I’m a semiconductor expert and without seeing the details, this seems like yet another smoke and mirrors wunderkind startup that will disperse once practical considerations are made. As far as I know, Mr. Zeloof has not made any fundamental advancements in any steps in manufacturing.
Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#32Great! Hopefully we can get 10 year behind technology from small fabs. There's so much you can do with a laptop from 2016
With electron-beam lithography you can build transistors with gate lengths down to 1 to 3 nanometers.
Using electron-beam lithography, you can define features of that size on a silicon wafer.
Silicon transistors with such gate lengths would not work, because the too short gate could not close the conduction channel (the minimum gate length with silicon is likely to be greater than 10 nm, even with gate-around transistors).
The masks used for deep UV lithography or for any other kind of high-resolution lithography are also made with electron-beam lithography.
Therefore it is obvious that anything that you can do in a form of lithography that uses masks you can do with electron-beam lithography.
Using directly electron-beam lithography skips the production of masks and their use.
This is a huge cost reduction in the cost of processing a single wafer (which may have hundreds or thousands of chips). However the processing throughput is orders of magnitude lower than when using masks. For very high-volume production, the costs of the masks and of the deep UV lithography are divided over millions or billions of chips, so they are reduced to a reasonable fraction of the cost, which is compensated by the high productivity.
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#33Great! Hopefully we can get 10 year behind technology from small fabs. There's so much you can do with a laptop from 2016
No, you misunderstood.
A small fab that uses electron-beam lithography can do everything that TSMC can do, and in a much simpler way.
Its problems are not technical, but economical.
The costs of producing chips are much lower than for TSMC, but the production rate is also orders of magnitude lower.
So they can be used only to produce prototypes or devices for niche applications, where the small quantities needed would never allow them to be produced at a big fab.
On the other hand, if such small fabs could be themselves mass produced, so that their cost could become low enough, then using a great number of such small fabs could satisfy the requirements in semiconductor devices and ICs of most not too big countries, and this style of production would be greatly preferable to what exists today as the end point of a long chain of acquisitions and mergers, that has resulted in a handful of SOTA manufacturers in the entire world.
Ideally, there would still exist big fabless IC design companies, like Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, but they would design for a standardized CMOS fabrication process, not for a proprietary process with secret design rules, like those of TSMC.
Then such designs would be licensed for production in distributed small fabs. Only such a system would remove the dependence of the entire world on a quasi-monopolistic system of production, where the destruction of a single fab could cripple most of the world.
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#34I would've liked to read more about what they're doing, but their website fab2.com is unhelpful. Very little info, presented in pointless swirling animations that hijack your scroll action.
Yes, the web site is all effects, no content. It's like an old Flash site.
E-beam machines work fine for prototyping. People have been doing that since the 1970s. But they're slow. It's a prototyping technology. The sort of thing that "3D print everything" people like. E-beam machines with many beams have been mentioned, but never seemed to be worth it.
There are companies which offer E-beam IC fab as a service. Some cater to DoD and the intelligence community.[2] (That's for when you really can't trust your supply chain and want your own ICs fabbed.) Others are more commercial, but are in China.[3]
They claim to be building all the machines needed for a fab. But they don't have a list, or pictures. There's a used market in that gear, and no reason to build it all yourself.
It's not a fundamentally bad idea, but the hype is strong here.
[1] https://www.machinio.com/semiconductors
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#35I don't get it. How is Jim Keller running a brand new, hard tech startup while being CEO of Tenstorrent at the same time?
So Elon Musk can be the CEO of multiple companies but Jim Keller can't be CEO of two quickly growing startups?
Elon is a notoriously bad CEO at all of those companies.
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
So Elon Musk can be the CEO of multiple companies but Jim Keller can't be CEO of two quickly growing startups?
Elon is a notoriously bad CEO at all of those companies.
Just by success numbers he can't be terrible. Most of his companies are doing pretty well for themselves.
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon is a notoriously bad CEO at all of those companies.
Just by success numbers he can't be terrible. Most of his companies are doing pretty well for themselves.
By only one metric really, which is market capitalisation. SpaceX, which is famously shielded from Elon by the next level of managers, also produces a useful and profitable product.
Re: Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
#38Is this an ASML competitor?
This is "we fit on small FPGA but dont want to ship cheap commodity off the shelf hardware for some bizarre reason while cant even afford structured ASIC (you only pay for metal layer masks)" competitor maybe.
Unless they offer some amazing analog capabilities.