I have been listening to Kai Ryssdal's Marketplace on NPR/KQED the last few days on my commute home from work.
The topic for the last several days was on the CHIPS And Science Act and the new Semiconductor Fabs being built by TSMC and Intel in Phoenx, AZ.
It will be several years before the plants already being constructed will go into production but there is a whole ecosystem of current construction, education of the future workforce that will need to be hired in the future. Not to mention all the ancilliary companies that are needed to support these gigantic plants in the area.
The dollars from CHIPS Act are not only bringing in the manufacturing plants but will be essential to bring this lost capability back to the US in the scale needed both from an economic and national security perspective.
It was great listening to the show and the impact the CHIPS Act on people's lives already happening now and in the future.
For anyone interested the links to the specific shows are available as podcasts here.
TSMC has moved many engineers from Taiwan to Phoenix. Entire towns were built with accomodation, schools, ethnic grocery stores from scratch. It would be interesting to see this initiative's cultural and economic impact on Phoenix in the years to come.
I’m not sure where “towns” (plural) are being built. The first plant is across the highway from a master planned community that was built 20 years ago, long before any fabs were being discussed in that area.
There certainly is a lot of development there, but it’s not like a factory town or anything.
There’s an outdoor recreational shooting facility across the street. I can only assume that is a huge culture shock for anyone coming over from Taiwan.
Honestly, this sounds like normal life being a junior employee at a big company. An ossified clique of old guard managers pick winners and losers with little regard for merit? Unbelievable bureaucratic overhead? Your boss expects you to flatter and fawn all over him because he allows you to work 50-60hrs a week at 80% the median salary without overtime pay? Sorry to say, this is just what they're all like. Do good work, make friends, and try to get a job at a small company where people treat each other decently and incompetents can't hide in the crowd.
I’m hugely supportive of the new factories and investments, but I’m curious why they decided on Phoenix which seems to be affected dramatically by climate change and incidentally has a very different climate and culture from Taiwan.
There are already a number of fabs there. Intel has a big presence. Government support, infranstructure and an experienced (although insufficient at this point) workforce are already there.
The reason there is a chip fab activity in Phoenix goes back to 1949 [0] when Motorola built a lab there. In 1952, they started making semiconductors and eventually chips.
I believe the new term for Phoenix, AZ and other major cities in AZ is "Silicon Desert". You can see a map of the many companies in the high tech space in AZ at the following site.
Major semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona is not exactly new: Motorola had fabs there in the 70s (or earlier?), Intel's presence dates to 1980, etc. The article [1] below from 2001 says that Arizona was "3rd in chipmaking"...
> With Taiwanese transplants moving to north Phoenix in droves, Arizona officials — and a local baker — are working behind the scenes to make them feel welcome
Could we say this is the "Manhattan or Apollo 11 Project for Chips"? For its articulation.
BTW, about this topic, I always recall "A View To Kill" James Bond's (1985) movie [1]. The top hit in the soundtrack from Duran Duran [2] is also recommended and playing in radios even today. Seems like Intel passed the torch long time ago but don't forget to read the mantra book: "Only the Paranoid Survive" [3].
The issue without outsourcing is that the benefits are widespread (lower prices!) but the drawbacks are concentrated (factory town is now a hellhole). And our political system is incapable of redistributing correctly even though the net effect is highly positive.
The seminal study on the topic is the "China shock" paper from Autor et Al.:
Strange, because put this way, it should be entirely positive - widespread benefits and concentrated drawbacks are what we want to happen, as it benefits more people and concentrated problems are much easier to manage. What's very bad is when benefits are concentrated (often in the hands of a small group), and drawbacks are widespread, and therefore near-impossible to manage. See e.g. pollution, emissions...
... and outsourcing. The benefits are concentrated: profits captured by the companies doing the outsourcing. Sure, they may sometimes trickle down to the consumer, but the costs - the distributed drawbacks - are inferior quality of goods, elimination of local jobs, high ecological footprint, abusive business practices, lack of effective customer support. And the extra magic here is, it spreads direct responsibility over national borders, so it's near-impossible to hold anyone to account.
I don’t know or understand this multiplier effect you’re referring to. If you’d like to persuade me (and I assume other readers) explaining your argument might be more effective. Instead I get a sense of “don’t argue against me” as opposed to “this is why I’m right”
Still have not answered my question. Why is lower prices better? Why would vastly higher consumption coupled with vastly decreased production be beneficial?
The show was talking about chip packaging companies to create the end usable chips from the silicon produced.
Just for the construction work alone, they mentioned that the pipefitters local union membership has doubled since 2020. Refinery level complexity on the specialized piping needs for the plants.
Special training programs geared towards the semiconductor industry being offered in the local Community and Trade schools training people to be the skilled and semi-skilled workforce for these companies.
People who were teachers now making four times the income working on the construction project.
For comparison, the cost to build the World Trade Center was $2 Billion.
BTW, having spent 35 years in the semiconductor industry, this is the best 'layman's' description of what goes into chip fabrication I have seen. A perfect blend of description and illustration without over simplifying.
