Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "The 300mm Silicon Wafer Transition" video.

  1. Because there's a requirement for 180-350nm chips as well as analogue chips and power semiconductor devices designed for an old process. Old production line needs old spec wafers. These seemingly obsolete semiconductors have been experiencing shortages, because as it turns out, they're EVERYWHERE literally everywhere, even the fanciest devices have some supporting circuitry which was designed against existing classic semiconductor devices, and of course since there was no shortage before, there was no pressure to produce more modern replacements of these semiconductors. People keep needing more electronics stuff, so the pressure is now on.
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  2. Were the lines shut down? Recently - i don't think so. Most of the 200mm shutdown happened decade+ ago. The industry was moving to 300mm, so it wasn't a temporary problem, it was lack of future viability seemingly. Except then it turned out everything needs legacy semiconductor devices huh, and the total consumption of electronics keeps growing. Hindsight 20-20. By the time it became evident that there may be a problem on our hands several years ago, there wasn't much to be done about it other than just to try to move things to fresher nodes. Try. And i mean temporary problems which last for 5+ years aren't so temporary if there's no money to be made in the interim, you run dry, you run bankrupt. Where do you get money from, what kind of an investor pitch is it when you say "help us maintain ancient obsolete stuff, trust me bro it'll matter someday again, just a rough patch bro, we know it's looking like what we're making is useless in 5 years but we just need to sit it out bro". Line on a chart going down tends to be a death sentence.
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  3.  @UpLateGeek  I am PAINFULLY aware of 2 year lead times, you don't have to tell me. I don't think anything substantial was shut down during pandemic, or i haven't heard of that. I know car manufacturers have dropped some orders, and then scrambled to get them back, but it wouldn't cause fabs and suppliers to get closed. They couldn't get new orders in because the capacities were already booked by some other semiconductors. Fundamentally, it's unnecessary that anything got shut down to get us where we got. Ingredient 1, is that electronics consumption keeps growing year to year by maybe a couple percent. 2, everything needs legacy components, jellybeans, classics, which are manufactured using old tech and which are not economical or impossible to move to new tech. 3, so as total electronics demand and demand for modern electronics is increasing, it drags alongside with it a demand in legacy components upwards. 4, in 2020, worldwide electronics sales shot up by 14%, which is WILD, pretty much never happened before; and the demand is remaining high even now. Given the huge jump in demand, some end device manufacturers cancelling their chip orders doesn't matter and wouldn't cause production stops, as the total demand increase is more than high enough to absorb any capacities that were in use previously. I have heard a conjecture somewhere that the problem with legacy component production capacity was a long time coming simply because demand keeps growing, but the legacy capacity is all we've had for a decade; but it wasn't expected to actually hit until 5+ years later, and more gradually, and was pushed to now and urgent by a sudden jump in demand. Do keep in mind that we have some overcorrection on our hands, that electronics manufacturers which thought that they didn't need to keep extra stock of jellybeans and were buying them on a weekly basis as needed (Just in Time manufacturing), now suddenly do, and many have decided to keep a year of advance stock that they're currently filling up; so the situation will take a long while to relax a little.
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  4. Tthis is among the topics which i have been curious about for quite a while!
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  5. Is it your first time watching Asianometry?
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  6.  @FelonyVideos  It's probably my first exposure to ยต-humour. It's so small, it's not even funny any longer.
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  7. The lot of it, an unsawn crystal? Do you think you can afford it, do you think your ceiling can hold it?
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  8.  @samgeorge4798  You could ask the office of your municipal chief architect; he will direct you to the paperwork for your house filed with them, and you can get hold of some qualified architect to interpret it for you. Did you mean this by "one way to find out"?
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  9. Consider that as you're pushing the process ever further towards higher transistor density, defect density increases. A very large chip today is maybe 3cm across, that's some vaguely 60-ish dies for the 30cm wafer. What happens if you have just a dozen tiny little defects for that wafer? Your yield is suffering, you could be throwing away a fifth of your product. Now imagine if you had some gargantuan level chips that are even larger than that, your count of defect free dies will be decimated somewhat fierce even further! So you can't increase transistor density and also increase die size any further, you get to choose one or the other. You want to make transistors smaller to decrease their gate capacity, so that changing their state takes less energy every time. And the problem is making the wafer larger doesn't make the problem go away, the defect density per unit of area just isn't going to get better. So larger wafers would hypothetically save some cutoff waste on the periphery, but they wouldn't actually help you make large dies.
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  10.  @johndoh5182  Several million? A lot of ICs have something like 100k transistors. A lot have only a couple thousand. A lot of ICs MUST run at 5V. A lot of ICs must run at 20V, pass substantial currents, and only contain less than a couple dozen transistors. All of these add up to a lot of wafer die area consumption, but don't have high purity requirements. Can they even be moved over?
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