Comments by "Grak70" (@Grak70) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1.  @brodriguez11000  I agree. The point is East Germany, as a Soviet satellite state, fell into a lot of traps of that culture that doomed them to failure. Some bureaucrat denying you static protection shoes, for example, is going to doom your efforts no matter what. Playing the “you pretend it’s fine, I pretend you didn’t fuck up” game is Soviet as hell. Technology difference aside (and that is like comparing cave paintings to AI art), China at least tends to listen to the science and put its money where its mouth is. If you’re going to be authoritarian, it’s far better for your industry to be ruled by technocrats than ideologues and apparatchiks.
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  2.  @Daz912  did you read what I wrote? I loved living in Japan. Working there is what blows.
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  3.  @ZxZ239  I never said any such thing. Stop being so defensive.
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  4.  @catsspat  some people just can't take public criticism or correction by people who know what they're talking about.
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  5.  @dieSpinnt  maybe it’s a second language issue but your tone is incredibly condescending for someone with no professional experience in this field.
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  6.  @dieSpinnt  it’s not an assumption because if you worked in this industry you wouldn’t be coming in here saying something as foolish and uninformed as that a 150mm or 200mm fab must inevitably be upgraded eventually. It’s exceedingly rare to do that because of the opportunity cost of lost production time. Those fabs are still producing chips and revenue streams while they’re online. Taking them completely offline to make a massive capital investment is ground-floor stupid. If you want the capacity of a 300mm fab and you have a 200mm one, you build a new 300mm fab and keep the 200mm one running in the meantime. It’s likely completely depreciated and running better than when you built it due to small improvements and engineering tweaks over time and it’s still making you money.
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  7.  @ugarit5  I continue to be perplexed by people who think every fuck up on YouTube is a joke or a troll.
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  8.  @tykjpelk  well you certainly wouldn’t do it for silicon CMOS in any case. Gold contamination forms trap states in the silicon bandgap. You can’t have gold anywhere near a silicon fab.
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  9. At the operator and tech level I 100% agree. Grunt labor is in short supply at most fabs right now. You can make the same hourly wage working at a grocery store in most semi-heavy US states. Why bust your ass in a fab for the same amount and get fired for dropping one FOUP worth $2M?
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  10.  @ThePowerLover  wow. Don’t see that every day on the Internet. Glad to be of help.
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  11.  @Gameboygenius  correct. 5500 refers to the body type. /xxxx is the model #. So for example a /100 is an i-line stepper with fixed pupil illumination and lower lamp power. A /275 is the same but with variable illuminator/pupil, better lens, and higher lamp power. Etc. A 5500/700 would be a single wafer stage body (limited to 200mm wafers max) containing a mid-range KrF exposure system.
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  12. Because that part of the radio spectrum is allocated to exactly these kinds of devices. 13.56+/-0.007Mhz is one of the so called “ISM” bands reserved for “industry, science, and medical” use. As such, there are no licensing requirements to use it. Although it’s possible to broadcast and receive in that band, machines that do so typically don’t exist since your data would be corrupted every time someone within 100ft microwaved a burrito.
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  13. Are you a fellow Perun fan?
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  14. There isn’t anything after lithography. There’s only different ways of doing lithography. At the moment the only two technologies that have a chance of equaling high-NA EUV are nanoinprint and DSA. And both of those have unresolved problems with defectivity that have never quite been solved.
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  15.  @inomo  oh well in that case I’ll tell Nvidia to make their intellectual property available to internet randos who “work for ASML” immediately. What are you smoking?
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  16.  @inomo  Somehow I think it’s much more likely that you’re an NPC who has no reason to have access to the design kit. Just because YOU can’t get access doesn’t make it fake. And honestly, Nvidia has very little reason to give you access: this likely competes with ASML’s in-house work on OPC algorithms and computational lithography. So not only do they not have a reason to give it to you, they have a reason to NOT give it to you. 🧂
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  17.  @inomo  not sure why you’d want that. You haven’t said anything of value yet.
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  18.  @tobiwonkanogy2975  different industry (beam or vapor phase epitaxy), but cool application. Not sure I want arsenic that close to my face, but I assume it will be encapsulated somehow.
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  19.  @akatsuki6371  glad to be of help!
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  20. “Micron” is standard industry jargon. Which you would know if you worked in this industry.
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  21. Even though you can look through the template, overlay is not a problem that’s going to go away because rather than adjust the image of the mask (which can scale linearly), changing the shape of the imprint template is limited by the modulus response of the template: a decidedly non-linear process. This means when you apply a correction to say, X-mag, different areas of the template will respond completely differently. Nano imprint is cute for some niche applications but it will never be used to print anything at the bleeding edge where its resolution capabilities shine. And on top of that, it’s slower than molasses in January.
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  22.  @JigilJigil  I’ve long suspected this was payback for Japan keeping the US out of Selete and other Japanese nationally funded semiconductor programs, not to mention sour memories of the 1980s. “Two can play at the protectionist game.” And two did.
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  23.  @MrDanisve  I work in a fab. Micron and nanometer are the trade terms in use the world over in this industry. This guy is either trolling or he’s a 14 year old pedant.
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  24.  @Gameboygenius  yes. It’s practically a pastime in Japan to come up with creative ways to avoid the NHK guy who *comes to your front door to ask for money*. For the longest time “I don’t have a TV” was a convenient lie that worked. Then NHK got wise and claimed any device that could play NHK content, including a laptop, meant that you have to pay the fee. But they have no powers of enforcement so most people just don’t answer the door or say the owner’s not home. For all its quirky creativity, Japan can be ass-backwards. Prolific and mandatory use of fax machines, the NHK guy, and the paper hanko system are just a few examples.
