Automakers, motorcycle manufacturers, electric bicycle makers & other high volume vehicle manufacturers demand high reliability IC chips made on 200mm wafers using 65nm to 28nm nodes. These are made by the billion in older Chip Fabs and the chips made are sold for a few dollars each & are often installed in robust fan-less modules important to most world economies.
As an example of a legacy chip product of broad commercial importance, consider the typical automotive ECU for engine management of the fuel injection & integration of data from the emissions controls like O2 sensor voltage values to determine the EGT or exhaust gas temperature so the ECU can vary the injection duration & timing along with spark-plug timing to vary the air fuel ratio & ignition to optimize light off or warm up of the catalytic converter.
7nm, 5nm, 3nm, 18A, 13A & 9A latest generation 193nm ArF excimer light source immersion lithography & emerging chip manufacturing gets all the press coverage in YouTube videos, on tech website and elsewhere online.
The legacy chip making on 200mm wafers and lack of replacement machines for those older 2011 era machines used on those nodes that caused the chip shortage that the American Chips Act provided $50 billion to address, though only about 6% of the funding goes to addressing legacy node Chip Fab issues as most of the federal funding to fund new sexy chip fab technology that Intel working directly with ASML to leap-frog past TSMC for leading edge next-gen chip fabrication.
Chip fab equipment often made in low volume niche quantities so getting replacement parts or new machines nearly impossible or the lead times for custom making it takes years for procurement.
These legacy fabs are state of the art when they are built out & setup to operate. So back when 28nm chips were the leading edge process node, Intel or TSMC would setup one of these fabs for billions of dollars & once they are operational they continue making chips 24/7 such that the chips sell for high prices until most of the equipment paid for as other newer node Fabs come online, so keeping the old one going mostly about selling the resulting chips for just enough to cover the operating costs & bit more for a small profit margin.
If you think about what is happening, EDA software used to design the integrated circuits, then during pre-production simulation testing happens to verify the logic works without glitches or errors. Then a test batch made for further testing & then the wafer production enters high volume production to mass produce the chipset or chip or integrated circuit.
Photomasks effectively etch a picture of each layer of the chipset so that physical & chemical processing stages can subsequently embed conductors, insulators, semiconductor & other materials to make up the switching gate logic, electronic components, and all the interconnection wire layers to link everything together into a giant system with tens of billions of transistors, later bonded to a package made of ceramic and wire bonded with thin gold wires to the pinout for connecting the CPU to the mainboard inside the computer.
Lithography a derivative of high volume printing & photo printing technologies with smaller light wavelengths used to etch smaller features. Thats where the 28nm & 14nm and 10nm marketing nomenclature comes from, the feature size of the CMOS transistors or later FinFet 3D transistors used in the 7nm, 5nm & later process nodes.
Due to the math of area a 300mm wafer can be made into 2X more chips than a 200mm wafer, so the cost per chip goes down on larger wafers, but not linearly. Handling 300mm wafers costs more and so do the newer smaller nm wafer node processes. Chip fabrication plants or Chip Fabs are becoming dramatically more expensive to build because its getting harder & harder to push the physics of making smaller transistors. The market incentive for next generation chips in smartphones creates enormous cash flow to finance emerging nodes even if they are way more costly. In mobile SOC power efficient performance king since the phone has to operate on a tiny lithium-ion battery.
In the olden days chipset were hand draw on graph paper, then transferred to Ruby film by photo-projection. The film was then used to etch metal photomasks. This work well during the 250nm era all the way until 90nm, after which the needed precision was no longer possible to achieve this way. The art & science of making higher resolution precision photomasks became a critical bottleneck. With EUV the mask is actually a mirror that bounces 13nm UV light containing the layer information to etch the photopolymer or resist layer to which later physical & chemical processes are used to fill in the voids created this way.
Precision king as any error in the mask creates errors in the logic. Even at the EDA software design level many opportunities for error creation exist. The addition of AI tools in EDA enables electrical engineers to run many generations of an existing chip design using big data systems on cloud computer infrastructure with many billions of times more information than the high complexity chip design.
If you think about compute software tools & hardware technology, you might realize there are reciprocal positive feedback effects as the better EDA tools enables better chips which enable better servers which enable more powerful EDA tools than enable better chips, etc. This feedback interesting because our brain is also trying to make sense of noise using information we gathered about the world previously in a cumulative feedback learning process that occurs throughout life as the emerging human mind tries to continually adapt the brain in response to what the person does, thinks about, believes, chooses and behaviors.
Understanding how chips are made can help you understand the world better. In this way education can elevate a person's mind by helping them to make better sense of the world. The brain can reuse what we have learned about the world in one domain to solve problems in other domains. Watching my Prusa Mini FDM print line by line & layer by layer helped me figure out how to clean things more efficiently for example, and how to use a small cheap light duty corded electric lawn mower plus 100ft of cheap thin diameter extension cable (low wattage mower motor) to infill style mow back & forth line by line always keeping the cord behind me so as to not get it tangled in the high speed rotating grass cutting blade motor shaft setup inside the mower.
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