Earlier quoted context omitted.
My ex is a process improvement engineer at Intel she told me a story about considerably higher failure rate for silicon that was manufactured in a northern part of a room vs the southern part what’s more odd is that it only affected some products that shared this room in their pipeline. The cause was that the water pipes under that section would impact that part of the process because of mechanical vibration the reas…
> If you think about it this way if it was so easy to recreate a process through reverse engineering a few hot chips talks and poaching Intel wouldn’t be in this mess and GloFo didn’t had to scrap their 20nm process. That's what I'm talking about. Who's to say there aren't a few gotchas like this in the new cobalt processing, and that's not exactly something that can be protected under IP law (or even necessarily by…
The example I gave in my previous was simplified the actual root cause was much weirder and included a condition where the flow rate would have to get to X and the temperature to get to just an exact Y for thermal expansion to apparently compress the insulation enoguh for it to matter if the temp would be a tad to low it won’t impact anything if it goes above the next level of flow rate it wouldn’t have an impact yet again because it would drop the temp.
Intel’s whole conflict free campaign was a marketing spin on a real problem and a way to benefit from the extra cost of materials and that extra cost wasn’t because of children in African mines.
Intel needs so much control over the raw materials to prevent contamination that they issue orders on what fuel, hydraulic fluid and lubricants can be used to mine their dirt to prevent or at least reduce contamination.
Heck I’m sure if one will read what ever T&C they attach to their supply contracts the metal composition of the pickaxes will be specified.
They survey and sample everything and essentially tell their supplier ok you can mine this specific area everything in the top 1m you get rid off everything below 10m we don’t want.
Like honestly at this point I think the only way for GloFo to have exactly the same problem as Intel is we live in a simulation.
They will however have their own problems with leakage, bonding, crystallization and w/e else can go wrong with this insanity with Cobalt but likely they’ll have completely different root causes and different solutions.