Comments by "Anders Juel Jensen" (@andersjjensen) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1.  @gregvanpaassen  That all consumer electronics are lead free today is paying dividends in recycling. Many electronics recycling processes need to use organic solvents and acids. Those two in combination with lead is the perfect way to get organically bound lead. You know, the stuff that has been proven since the 50s to accumulate in humans and animals leading to heavy metal poisoning. The very reason we stopped using lead as a fuel additive and in pesticides... Not everything you don't understand is done by "bureaucrats who has no sense". Sometimes it's done by "bureaucrats who listened to the leading experts" and, unfortunately, sometimes it's done by "bureaucrats who listened to special interest groups representing greedy corporations"... Like that one time where no less than 24 CEOs from various tobacco companies swore under oath that nicotine is not addictive...
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  2. Taiwan's official name is Republic of China. China's official name is People's Republic of China.
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  3. Fascinating topic as always Jon! :D
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  4. There are many MANY semiconductor technologies that were proven in the lab several decades before they became commercially viable. One thing is to do it. Another thing is to do it with such low defect density that you can build anything useful with it. And another thing, yet again, is to be able to do that at several hundred wafers per hour with a method that can be "copy/pasted" to many production lines spanning several fabs.
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  5. If you like being presented with math problems that seriously bake your noodle for several hours before you finally crack it: Do it! If you hate the problem solving part and just want to get to the dopamine rush, from getting the solution, quickly.... keep playing computer games.
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  6.  @jrherita  No, that was several generations later. Bulldozer/Piledriver was a desperate attempt at selling cheaply but still making livable margins.
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  7. But that's the thing. By focusing on easier nodes they can get the basic infrastructure up and start generating revenue which, with a bit of lube, could attract the big players, which makes it financially viable to go the last (and hardest) mile with infrastructure.
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  8. Man the semi business is a dangerous place. It's a lot like the famous D&D quote: "Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, fore you are crunchy and good with ketchup".
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  9. We can all be very thankful that Intel did not mange to cram WiMAX down everyone's throat....
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  10. TSMC is building in the US and is in talks about building in Japan. The US and Japan are the only ones who're actively telling China that they will intervene if China tries to invade Taiwan. For once it sucks to be a European. We're lagging behind here. China has been out of line for far too long. And Taiwan should've been recognized as a sovereign nation internationally a long time ago. In my book it can't happen fast enough to get Taiwan on the UN council and to become a NATO member. That should stabilize things rather quickly...
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  11. Most people think they're a local brand, as YKK has factories all over the world :P
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  12. In case you haven't noticed. This video is flagged "Unlisted".. that's an oversight, isn't it?
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  13. It does work for labour intensive tasks. If you employ a ton of people there is equally going to be a need for the support roles like cleaning, building maintenance, cantina service, etc, which further supports local agriculture and other markets. But when you have 10 brainiacs and a huge automated plant... not so much.. especially not if all the materials said plant works with are so specialized that they can't be produced locally.
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  14. 3:32 "It comes from the power supply". Uh, minor correction/elaboration. It solely comes from the VRMs. The PSU delivers 3.3V, 5V and 12V, all of which will absolutely fry a modern CPU, so no PSU voltage goes straight to the socket. On modern motherboards the VRM components are a non-trivial part of the total cost. Being able to deliver several hundred amps at very low voltages is costly. But every power domain relating directly to CPU, chipset and memory requires (a lot) less than 3.3V, so a lot of stepping down is required. What remains to be seen is if Intel will manage to execute this time around. Every node since their 10nm (now called Intel 7) has been delayed and underperformed once ready. My gut feeling is that TSMC, who's no stranger to taking leaps of faith, is right in splitting GAA off from BPD to make sure they get each right and have time to thoroughly tune the EDA for each. You can have the best node in the universe, but it will be useless if your engineers (or customers engineers) can't properly design for it.
