Comments by "Grak70" (@Grak70) on "Where The Real Chip Shortage Is" video.

Also, half the tools I work with on a daily basis are older than I am. And I’m over 40. Compound semiconductor makers almost exclusively inherited equipment from the 1970s-early 1990s silicon world because that’s all that’s available in many cases. What’s left are often 200mm tools down-converted to 150mm. With those kind of capital restrictions, an industry that charges cents per unit for its product and can fit 5,000-15,000 chips on one 6” wafer is never going to transition to 200 or 300mm.
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Yup. I work in GaAs. Hard to make a Cz ingot when half the atoms in your melt sublime into vapor at atmospheric pressure.
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An enormous amount of III-V production has never scaled beyond 0.5um. There’s simply no need in many cases, and the tools and processes used to create them aren’t capable of doing much better.
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@neilkurzman4907 I wanted to make a post about this exact thing but you said it better. For decades semiconductor companies have been in a feast to famine cycle of greedily chasing capacity. Much like the oil and gas refining industry this time around, when customers and governments pissed and moaned about building extra capacity, knowing the business cycle has busted every time and they’ve been left holding the bag, they said no. It feels like maybe we finally learned our lesson about chasing our own tail to overproduce in good times.
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@tonysu8860 that would strongly depend on whether you stock it with new tools or used ones; preferably used ones you already own. If the latter is the case and the equipment is already depreciated, it might make financial sense to build a fab shell and start it up. But then why weren’t you doing it already? Semiconductors just don’t allow for this kind of “go back and capture old nodes/tech” business model. A good example of one case where this worked was when TI built RFab in Richardson, TX. The only reasons they were able to start up a 300mm analog line was 1) they had already built the fab shell when the subprime mortgage crisis shit the bed and 2) Qimonda had just gone under hard and sold a massive amount of 300mm tool assets for cents on the dollar. That sort of confluence of chance almost never happens.
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@Hallettjs7957 Intel did it, yes. The largest most cash flush semiconductor company on the planet did it. Once. Analog and discrete makers aren’t working with that kind of capital. And if they’re III-V substrate forget it; the wafers don’t even exist.
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@dieSpinnt with all due respect you have no idea what you’re talking about. Semiconductor fabs are not like Chinese sweat shops spitting out wax lips and Tupperware.
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It’s all fun and games until that MESFET discrete your fancypants state-of-the-art module needs is backordered!
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@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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@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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@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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@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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@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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@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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@nvignesh the thing is on this channel: some of us ARE those people.
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@neilkurzman4907 don’t bother, it’s just some FCA Chinese troll copy-pasting their comments.
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There is no stepper infrastructure for reticles other than 4x and 5x. You can do whole wafer masks aligners, but those have resolution limits and defect issues that can’t even break 3-5um in most cases.
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A big problem with this idea is getting enough equipment to operate at large enough scale to disrupt the market. In many ways it’s more difficult to tool up an old node fab because cheap, vintage used equipment isn’t available or gets snapped up as soon as it’s on market.
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@卩乇尺丂ㄖ几 tell me you’ve never worked in semiconductors without telling me you’ve never worked in semiconductors. Chips are not priced as market commodities and customer pressure to lower prices as each generation of product ages is unavoidable. The fab I work at is at capacity. We would love to start more wafers and sell them. People are beating down our door. What we’re not going to do though? Bend our existing customers over a barrel and fuck them when they’re hamstrung by supply chains. That’s how you get customers to leave for your competitors when things get better.
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