What a fascinating article. It truly blows my mind just how advanced humans have become. When playing angry birds on an iPhone we tend to forget the insane amount of research, resources, and specialized expertise that has made all the modern tech world possible.
I’d also highly recommend the book Chip Wars by Chris Miller for anyone looking for a deeper dive into the history and current dilemmas of the semiconductor industry
It’s a thoroughly interesting video, but I’m a bit disappointed he never took his idea any further than he did. I’d really love to see something like a 6502 being made at home.
You say ex AMD like that's all he's known for. Jim Keller is like some fairy who flies around companies designing sota chips.
From DEC, to AMD, to ARM and Broadcom, his own firm, hops over to Apple which then buys his old firm, heads back to ARM and then over to Tesla and finally one last stop at Intel before going into startup land again.
Worked on the K7/K8, MIPs for networking, did the A4 and A5 for Apple, on the Zen/K12, and the Tesla TPU.
That's good for him, but it means we'll never find out in the near future whether it's possible for the average person to create useful ICs in their garage.
From a business perspective, I agree that it’s a fool’s errand. But imagine being able to design and tangibly build your own computer, at home. 6400 euros is pennies for a business, but exorbitant for an individual.
I believe the way Sam Zeloof circumvents the enormous amount of capital needed for a chip fab by relying on modern technology to create 1970’s technology. He simply mounts a cheap digital projector onto a cheap microscope - they didn’t have that advantage in the 70s, and thus it cost millions to start a chip fab. My point is that it could conceivably be doable for an individual to create old computing technology with the advantages of living in the modern world. I certainly don’t have the drive to do it, but I wish someone did.
You'd spend far more than 6400 euros to do it at home.
If you did it often and didn't count your own labor costs, then maybe the average cost would be less, but that's an incredibly specific situation.
> I believe the way Sam Zeloof circumvents the enormous amount of capital needed for a chip fab by relying on modern technology to create 1970’s technology
Yes, exactly.
Old lithographic technology is so crude that you can even use modern high resolution laserjets to print masks (10000 dpi is less than 3 microns).
Even so, 1970s-era CVD, PVD, and plasma etch is still quite complicated, and CMP is impossible (it hadn't even been invented yet). So the devices you can create are significantly integration-constrained.
Do you have examples for models of laser printers can actually achieve a resolution of 10000dpi? It doesn't need to be office equipment. Any example would suffice as I so far thought that laser printouts were limited to a maximum resolution between 1200 and 2400dpi.
Not at home, but at professional printing houses absolutely.
This isn't hypothetical, I've done it -- in grad school we would send out (I believe) 30000 dpi print jobs on transparent polyester film, and then adhere those to glass blanks to create cheap masks for MEMS fabrication. We had an old Canon i-line lithographic aligner that accepted the glass blanks.
I think the print jobs cost us about $100 each.
Here's the first Google result for a vendor (I don't remember who we used). There's a price list on their page and it looks like they have capability up to 50,800 dpi.
Maybe a little different. For narrow enough definitions of "clothing," homemade clothing can be good. And there are other artisanal homemade crafts (e.g. woodworking) that can be good. But I agree in general.
Industrially (by which I mean how it was done circa 1970), silicon oxide and silicon nitride was etched using a buffered HF solution known as BOE (buffered oxide etchant). The buffer was typically ammonium fluoride; because of the presence of the buffer, the concentration of fluorine ions in solution stays constant even as some of the fluorine attacks the substrate to form e.g. hexafluorosilicic acid. Since the concentration of fluorine stays constant, so does the etch rate.
If you just pull some rust cleaner off the shelf at home depot, the etch rate will crash as the concentration of fluorine ions decreases. That's compounded by the fact that the HF concentration isn't very high in the first place.
As a result it would be very difficult to determine how long your wafer should remain in the etch bath. Underetching could easily cause "opens" in the circuits from unremoved insulator, and overetching and/or undercut can destroy the patterns you're trying to produce. Either way it can ruin the chip.
Yep, he used an ammonium fluoride buffer.
> Instead of a standard HF etch, a buffered oxide etch of NH4F (Ammonium Fluoride) in HF can be used to control the etch rate and photoresist lifting. I use approximately 20-30g of 100% NH4F per 50mL of HF (stock whink rust remover)
Ammonium fluoride definitely isn’t as easily accessible as rust cleaner, but you could buy it for a somewhat cheap price on Amazon.
Thus only a very small number of companies (currently TSMC, Samsung, and Intel) attempt to operate leading-edge nodes, and the industry has shifted to a “fabless” model where companies like Apple and Nvidia design their chips but have them manufactured by “foundries” like TSMC. By pooling the orders of many different chip companies, the foundries can achieve the scale necessary to afford cutting edge fabs.
I wonder if AI training will end up being similar in the long-term (it's already partially true today).
> (There is a Moore’s Second Law, also known as Rock’s Law, which posits that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.)
If this were to hold, then in under 30 years a single fab would cost more than three trillion dollars, which itself implies a hard upper bound on node improvements by way of economic considerations.
I've been to a number of big construction sites for business purposes. When I hear, "this is a $40 million dollar project" and when I see all these workmen, equipment and materials moving around, I think, so this is what $40 million dollars in motion looks like.