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  15. I'm not a financial advisor, but the reason that TSMC isn't crazy over valued like some other tech companies is probably that they're enormously predictable in their future income. They book wafer agreements 3-5 years in advance, build fabs that can fulfill that demand and then run them at ever lower margins until they're "worn out". This means they can't suddenly invent a hot new thing and become the latest fad overnight. But they have consistently delivered on their profit projections, and since they produce for every player in the AI space (Even Intel is using them for their NPUs, instead of using their own fabs for that), Apple, a hefty portion of the Android phone market, and most the PC space in general, I think you could do worse than buy TSMC stock. That is, if you buy stocks to generate passive income. If you buy stocks in the hope they'll gain value, so you can sell them for a profit, then TSMC is probably not the best bet.
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  16. Every colonial rule was much more brutal than anyone really likes to remember. But for the places where the effects of colonization has left the countries devastated to this day there is, obviously, a greater will to remember. Places where the decolonization went smoothly and/or left the natives better off in the end obviously want to focus on the positive. And colonization or not, a hundred years ago EVERY country was a brutal asshole. Genocide, torture of war prisoners, military plunder, etc, was just more water under the bridge. It wasn't until after WWII that everyone was going "Uh, how about we stop this madness?".
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  17. "Yes. But not at prices and yields that are acceptable".
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  18. N4 is just a normal half step. The reason they specifically mention N6 is that it's a quite cost optimized half step of N7. That is, it doesn't improve much on density, but it is 100% design compatible with N7, has better yields and costs less because some critical layers have been moved from multi patterning on DUV to single layer EUV. Don't quote me on it, but I've heard a 20% reduction in wafer price with yields in the 99.xx% range while cutting 5 days off the lead time.
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  19. They have also, unfortunately, also stuffed up massively several times because they wanted a proprietary format for those sweet sweet monopoly dollars.
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  20.  @testman9541  If by medium teeth you mean the size typically used in jeans I beg to differ. I've never had one of those fail before the fabric in the crotch area was worn through.
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  21.  @testman9541  "The crotch are wearing out and not being replaceable is not acceptable to me either"... have you ever owned jeans? They're made of cotton, not adamantium. And how would they sew the pants so that area is replaceable without it looking goofy? I mean, you have no less than four seems joining up in that area. And it's the area that constantly rubs on itself unless you walk like you shit your pants...
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  22. And AMD's latest chiplet innovation is 3D V Cache which stacks additional cache on top of the base chiplet.
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  23.  @m2heavyindustries378  It makes perfect Chinese sense: "Our scientists are not nationalistic enough and recommend that we buy our lasers from Lithuania. Quick! Make up a reason to print in the news paper about how Lithuania is a racist/bigot/discriminating/infringing state that hates China so we can tell our scientists they need to work 80 hours a week to develop the lasers we need!" It is a clearly defined goal of the Chinese government to attempt to end all imports of any kind. Everything should be Chinese made in China. And most things should be Chinese made in the rest of the world.
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  24.  @me0101001000  TSMC is in part owned by it's own clients. Continuing to push semiconductor technology has gotten exponentially more expensive each generation, so I honestly think that TSMC will eventually become a client owned state licensed monopoly. That is, TSMC will forever be barred from entering any other market than chip manufacturing and advanced packaging and will have a maximum allowable profit margin in exchange for servicing every chip design company in the world.
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  25. X-rays are notoriously hard to reflect as they penetrate most things. Also I've been told that creating a photo-resist compound for x-ray lithography is pretty hard. Not because it's hard to find a material that crumbles when exposed to x-rays, but be cause it's hard to find a material that crumbles, but doesn't let x-rays through to destroy the previously made features.
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  26. The next phase is Large Aperture EUV. So same light source but much bigger mirrors with tighter focal points. This gives a smaller Critical Dimension. Small enough that there is no point going beyond that because quantum fuzziness will start fucking with us big time. So the next big leap is not to go smaller, but to go both more energy efficient on the transistors themselves and to start stacking multiple layers of transistor patterns. They're also researching using carbon nanotubes for connecting the transistors. Currently about 50% of a microprocessors power consumption is plain routing. Stacking things or connecting them with a much better conductor are both avenues to reclaim some of that loss.