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  25.  @NightRogue77  indeed. Nobody loves a good story more than a frightened, ignorant human.
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  26. Because putting all your eggs into one basket is stupid, especially when GPU prices are being driven by an unpredictable crypto frenzy, not stable retail market pressure. That’s to say nothing of the fact they have existing contracts to produce for other customers that can’t be breached without penalties. It would also rapidly deplete stock of chips used to make things like smartphones.
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  27.  Olaf Willocx  I suspect they will be persuaded with the chips money, in which case, yes: they want to.
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  28.  @Luxcium  sure, maybe if your bucket cost $10M
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  29. I felt the same way about the newer Sony Xperia offerings, specifically for their cameras. The stuff you can do is light years beyond any other smart phone camera. Build quality is great too. But it’s almost impossible to buy one outside Japan and even counting domestic sales they’re an unmitigated failure. Yet somehow Sony keeps releasing a new one every year. It’s baffling.
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  30.  @fouzaialaa7962  200mm equipment is in high demand, but it’s not going to make a dent in your purchase of new 300mm equipment. There is very little used 300mm equipment on the market because all of it is still in use. The only time fabs get a chance to buy significant amounts of used 300mm capital is when a major company croaks and has to liquidate their assets to pay creditors. That’s rare. The last big one I know of is when TI outfitted R-Fab in Richardson, TX as an analog chip facility with 300mm equipment they bought from the dissolution of Qimonda. It was also a golden opportunity for TI as they had already built the R-fab shell, having previously intended for it to be a follow up to DMOS6. Bottom line is if you’re going to build a 300mm fab, your capital orders needed to be in a couple years ago because it’s all likely to be new build tools.
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  31. Assuming everyone here who hates the taste of Moutai is American pretty much pegs you as American yourself.
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  32.  @michaelkeudel8770  they may be on the same site, but fab 10 and fab 24 are separate entities. Fab 10 was shut a while ago.
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  33.  @michaelkeudel8770  well the point being it’s still extremely rare to do that for all the reasons laid out in this thread. Having another 300mm fab on the same campus is probably a huge advantage. As well as just being Intel in the first place.
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  34.  @nvignesh  the thing is on this channel: some of us ARE those people.
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  35. The proportion of Western progressives who actually want a full-on communist state is quite small, and suggestions to the contrary are mostly right-wing scare propaganda. Nordic socialism for example still relies on capital markets and functions just fine.
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  36. Nanoimprint is a cute idea but it’s a dead end. Nobody’s going to buy hundreds of nanoimprint tools just to keep up with their backend scanners than can crank out 200+ wafers per hour.
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  37. Because it’s a red ocean market with high risk and volatile prices. If their margins are 20x higher making GPUs and snapdragon mobile processors, making DRAM would be a poor allocation of capital.
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  38. Fun fact: Perkin Elmer was also the company that fucked up the Hubble primary mirror. I remember a coworker of mine recalling he would bring it up constantly to his Perkin-Elmer FSE at Motorola just to get a rise out of the guy. It’s not often the US government has to launch a space shuttle just to fix someone’s incompetence. 😆
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  39.  @tykjpelk  sure, if you don’t mind sputtering gold all over everything and failing reliability testing. What works in a university lab or a white paper to get a pretty SEM image rarely works in the field.
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  40.  @ThePowerLover  ASML’s factories are in Netherlands, not Belgium. IMEC is in Belgium.
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  41.  @tykjpelk  totally gonna start calling mask files “GD slayers” starting this coming Monday.
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  42. Their AOI tools are pretty good, especially if you can’t or don’t need to pay KLA prices.
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  43. Other than TEL, Japan maintained dominance in one lithography area where it has never been surpassed: photoresist and multilayer spin-on materials. I worked for an American competitor to these companies (comprised mainly of Shin Etsu, TOK, and JSR, as well as Nissan Chemical's semiconductor materials division) and it was laughable how far behind we were. I eventually left because continuing to be employed there while standing in front of customers with these entrenched suppliers was a personal embarrassment. Competing with someone like Shin Etsu whose entire history was built on organosilicon materials and polymers is a fool's errand.
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  44. BTW my memories of working on a pair of Micrascan III+ tools at my first job are a constant source of long-term trauma. Everyone loved the reticle cassette design y’all came up with where if you picked it up wrong the mask would fall out. 😆
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  45. Lower reticle demagnification reduces active write area on the mask, making defects easier to tolerate. 5x masks still exist at all because legacy equipment requires them. Canon for example used 5x reduction in its steppers, but left the advanced lithography market after dry ArF.
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  46. Animation at 3:20 technically shows a scanner, not a stepper. When the shutter is open on a stepper, there is no stage motion. Minor quibble though; I love this channel.
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  47. That’s a great sentiment provided you survive the failure and go on to succeed at something else. Plenty of people, companies, and governments don’t.
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  48. Precision diamond saws have long been the standard. IR and UV laser saws are more common these days. A lot of it depends on the substrate, what sort of overcoat protection is needed, and the street dimensions.
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  49. Comes from Greek ἀκτῖνος meaning “ray” or “beam”, so the relationship to light emission is the more proximate meaning. The actinides got their name for the majority having radioactive isotopes.
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  50.  @thisiskevin1000  Indeed. ASML bought SVG for the patents on their catadioptric lens designs, which they needed to design and deploy advanced 193 and 157 scanners a few years later.
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