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TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

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Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#51

Post by jaggederest »

sevensor wrote: post #20
bob1029 wrote: post #3

> 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…

It 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?

I 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.

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#52

Post by bnjms »

lazide wrote: post #44
itake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if the US workers earned OT like TW workers do, the "culture" gap would shrink.

Hahaha. The work culture between TW and the US is night and day - and it isn’t flattering for the US.

How so? Are the Americans relatively lazy or just unwilling to put in tedious but necessary extended hours?

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#53

Post by nebula8804 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #41
NoiseBert69 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linde is huge. They can produce and offer all gases in all available purity classes.

Is this an ad?

Possibly but also plausible is that its a deep joke that everyone is in on.

When googling the company, the marketing slogan that comes up is "Linde is Everywhere" but that works on so many levels. They sell air, air is everywhere. Therefore Linde is everywhere.

They are a company that sells air: that stuff that people breathe. Forget this AI nonsense. Jensen has to constantly pull something out of rear to keep food on the table. These guys sell air. What a business. :)

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#54

Post by gnatman »

ActorNightly wrote: post #6
tantalor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good 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.

Someone 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.

Like Ender’s Game but instead of intergalactic shooting war it’s international chip war.

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#55

Post by astrange »

NoiseBert69 wrote: post #33
Animats wrote: post #24

This was apparently a Linde installation custom built for TSMC in Arizona.[1] Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon are extracted from air on-site and purified. That's Linde's primary business; liquefying and distilling air. This isn't some little local company or a company operating outside their area of expertise. Those gases are storeable, so it's surprising there wasn't enough tank capacity to deal with outages. The site p…

Linde is huge. They can produce and offer all gases in all available purity classes.

Is there some reason you'd want gasses in a lower purity class?

(Well, it's cheaper.)

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#56

Post by rpmisms »

astrange wrote: post #55
NoiseBert69 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linde is huge. They can produce and offer all gases in all available purity classes.

Is there some reason you'd want gasses in a lower purity class? (Well, it's cheaper.)

Fire suppression, welding gases, etc.

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#57

Post by astrange »

barkingcat wrote: post #46
coredog64 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are like half a dozen semiconductor manufacturers in Phoenix that were here before TSMC arrived. There's a robust pipeline from ASU to these same manufacturers. Can we please just stop with the nonsensical notion that "Americans don't know how to fabricate semiconductors"?

American economics doesn't allow fabrication of semiconductors even if there is the know how. Think about how Intel, who pioneered the know how, can't build cutting edge nodes in the levels that they need to make it profitable. IBM had to sell their fabs to cater to the whims of "shareholders". It's the greed of stockholders that you need to blame.

TSMC is a publicly traded company just like the others. I'm not familiar with their governance but Google tells me the largest owner (a state development fund) has 6%.

They have a special advantage because they don't compete with their customers, which leads to trust, which leads to customers paying for their R&D for them.

Intel on the other hand just kind of sucks at their job. Skill issue basically. (But they aren't /that/ far behind.)

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#58

Post by astrange »

lysace wrote: post #49
itake wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not that the USA can't produce semi-conductors. Its that semi-conductor production, at TSMC's scale (both in terms of number of units, yield rates, and depth) currently requires highly skilled workers to work a lot of their hours to "baby sit" the wafer production. Maybe there is a world where TSMC can hire enough skilled workers and optimize processes enabling people to go home at 5p, but that is not currently t…

Yes. This. So, yeah, essentially fundamentally incompatible with the US economy. The US is going to have to heavily subsidize the payroll of tens of thousands of very accomplished EEs/etc to make this work. By doing that they will also wreck the HW part of SV.

There isn't really a HW part of SV. Hardware engineers aren't paid well enough to live there in droves like programmers. There are some of course, but the ones I know are in San Diego or Bremerton or Israel.

Also, it's completely normal to run a factory 24/7. I think people are just impressed because TSMC is the only one they've read about?

(However, it's correct that a TSMC fab is the most advanced and complicated process on the planet.)

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#59

Post by sevensor »

Animats wrote: post #24

This was apparently a Linde installation custom built for TSMC in Arizona.[1] Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon are extracted from air on-site and purified. That's Linde's primary business; liquefying and distilling air. This isn't some little local company or a company operating outside their area of expertise. Those gases are storeable, so it's surprising there wasn't enough tank capacity to deal with outages. The site p…

Unless things have changed a lot since I fled semiconductor manufacturing, you would still need silane tanks at least. I’m as surprised as you that they don’t have buffer tanks.

Re: TSMC Arizona outage saw fab halt, Apple wafers scrapped

#60

Post by lysace »

astrange wrote: post #58
lysace wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This. So, yeah, essentially fundamentally incompatible with the US economy. The US is going to have to heavily subsidize the payroll of tens of thousands of very accomplished EEs/etc to make this work. By doing that they will also wreck the HW part of SV.

There isn't really a HW part of SV. Hardware engineers aren't paid well enough to live there in droves like programmers. There are some of course, but the ones I know are in San Diego or Bremerton or Israel. Also, it's completely normal to run a factory 24/7. I think people are just impressed because TSMC is the only one they've read about? (However, it's correct that a TSMC fab is the most advanced and complicated p…

Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Applied Materials probably employ like 100k people in SV?
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