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 th…
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.
How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> People who were teachers now making four times the income working on the construction project. Targeted investment! Toward future generations of chips, rather than of people.
Re: How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
https://hacker-fab.gitbook.io/hacker-fab-space/fab-toolkit/p...
Re: How to build a $20B semiconductor fab
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most rust cleaner that you buy at the store is HF solution. For example, the one that teen used was 1.5% HF.
I can't believe that worked. 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. hexafluoro…