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Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

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201–210 of 675 posts

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#201
post #192

I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.

Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.

Honestly even in "developed countries" it's not worth blindly trusting that the power in your house/building is clean. It's cheap and easy enough to just put any expensive hardware on a UPS rather than speculating what's going on behind the walls.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All natural gas deposits contain helium at various concentrations, it's only commercially worth harvesting above a certain percentage but speculate the problem is the US can't just fill the Qatar loss in supply immediately since we have plentiful natural gas.

Makes sense. We have so much gas where I live that there are places it’s just flared off and burned, because it’s less greenhouse emissions than it escaping unburned.

If it's being burned, it isn't helium.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#203
post #200

Tech divers are also probably gonna be having a Bad Time. Helium mixes are already pretty expensive, I assume this will make it far worse.

Also, copper welding involves the use of helium as shielding gas. Helium shortage is painful

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the nation's #1 dingleberry Joe Rogan is now turning against Trump. Would be a great time for folks to start admitting they fell for it again.

I will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2…

The answer isn’t less voters, it’s more. Australia’s compulsory voting system has successfully taken the edge off extremist ideology.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#205
post #98

I remember hearing somewhere on this site that medical imaging got pretty good at building systems that recycle helium. Does chip manufacturing not do this or are the losses at their scale are still large enough that you need a substantial constant supply?

Some of the fabs do recycle as effectively as they can, but MRIs use it in a single process, in liquid form, in a relatively constrained container. Fabs use it for a variety of processes, ranging from wafer cooling to purging environments, to making ultra ultra clean chambers. The scale of what they use is higher, too, so even if an individual process is more efficiently recapturing helium, they might go through a fe…

Also fab companies have had to learn to be incredibly conservative about perceptively meaningless changes.

Most famously illustrated by Intel's "Copy Exactly!" methodology. https://duckduckgo.com/?q="copy%20exactly"+Intel

An adjacent IBM story that kinda explains why:

  During the year 1986, there was an anomalous increase in LSI memory problems. Electronics in early 1987 appeared to have problem rates approaching 20 times higher than predicted. In contrast, identical LSI memories being manufactured in Europe showed no anomalous problems. Because of knowledge of the radioactivity problem with the Intel 2107 RAMs, it was thought that the LSI package probably was at fault, since the IBM chips were mounted on similar ceramic materials. LSI ceramic packages made by IBM in Europe and in the U.S. were exchanged, but the European computer modules (with European chips and U.S. packaging) showed no fails, while the U.S. chips with European packages still failed at a high rate. This indicated that the problem was undoubtedly in the U.S.-manufactured LSI chips. In April 1987, significant design changes had been made to the memory chip with the most problems, a 4Kb bipolar RAM. The newer chip had been given the nickname Hera, and so at an early stage the incident became known as the "Hera problem."
  By June 1987, the problem was very serious. A group was organized to investigate the problem. The first breakthrough in understanding occurred with the analysis of "carcasses" from the memory chips (the term carcasses refers to the chips on an LSI wafer which do not work correctly, and are not used but saved in case some problem occurs at a future time). Some of these carcasses were shown to have significant radioactivity.
  Six weeks was spent in the manufacturing process lines, looking for radioactivity, and traces were found inside various processing units. However, it could not be determined whether these traces came from the raw materials used, or whether they were transferred from the chips themselves, which might have been contaminated earlier in their processing. Further, it was discovered that radioactive filaments (containing radioactive thorium) were commonly used in some evaporators. A detailed analysis by T. Zabel of some of the "hot" chips revealed that the radioactive contamination came from a single source: Po210 This isotope is found in the uranium decay chain, which contains about twelve different radioactive species. The surprising fact was that Po210 was the only contaminant on the LSI chips, and all the other expected decay-chain elements were missing. Hundreds of chips were analyzed for radioactivity, and Po210 contamination was found going back more than a year. Then it was found that whatever caused the radioactivity problem disappeared on all wafers started after May 22, 1987. After this precise date, all new wafers were free of contamination, except for small amounts which probably were contaminated by other older chips being processed by the same equipment. Since it takes about four months for chips to be manufactured, the pipeline was still full of "hot" chips in July and August 1987. Further sweeps of the manufacturing lines showed trace radioactivity, but the plant was essentially clean. The contamination had appeared in 1985, increased by more than 1000 times until May 22, 1987, and then totally disappeared!
  Several months passed, with widespread testing of manufacturing materials and tools, but no radioactive contamination was discovered. All memory chips in the manufacturing lines were spot-screened for radioactivity, but they were clean. The radioactivity reappeared in the manufacturing plant in early December 1987, mildly contaminating several hundred wafers, then disappeared again. A search of all the materials used in the fabrication of these chips found no source of the radioactivity. With further screening, and a lot of luck, a new and unused bottle of nitric acid was identified by J. Hannah as radioactive. One surprising aspect of this discovery was that, of twelve bottles in the single lot of acid, only one was contaminated. Since all screening of materials assumed lot-sized homogeneity, this discovery of a single bad sample in a large lot probably explained why previous scans of the manufacturing line had been negative. The unopened bottle of radioactive nitric acid led investigators back to a supplier's factory, and it was found that the radioactivity was being injected by a bottle-cleaning machine for semiconductor-grade acid bottles. This bottle cleaner used radioactive Po210 material to ionize an air jet which was used to dislodge electrostatic dust inside the bottles after washing. The jets were leaking radioactivity because of a change in the epoxy used to seal the Po210 inside the air jet capsule. Since these jets gave off infrequent and random bursts of radioactivity, only a few bottles out of thousands were contaminated.
An excerpt from: Ziegler, James F., et al. "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)." IBM journal of research and development 40.1 (1996): 3-18

Polonium is debuggable. More subtle statistical aberrations would be exponentially harder.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#206
post #18

Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.

The kind of people who voted for trump would never admit they made a mistake. They double down on stupidity instead.

That isn't true. There's actually a large number of people, probably in the millions, but probably not a majority of those who voted for him, who no longer support him in any way. And of the ones who remain, yes: they're pretty dense to still support him now. There are some lunatics who genuinely believe that the US has the right to dominate and exploit all other nations, but the majority of them simply believe the lies he's telling. I've already seen that when they are confronted with the facts about, say, Gaza, some of them can change their minds. It would be a mistake to turn them away instead of treating them like potential allies. There really is something more important at stake.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#207
post #67
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did we sell it instead of lease? This seems like something that should be in public hands.

Ideological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.

This. 1000x this.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#208

Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.

Even the nation's #1 dingleberry Joe Rogan is now turning against Trump. Would be a great time for folks to start admitting they fell for it again.

People are admitting that now. It's happening. There's some hope that something can be done about him.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely how you close the straits; by making everyone scared to go through.

You don't even have to scare everyone. You just have to scare the insurers. Without insurance ships won't sail. The exposure is huge , so a small blip in risk makes all the modeling go kerplooie. Traffic stopped when the insurers said drop the anchors. To restore traffic, we need that risk to return to previous levels, which requires diplomacy and trust. I don't expect resolution any time soon.

Impeachment, and then we could get there. It's not impossible.

Re: Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used those Tripp Lite LC1200 to knock down the noise floor (14dB) on remote equipment. These line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3

These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves. So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical p…

The simple line-conditioners were surprisingly effective, and are a fraction of the cost of lab/medical grade galvanic isolation ferroresonant transformers. =3
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