5 ms·
> forcing the facility to shut down for at least a few hours > As a result, the company had to scrap thousands of wafers Anything involving wet chemistry, pho
by bob1029 11mo ago
> forcing the facility to shut down for at least a few hours
> As a result, the company had to scrap thousands of wafers
Anything involving wet chemistry, photoresist, furnaces, etc. is very time-constrained. You can't let wafers sit around indefinitely. Certain process steps must be followed up very quickly to avoid scrap.
This is why you dont see redundant power for manufacturing lines. A 3nm line needs hundreds of megawatts to operate. You cant clear queued lots without a fully functional line. There's not much you could save by keeping part of the line operational.
- tantalor 11mo agoGood idea for a Factorio mod? A new failure mode resets output progress back to zero if you lose power or some other input while crafting. You could design circuit networks to cut power to non-essential systems so the rest of the factory can keep producing.
- ActorNightly 11mo agoSomeone needs to make the whole chip manufacturing process into a factorio like game and let the gamers optimize it, then build the factories around that.
- gnatman 11mo agoLike Ender’s Game but instead of intergalactic shooting war it’s international chip war.
- sidewndr46 11mo agoIsn't that what spoilage is?
- helpfulclippy 11mo agoI thought of spoilage as a mechanic that punishes overproduction.
- blmarket 11mo agoIt's a constraint to process item within limited time (regardless of overproduction or power outage). Matching with the problem description. Surely the reality might be much more complex (like... the yield/quality drop by time function?)
- tetha 11mo agoSome mods in modded minecraft had that and it's a very punishing mechanic unless implemented well. It eats all of your power and usually also very expensive items very quickly usually. Assume you have like 600RF/tick generated, common with certain generator constellations. 1 tick - 1024 RF and one input consumed, crafting fails due to not enough power. 1 tick wait, 1 tick, 1024 RF and one input consumed, ... This can void 10+ items / second, which can hurt very badly. Even for common items in fact. It also tends to kick you while you're down, because it only kicks in if everything else is already failing. Then the only thing to continue functioning is the thing voiding your energy and your expensive items. Or even worse, if you did one miscalculation about your power grid, and then all of your resources are gone, often before you can react. It can be interesting in the right packs, but it is Gregtech level hardness.
- hofrogs 11mo agoGregTech doesn't use RF though, at least it didn't. Machines pull packets of amps through the wires from the generators/batteries, the whole system is pretty interesting. Also high-level circuits have to be manufactured in cleanrooms with a pretty complex tech chain.
- squigz 11mo agoI think GP just used RF as an example and was only referring to GT as a comparison in difficulty. GT's system of only pulling power on-demand is very nice though; no wasting fuel
- tetha 11mo agoOh GTs power is absolutely not RF. Back in the day, even GTs power could be cruel though. You could over-volt your machines and thus void machines you spend literal days on crafting. And the cables in the process too. And you could lose your entire infrastructure once it rained and you had no roof :)
- squigz 11mo agoOut of curiosity, which mods are this cruel? I've been playing GT (modern) lately and even it doesn't void your machine's items unless you break the machine itself.
- rtkwe 11mo agoPower brownouts are pretty rare outside of the very early game. It's too easy and cheap to massively over produce power for that to really harm players outside the early game so I don't think there'd be much interest. Usually brownouts rapidly develop into full blown blackouts and black restarts as your miners reduce output during the brownout often leading to a reduction in incoming fuel leading to even less power being generated in a self consuming cycle.
- tantalor 11mo agoI would apply it to inputs as well. Suppose you can start production with only 1 of each input required for a recipe, but to keep it going you need to keep feeding all of the inputs to finish it. If any of them run out, then the recipe fails, you lose the inputs, and the machine stalls. This works better for high latency recipes (>10s) with lots of inputs, like low density structure, modules, and atomic bombs.
- rtkwe 11mo agoUsually the answer is to just slightly overproduce the inputs, only the new planet Gleba even slightly discourages letting items just sit on the conveyors with their freshness mechanic. What's the benefit?
- marcosdumay 11mo agoYou would want to use circuits and stop production if there aren't enough inputs for a receipt. It still looks kinda easy, the machines just do it automatically on the default game.
- dylan604 11mo agoMindustry has something similar with pumping various gasses/liquids through plumbing. If you accidentally mix them while building new lines, things stop working when your gases get mixed up forcing you to purge the line.
- Kye 11mo agoA video showing those steps, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w It's probably not 100% identical to TSMC's process.
- sevensor 11mo agoIt didn’t happen, but the facilities team at the fab where I worked was seriously considering installing a flywheel to cover power bumps. What I don’t get about this story is how this actually happened. All our process gasses were out in a tank farm and we knew how much pressure we had. We would have stopped the line if there wasn’t enough to proceed. Were they separating air onsite or something?
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoYes, Linde has an onsite plant and is building two more. For some processes, stopping will botch the wafer. In the event of a gas shortage, do plants plan which lines to take down first, and which lines should complete a process step?
- sevensor 11mo agoThe way this worked at the fab where I was, was that facilities would have paged everybody, and whoever needed to hold wafers would do so. You could mark your equipment down or unavailable for a particular step. I don’t know what we would have done if it was “hey, we lost dry nitrogen a minute ago.” I think at that point you lose a lot of wafers in wet cleans. In the case of a power interruption at the fab, consequences were highly dependent on the equipment and the unit process. A prolonged power interruption to diffusion was the worst case scenario. You’d have 150 wafers in the furnace, and any significant deviation from the nominal temperature profile meant they were all scrap. Worse, if the furnace cooled off, you had to scrap the quartz boat the wafers rode in, too. Other processes had a smaller blast radius but were even more of a headache to disposition. Implant, you’d lose beam and probably lose vacuum too. Then the wafer in the chamber would be dusted and in an indeterminate state, and the rest of the wafers you’d have to sleuth out whether they were implanted or not. Sometimes you’d have a lot sitting in the end station and it wouldn’t be clear whether or not it had been run at all. At least in photolithography you could tell whether or not a wafer was patterned by looking at it.
- jaggederest 11mo agoI was very impressed by the modest little fab I worked at having thousands of lead acid batteries for momentary takeover, and 8 five-megawatt locomotive engines for longer term redundancy. Apparently their steady state usage was 25MW, which allowed still having a hot spare and concurrent downtime for two of the locomotive generator units.
- j_walter 11mo agoTSMC has backup generators in their AZ fab. You actually have to have backup power or a few hundred millisecond blip could cause days or weeks of tool down time. You should see what happens when you lose the ability to keep a clean room at temp/humidity/airflow...it's weeks or months.