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  27.  @SianaGearz  The advantage of smaller transistors is faster switching time (higher frequency chips) and faster signalling between each transistor (signals propagate at the speed of light). The first disadvantage is greater leakage (wasted power), but this is partly offset by the better voltage/frequency curve. That is to say: if we only "harvest" some of the frequency gain in exchange for lower operating voltage it's still a net gain. The power density problem is not inherent to node shrinks. It's inherent to competition. Laptop chips run at 15W and get like 80% the performance of their 65W desktop cousins. We still make chips about the same size all the time, so the cooling area remains much the same. We just cram more transistors (which each use less power) into the same size package for a net performance gain.
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  28. Blocking google, facebook, instagram, twitter and porn sites is what it is.... but blocking wikipedia is decisively nasty. Not just because it blocks access to existing knowledge, but because it blocks the Chinese people from building an encyclopedia of their own, which is not (necessarily) "sanctioned by comity" at every level.
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  29. Intel is a massive client of ASML. They also happen to own a large stock option in ASML. As do TSMC and Samsung. This is very common in big business. If someone become a critical supplier of an entire industry, nobody wants them to just twist the arms of everyone, so stock-swapping is carried out.
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  30. Nope. No dudettes to distract the best dudes. The best dudes are highly intellectual nerds who have fully devoted themselves to highest tier of technical monkhood. They're not very well acquainted with bodily needs and often find it very distressing to be confronted with the fact that they are, in fact, not just biological computers. So no dudettes in the tech monastery. And specifically and categorically no dudettes in miniskirts! Not even if they work in accounting!
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  31. You can be 100% sure he was not allowed to bring in any recording devices. All photos in this episode where ASML's own.
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  32. Those are going to be heavy as fuck... Uranium weighs 19g/cm3. Lithium weighs 0.54g/cm3.
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  33. TBF, ASML does not have a PR policy that is focused on small time youtubers. It's not exactly like a super positive mention by Jon is going to secure them new customers. That they even let him in is more an acknowledgement of his work explaining chip lithography to laymen than anything else. And considering how closely guarded the IP of these machines are, that's no small acknowledgement.
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  34. The concept of standard cells still live on, but today there is so much software aid on the hard design that the finished product is a far cry from the Lego like approach of VLSI. And today the concept has moved to IP blocks. That is basically the same approach done differently: keep complexity down by segmenting out functionality blocks, but keep things flexible with standard interfaces for those blocks.
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  35.  @Kawitamamayi  Oh trust me when I say he frustrates the IT crowd too. But I think he does it on purpose by now :P
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  36. 1999.. The year: The Matrix came out along with Fight Club and Pulp Fiction Napster was first released SpongeBob SquarePants aired for the first time Putin became president of Russia and invaded Chechnya Uh... I think 1999 was the year where the timeline fucked up...
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  37. That is exactly how AMD's 3D-Vcache works. There is nothing but SRAM on the chiplet (and of cause the connecting pins) so the gate patterning can be optimized solely for that layout.
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  38. I loved your dry humour at the end! :D
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  39.  @justinliu7357  I'm not small minded. I'm autistic. There's a key difference between being annoyed by emotions and thinking that only ones own emotions are valid (aka being toxic). But as I stated above, someone like me should not be boss. I'm technical chief on my team and my right hand man (whom I've worked with for 22 years) handles personel details and upper management for precisely this reason.
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  40. This is known and expected in the industry. And the usual way to get around it is that once people get good enough to work on the seriously important stuff they sign a period specific NDA in exchange for a golden handshake and a looong vacation when they leave. The lead times in the high tech fields is often close to five years. So just being cut out of the loop for 18 months before you're allowed to work in the exact same field for someone else pretty much takes the sting off. You'll have fallen enough behind, and you'll end up in the middle of a product development cycle when many things are already set in stone, or you'll end up at the beginning of a product development cycle with 18 months old info. My buddy is a sales engineer at a crane company. If he gets fired he will get 70% of his salary for 12 months (on top of his new salary), but cannot work with price projecting of crane projects. That doesn't mean he can't work on, say, designing a new hydraulic system for some specific type of crane. He just can't work for a competitor in a way that would put his former employer at a serious disadvantage. Being able to undercut every contract bid by precisely 0.5% (knowing the internal prices of the former place by heart) would not only be unfair to his former job, but also unfair to the customers who expect bids to be given "blind". Each company has to guess at the level of competition they think they are facing and make a competitive bid. Not doing so is considered price fixing. But in the above case it would effectively be price fixing for the customer and a practical monopoly for the new employer.
