Chip fabs owned by TSMC, Intel & others manufacturing high volume integrated circuits on equipment that costs hundreds of millions of dollars made by ASML & others like Nikon or Cannon, the main bread & butter of the clean room equipment the lithography machines that etch integrated circuit layer information into the semiconductor wafers made of high purity silicon & doped with nitrogen & phosphorus to make PN junctions for solar PV, computer memory, CMOS image sensors & other such ASIC chips or just computer chips like the GPU designs of NVIDIA or Apple Silicon.
Wafer bonding a way to create double sided chips that improve transistor density and data throughput in products like HBW memory or high bandwidth memory, important for computer simulations of increasing detail or even supply chain management or digital asset management for Amazon or Ebay or Alibaba.
The need for improved information technology hardware also driven by a need for increasing energy efficient in data centers, where huge amounts of electrical power are energizing cloud computer clusters or elastic data & processing remote IO systems important for web services like YouTube streaming for parent company Alphabet Inc, known widely for their Google Search product & platform that connects users to products & services in novel ways never previously possible. This is what makes electricity, the internet & information technology a potent combination of technologies essential for ongoing innovation and progress during the remainder of the 4th and begging of the 5th industrial revolutions respectively.
Without intelligent or smart switching technology, it would be unimaginably difficult to fully optimize manufacturing or logistics. This includes movement of the KEVA technology robots in Amazon warehouses, that have to be dynamically routed or moved in a scalable way in response to what items in inventory are under current purchasing demand, or what items are selling well vs items that move in smaller quantities such that the rack moving robots have to route items to minimize shelf time cost shrinkage using heuristic search optimization algorithms that are refined in real time with ongoing training of AI that continually improves efficiency or lowers operating costs in an ongoing way to eventually reach full optimization of a given state, though the state change in what is selling well constantly changes in response to cultural and social changes in what consumers value or want or desire, which changes by local, & many other variables, such that there will always be a need for ongoing optimization.
Chip fabs have pushed lithography limits to 0.13 nm features sizes with ASML's latest EUV and High NA machines. That means hitting tiny droplets of liquid tin suspending in a parabolic mirror center of focus being hit by a 10,000 watt CO2 laser 50 times per second to make Deep UV pulses of light reflected off laser etched nickel mask reticles containing the CHIP layer data, then focused onto the wafer for light etching of the photopolymer after which chemical washes remove the parts hit by light, then CVD or chemical vapor deposition layers down copper or other layers, wires or features, with a product like a modern smartphone SOC made with more than 150 layers of lithography and chemical processes in giant multi-billion dollar global chip fabs.
Van Der Waals forces, capillary action and hydrogen bonding #chemistry dictate the energetic chemical & physical techniques used to bond chip fab wafers. Imagine glueing together two nearly perfect flat disks of metal or ceramic, using a thin low viscosity adhesive like superglue, where a small droplet in the center can be spun spread over the entire area of one disk facing upward so that the upper disk lowered onto the bottom disk achieves a bubble free low defect bond, so both disks are nearly perfectly adhered or bonded together. That is what the chip fabs are aiming for with wafer bonding for double sided chips. Apple works with Hon Hai Precision and Flextronics to make double sides mainboard logic in iPhones for example, so a larger battery can be installed, with room for the speakers, RF section, antenna, cameras, and other hardware devices, such that the mainboard logic is thinking and where the SOC contains the memory, cache memory, CPU, GPU, graphic memory, Northbridge, South Bridge, IO, and an AI based network arbitrator that does SOC level data and power routing with ultra high efficiency so that the smartphone can run for 1 or more days using just 10 or so watt hours of power from single cell Lithium Ion polymer battery of 3.85 VDC nominal voltage in the latests battery chemistries.
I have been studying information technology for more than 30 years to follow what is happening in computer science, software engineering, information technology, broadband internet access, mobile high speed internet on smartphones over 4GLTE then 5G NR and soon 6G mobile internet, with products like SpaceX StarLink emerging to provide internet access around the world to anyone with the required equipment and subscription. Software as a service, streaming content as a services, cloud computer and elastic cloud storage as a service, almost all information technology is moving to subscription models because the provide the company ongoing continual revenue that improves profit margins.
