There will also be a cost reduction from the more efficient use of the ARC (anti-reflective coating), top coats, and Photoresist applications on the larger wafers. Coat dispense volumes do not go up significantly with larger wafers in a spin coat application so you effectively get more imaging for the same volume of chemical. Seeing as many of the lithography materials are some of the most expensive in the process this benefit can be very significant. Of course controlling these thicknesses to within a few angstroms across essentially a medium pizza will be a major challenge.

Also I was pretty sure the SEMI standard was for 450mm wafers. It will be interesting to see how many people adopt the new equipment for 450mm production, because the up front costs will be astronomical.

Actually crime in the USA is also down.

I am not saying our extremely high incarceration rate is the primary cause for the reduction in crime. But in spite of what is commonly reported about America, crime is actually improving. I would expect if we did a similar reduction in sentences for drug offenders, and have some better support for those getting out of jail we would have gotten a bigger reduction probably at a lower cost, but being "soft on crime" does not help anyone win elections

As somebody who works in Lithography, I can let you know that they have not been using visible light for a long time. All fine resolution lithography is designed around as close to a monochromatic light source as possible. Having a significant spread in the light spectrum was just not consistent to do much below the 1.0 um feature size. This is because of the diffraction spread is very dependent on the wavelength and the fact that the photons have different energies thus reacting differently (or not at all) in the photoresist on the wafer.

Thus broadband lithography gave way to g-line (465nm visible blue) which gave way to i-line (365nm Ultra-Violet); Next was deep UV (248nm), Now 193nm is still used in state of the art systems today with lots of tricks such as immersion (where the light goes into water before it hits the wafer to increase the NA of the system) and double patterning (splitting up the image into multiple images that are combined in the etch processes after). Extreme UV is 13.5nm light is the next step but it is a very difficult light source to work with and the systems outrageous sums of money even for this industry.

What you are completely correct about is the importance of connectivity. I went from working in a dying 1xx nm CMOS fab this year to a thriving 1.0+um fab that makes wireless components. The lithographic part of the process (and just cramming more and more transistors on a die) is not the key value to our customers; its the exotic materials that we use to target more and more bands of wireless connectivity. I expect there will always be a demand in the market for more and faster transistors for pure computation. Its unfortunately no longer where the market growth is; thus the ROI on developing these technologies is looking more and more risky for businesses. What I have found interesting is that just about everybody working on the high end of the industry is pretty confident that the transistors will work at the 5nm-7nm node so there is still an incentive to head in that direction for now. After that will require some radical re-thinking about the materials used in computational machines.

But this is Slashdot, NOBODY is going to actually RTFA.

My cycling experience in Colorado has been the same (ditched my car in 2010). I frequently have cars shocked that I actually stopped at a stop sign when I am commuting to work, because all of the drivers here are so used to most cyclists blowing through them without stopping. I have also had far more close calls on the biking only trails in town with people not paying attention while riding than on the streets. The right mindset for riding is "being right doesn't bring you back" so always assume all other vehicles are going to do something dangerous when on the road.

In the discussions I have had with other people that I work with in the semiconductor industry, the primary case against FD-SOI was business not technical. FD-SOI is very expensive as a starting material and the sourcing of the stuff was iffy at best when Intel decided to go FinFet. It was also questionable if it would scale well to 450mm wafers, something that TSMC and Intel really want.

Not completely true. You can get one from OWC . You will pay more for it and it is a pain in the butt to do the work but you can replace them. I do remember when working on mac hardware was easy and quick but those days are long gone.

The price has nothing to do with the lack of leverage for the fab. In semiconductors, there has been a massive consolidation of vendors as tools become more and more specialized (and thus far more expensive to design).

For example if you want to buy an immersion ArF lithography tool, you have exactly two vendors to choose from. Both 1 2 of these vendors will charge you tens of millions of dollars for a single tool, and both will make no promises about software upgrades, unless you pay for a service contract.

At the next generation if you want to buy an EUV lithography tool, you have exactly one vendor, with a nice long waiting list (of your competitors) to get a tool. So good luck trying to negotiate on the software patches for the PC attached to it. Also the last quote I heard about for one of these tools was actually over 100 Million USD.

I had the same shock seeing something from the RC journal on slashdot. I am glad they are getting the lab up and running as it was all just proposals when I moved away from Rapid City.

I hope going with ARM is successful for them; maybe enough to get them to try to make something to compete with the Tegra in the mobile space eventually.

Robert McNamara had a good quote about this in the Fog of War. If I remember he listed it as a "rule" for a life in politics.

"Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you."

I always considered the day people stopped using Rubylith to be when we stopped doing layouts "by hand".

I couldn't agree with you more.

I frequently try to talk the more technically inclined high school kids in my family/friends group into seriously thinking about an engineering degree instead of IT or Comp Sci. I got a Computer Engineering degree and initially did some work in the mixed signal design area of emphasis; but finally settled in a career doing the optics for chip fabrication. Having studied engineering fundamentals first, then moving on to how they applied to computing machines has opened up so many more job opportunities than I believe I would have had if I had gone Comp Sci.

I work in the USA for a company that makes chips for Samsung amongst others. Our normal shift is 12 hours on your feet in the fab. (on a compressed schedule, 4 days on 3 days off and then 3 days on and 4 days off, and yes I know China is doing 6/7 days a week as the norm but I also know the quality can/will suffer as we are still cheaper than our outsourced competition for their lack of quality and consistency on a cost per good die metric). Its great money for those of us who work it and many of us sign up for overtime on our days off.

Also more to the point of the article, if you are doing inspections for 12 hours in a row on anything complex, you will suck as an inspector and I would hope Samsung would not accept this as a practice in China (or anywhere for that matter) for the interest of QA for their products but maybe I am asking too much.

I think it might make the world a better place.