Search This Blog

Even CHIP Fabs using ASML's Latest EUV machines Have Unexpected Downs, Critical Part Failures like a Traffic Jam

If the human body moved blood the way our road system move automobiles in a traffic jam, then hypoxia would kill off organs and tissue, the way peoples finite time alive wasted in stop and go traffic congestion traffic jams that can take hours to clear in many emerging megacities. I hear of 4 hour long traffic jams in some of China's largest metropolitan areas where many drivers stuck in stop and go congestion are driving their first car and also the first car in their family history as their parents never owned a car and got around on human powered bicycles before 1980 when China or the PRC started rapidly industrializing.

CHIP Fabs made integrated circuit chips like the SOC of your smartphone, or RAM in your laptop or desktop or server, or the GPU or CPU chips of many modern computers, automobiles, and all the chips needed for driver assist technology such that a modern automobile after 2017 has more than 130 digital modules with chipset, often fan-less passively cooled with an aluminum heatsink housing, powered by the 12vdc direct current bus power from the vehicles battery and alternator generator system. You could accurately describe a modern car as a rolling data center because of the amount of compute system active onboard in the background passively operating without driver inputs, helping with vehicle stability control, adaptive lane keep assist, automatic energy braking, automatic high beams and many other features and functions in the infotainment dash system for content streaming and smartphone interactions over bluetooth connections between your smartphone and your car so you can stream Pandora or Spotify music or similar through your car stereo to enjoy music while you are driving without resorting to ad heavy radio stations or RF via AM or FM reception. 

A chip fab down can cost the operator more than $30 dollars per second, or $1800 per minute or over $108,000 per hour in increased costs from a loss in throughput, since they can't control other cost variables. High volume 24/7 high throughput production the name of the game at a chip fab because all the equipment is depreciating and wearing out, and the ultra pure water & electricity costs cannot be varied and can increase, the only way profitability can be increased is by increasing throughput or the number of chips made per unit of time. 

Making more chips faster means cheaper chips, but going faster has issues with layer accuracy, loss of focus, aberrations, vibrations, misalignments, feature gaps, electron leakage, shorting between layers and other errors if the machines slip even a tiny bit out of calibration. Even the lasers that are used for alignment only last 2 years, and the primary light source 18 months, and the masks don't last forever either. All the parts of the machine are subject to wear, noise, vibration or harshness, although precisely machines and highly precisely assembled, tested and validated, the machines still have some precision drift as the operated. Wear parameters can be used for some automatic adjustments to keep the machine in ultra precise ranges of calibration even as small amounts of drift occur as a consequence of entropy in the ASML EVU machines high intensity operating conditions. This is extreme engineering to make the highest precision products manufacture, tiny transistors by the many tens of billions on chips smaller than a human fingernail. 

If a chip fab EUV critical part out of stock and not quickly available, it can cause a horrid month long down event that costs millions of dollars in painful loses, and still take longer to replace and get the machine back online, calibrated and validated before turning it on full blast for high volume high throughput production output of all the trillions and trillions of transistors etched with light, acids and other chemicals, with lots of electricity and ultra pure water consumed. CHIP Fabs are the most complicated and complex manufacturing facilities with the most expensive equipment and requires the most talented and most educated employees, scientists, technicians, and elaborate multilayer support structures from ASML for their Twinscan machines as an example, which are the King of most cleanrooms used from high throughput IC manufacturing. 

No comments:

Post a Comment