This is what is know in business studies as market forces or free market actives that create economies, wealth and shared prosperity and new business models and new forms of gainful employment that make life better for more people in more ways. Thus information technology creates jobs of many different kinds enabling the replacement of jobs lost in other sectors to automation or robots. Artificial Intelligence experience a renaissance of high value investments, with a global AI races in military industrial complexes with American & Europe competing against China for example. I don't like the CCP or government in China because they do not observe basic human rights & use the military to harm or hurt Chinese people living in the PRC or what we call China today. That means the government of China hurts its own people.
China has never been able to keep up with India, Israel, America, the UK, South Korea or German with chip fab technology, information technology, and have generally played the role of manufacturing partner, though the economy of China is collapsing and youth in China are about to overthrow the CCP. There are many YouTube video documentary covering the economic collapse in China or the Bai Lan movement of young people who have no hope of ever owning homes and have little of any opportunity to succeed in life with hard work the way their parents were able to do. Between 1979 and 2017 Chine experience an economic miracle of rapid industrialization, though this produce property price inflation and wage increases that created radical income inequality in the PRC today in 2024.
This means the trade embargo and sanctions against the CCP for unfair trade and currency manipulation, combined with the sharp covid 19 closures in china, are together causing economic chaos within China, which I almost consider fair because of the way that the CCP ruined Honk Kong and continues bullying the ROC in Taiwan. I stand with India and Israel and NATO and oppose the CCP and am part of the End the CCP movement. I am pro technology, pro investment and pro free market enterprise, so communism makes no sense at all. State planned economies like those of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, never flourished.
Silicon on Insulator technology since the 1960's to largely eliminate cross talk between transistors on the thick substrate. This oxide layer beneath the transistors acts as an insulator. SOI widely applied in MEMS and micro-electro mechanical actuator technologies including those important for commercial airbag sensors in mass produces automobiles, and DLP light projection technology using compact metal halide HID parabolic mirror assembly with coated optical lenses to projected a precise beam of rectangular uniform light agains the DLP chip by Texas Instrument who also made the TI 82+ calculator that got me through many college science classes in Chemistry & Physics that formed the basis of my Bachelors of Science of Environmental Science degree that made me a scientist by education, though today in 2024 and for the past few years I am a commercial drivers license or CDL holding professional School Bus driver, previously a Level 2 Device Repair Technician fixing smartphones by Apple and Samsung to replace broken screens and faded batteries. I am also a HAM radio Technician KJ7IOF. I have published more than 600 YouTube videos & more than 1000, blog postings. I try to share what I have learned and what I am learning, to make the world a better place by helping other people understand the same topics.
BSI or back side illumination Sony Science Et. Al. now emerging as Backside Power Delivery or BDP technology, eliminating the need for wire network power layers over logic in past chip designs of lower energy efficiency. I am talking about TSV or through silicon via, ways of interconnecting different layers of logic and power :) Metal interlayer bonding for example in HBM such as TCH or thermo compression bonding. Heat, pressure, and metal inter layer. HMB3 the hot compression bonding developed by Howard Hughes in the 1950s makes a resurgence in NVIDIA stacked memory technology for AI training. Hybrid bonding makes a splash as a front end process when making transistors :)
Data centers use about as much water as an 18 hole gold course, but are much more common, as in there are many more data centers than gold courses worldwide. This means the closed loop water purification cycling technology to reused cooling water ultra purified means lower operating costs or improved profits of data centers making renewable use of high purity water for cooling :)
Water Recycling very important for Data center to reduce operating costs.
Around the world Data Centers operate using a lot of water, while closed cycle water reuse systems can slash water consumption by 99%, radically improving the sustainability of data center operations! Free cooling, waste heat recover, and renewable energy, these are being adopted by data centers looking to reduce energy consumption 4 to 9 %, while improving cooling performance. Think sustainability vs money or budget or financing. Anything that improves data center energy efficient will serve market forces that drive innovation and progress. We will continue to make products and services of all kinds better with renewables, more applied intelligence, continual operation optimization and ongoing revisions that reduce energy consumption and improve throughput or efficiency.