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  41.  @johnl.7754  Nope. TSMC (Based in Taiwan) holds just over 50% of the global semiconductor production market share, with Taiwan in general holding about 66%. TSMC is also about 1.5 node-shrink ahead of of the second most advanced producer (Intel). So Taiwan, as a whole, is the leader in both quantity and technology.
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  42. AMD was also the first to market with the direct-copper bonding method: The 5800X3D. It was originally planned for Zen 2, which even had the connecting pads, but the yields were terrible, so it wasn't brought to market.
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  43. "Fabbing". But yes, it is actual industry lingo. Now get your mind out of the gutter! :P
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  44.  @あなた以外の誰でもない  Or perhaps the Taiwanese just like not having their internet censored. Or having a "social credit" score. Or having every "news outlet" effectively be a one-sided propaganda machine.... In fact, I don't even think their government need to spend much on anti-CCP campaigning since the Taiwanese already enjoy higher standards of living, better working conditions and a whole lot less "great leaps forward". And TSMC can't "just help China". TSMC has EUV tech because they're licensed to be a client of ASML. And ASML signed a contract with the US to get EUV, which require honouring US technology export regulations. But since you bring it up: even if TSMC could help China they most certainly wont. Just look at the vile methods SMIC tried because TSMC wouldn't botch. And this was well before EUV. TSMC don't want to help China because they have a brain. They full well understand that if China gets TSMC's capabilities they will lose billions right away.
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  45. It would be much more interesting if they managed to make the first trailing node cheap as fuck. Most people, companies and institutions don't need the very best. The second best at a fraction of the price is often a very sweet proposition.
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  46. LOL! Yeah, solving the problem by shooting droplets of tin at black powder revolver speeds and hitting them twice with two different laser systems (with each their own complexities) sounds like a Nicola Tesla solution all right. Doing it 50,000 times a second without missing a beat?... That sounds more like Edison! :P
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  47. The agreement that the youth needs "proper political perspective" irks me to say the very least. That's exactly the method every ruthless regime in history has resorted to. That's how you foster a rigid doctrine that cannot be questioned without dire consequences. And history has shown us that it is precisely the things that can't be questioned... that needs constant questioning!
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  48. Your voice sounds strained in this episode... I hope you didn't take that bonehead, who said you sounded boring, too seriously. I'd personally rather listen to someone who sounds relaxed and with a bit slower pacing, as it gives me more time to reflect on what is being said.
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  49. You're right, but the way you worded the second part it becomes hard for laymen to understand that when you say "charges" you're not referring the act of "charging up the battery" but rather referring to "the amount of Coulombs". So for anyone curious: Watt (rate of electricity consumption) = Joules/second ("energy chucks per time unit") Watthours (total electricity consumption) = Joules/second * 3600 seconds (so the seconds cancel out and you're left with 3600 Joules) However, Watt is also equal to Volts * Amps (sorry physics teachers for the laymanified notation). This means that when you have a, say, 3.7V battery rated for 1000mAh of capacity you just multiply the two to get it in mWh, which in this case is 3,700mWh. Then divide by 1000 to remove the "milli" part and you're left with 3.7Wh, or divide by 1000 again to get to the kWh you're used to from your electric bill. In this case 0.0037kWh. But here's the catch: What I just said is complete nonsense... Because a battery does not deliver it's rated voltage from 100% to 0% capacity. The voltage will decline as the battery discharges. This means that you will, in fact, not get 3.7Wh our of the example above. The battery will start at 3.7V but end at around 2.2V (I'm using my Vape battery as an example) before it's sufficiently "flat" to not be able to drive my "device". And that's the reason why battery capacity is measured in amp-hours (or milliamp-hours for small stuff), as the Watt-hour approach "is bogus" despite it looking more familiar. You can, however, go V * mAh * 3/4 and get a reasonable approximation for modern lithium batteries. "The constant" will change depending on the battery technology, but I've rambled on for long enough, so I'll spare you all for a lecture on the implications of a battery's internal resistance and how that directly relates to Ohm's Law.
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  50. I'm not 100% he thought of that perspective himself.
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