Much of that money goes to permitting, admin, and insurance. What you’re seeing is probably the $10-20 million that wasn’t successfully siphoned off by bureaucrats.
Kinda easy to guess, there’s really only one possibility and answer: people felt a certain way after reading and voted accordingly. The idea that anyone votes based on the content of what’s been said is false. For example, you’re not gonna upvote a true statement of a statistical fact if you think there’s a terrible reason for it. You’re gonna downvote because you feel bad about what you perceive as the reason regardless
Because “successfully siphoned off by bureaucrats” has an implicit value judgement in it. If someone a) thinks the cost of regulation provides value and b) believes that downvoting is a reasonable response to opinions they disagree with, they’re likely to downvote in this case.
Personally I only believe one of those things. I also believe the point about additional cost of development could have been made without the value judgement.
CHM(computer history museum) have conducted an oral history interview with TSMC found Morris Chang in 2007. Chang told his personal Odyssey in this interview, from inner China to Taiwan, studying and working at US, PhD application refused by MIT, but luckily he choose a fast rocket track in the industry, after he accumulated enough wealth, industry insight, connections etc... He returned to Taiwan to found TMSC, else is the story. Also he compared Asian and American engineering styles:
"I think the Asian engineers tend to be more methodical, they tend to be more studious, more orderly engineers; whereas, the U.S. engineers tend to be more innovative, but they tend not to be as methodical and orderly as the Asian engineers. ......
On the other hand, I also think that one group can accompany another group, you know. You can have an innovative group but not so methodical and so on, and then you can have a methodical group maybe not very innovative accompanying each other.
"
Everyone has to buy from ASML, and even if someone wants one, there's a wait list.
The sheer complexity and costs means there's no real possibility of a competitor. Nor would a billion dollar fab want to experiment with a new company.
The stated tolerances of typical manufacturing processes seem to be off by at least an order of magnitude. Not that it does make sense to give a tolerance number without some magnitude it applies to, nonetheless, 0.125mm stated tolerance of CNC machining is ridiculous.
A tolerance of 1/8 millimeter (5 mils) can certainly be achieved by CNC machining, but not always by the cheapest tools.
You mean that it is easy to achieve much smaller tolerances than this by CNC machining?
Googling for "CNC machining tolerances" finds at first hit a guide that says "For CNC machining, the standard tolerance limit is set around +/-.005” (0.127 mm)."
The next hits show the same 5 mils standard tolerance, but they also mention the availability of better tolerances, like 2 mils or even less, but at higher costs and subject to various constraints on the features to which they are applicable.
So it appears that the tolerance written in the article is indeed typical, as claimed.
The discussion is somewhat moot, what did bug me is that the article claims those are typical tolerances inherent in the machining / wire edm / molding processes whereas it just may be the tolerance that is applied if nothing else is agreed upon. You can achieve much tighter tolerances if needed, even in mass-produced stuff like LEGO bricks, plastic lenses, iphone / macbook cases, PCBs, etc...
At what point will current fabrication plants reach their limit? Is it a supply issue? Or maybe a resource constraint?
> Similarly, a fab will use very large amounts of ultrapure water for wafer cleaning and CMP, along with the regular water for things like chillers for process cooling. A large fab can use millions of gallons of ultrapure water a day, as much as a town of 50,000 people, and producing it requires its own specialized plant.
This is wild. All of this water so companies can create chips that will ultimately be used to …
pump out “advanced” chat bots.
I really hope all of this sacrifice is worth it in the end. Climate change is accelerating the loss of drinkable water around the planet.
If the best we could do is a slightly better chat bot, then we are doomed.
The water is not used up, and it doesn’t even evaporate, except for the small amount used in evaporative chillers.
The big scary sounding number at the input has a big number at the output.
Not to mention that up to 98 percent of the water is reused on site. It just gets cleaned and goes back into facility. It’s a big loop, not an input disappearing into a parallel universe.
This is always so funny to me. Oh, something that can make enough chips for millions/billions of devices also uses as much water as a small town? That sounds perfectly reasonable. Don't build it in the middle of the desert, I guess, but otherwise it's not a problem.
Ignoring Alphafold, moderna partnering with openai, the new class of antibiotics, etc etc. There's a lot more to ai than chat bots. That's a disingenuous reduction.
I agree that it's a bold bet though, burning how many ever billions a year on the hope that ai can help us solve medicine and fusion and climate change.
The topic for the last several days was on the CHIPS And Science Act and the new Semiconductor Fabs being built by TSMC and Intel in Phoenx, AZ.
It will be several years before the plants already being constructed will go into production but there is a whole ecosystem of current construction, education of the future workforce that will need to be hired in the future. Not to mention all the ancilliary companies that are needed to support these gigantic plants in the area.
The dollars from CHIPS Act are not only bringing in the manufacturing plants but will be essential to bring this lost capability back to the US in the scale needed both from an economic and national security perspective.
It was great listening to the show and the impact the CHIPS Act on people's lives already happening now and in the future.
For anyone interested the links to the specific shows are available as podcasts here.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace