Comment on TSMC to make advanced 3nm chips in Japan
TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
How come another East Asian country? Why does literally no other country want to make microchips?
Another factor here is that to make the most advanced chips, you need something called eleven 9 silicon. That’s silicon that’s 99.999999999% pure.
We can only artificially manufacture up to nine 9 silicon.
Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.
That’s why the US gets to say who can even attempt to manufacture advanced chips.
Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.
What
Silicon wafer production just started with metallurgical grade quartzite and then chemically processed into high purity. The input material is usually around 98% purity.
wired.com/…/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-si…
As I said, we can make nine 9 silicon. But not eleven 9. China makes billions of nine 9 silicon chips per year. But they can’t make eleven 9. Everyone is trying to create lab made eleven 9, it might not be possible. The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.
So yeah, we’ve not succeeded in recreating that.
wired.com/…/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-si…
As I said, we can make nine 9 silicon. But not eleven 9. China makes billions of nine 9 silicon chips per year. But they can’t make eleven 9. Everyone is trying to create lab made eleven 9, it might not be possible. The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.
So yeah, we’ve not succeeded in recreating that.
That’s not what is in the article you linked.
The very best Spruce Pine quartz, however, has an open crystalline structure, which means that hydrofluoric acid can be injected right into the crystal molecules to dissolve any lingering traces of feldspar or iron, taking the purity up another notch. Technicians take it one step further by reacting the quartz with chlorine or hydrochloric acid at high temperatures, then putting it through one or two more trade‑secret steps of physical and chemical processing.
The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip‑top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO , there are only 80 molecules of impurities. Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.
You wrote
The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.
From the article:
It took some 100 million years for the deeply buried molten rock to cool down and crystallize. Thanks to the depth at which it was buried and to the lack of water where all this was happening, the pegmatites formed almost without impurities. Generally speaking, the pegmatites are about 65 percent feldspar, 25 percent quartz, 8 percent mica, and the rest traces of other minerals.
The quartz they produce has a structure that makes it easier to clean so, when making the quartz crucibles for manufacturing silicon wafers it is the best choice. But the purity isn’t eleven 9s, the highest quality is 99.9992% purity.
Silicon wafers are made out of even more pure silicon (9n), which is melted in the nearly pure quartz crucibles. The Spruce Pine quartz is for making the crucibles, not making the wafers.
Drugs are bad mkay?
halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 1 day ago
Oh they want to… There are quite a few chip fabs around the world… there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.
Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.
And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
jaxxed@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t understand why there aren’t more EU fabs, as the EUV machines are made there.
verdi@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 1 day ago
We had global foundries, among a myriad of other fabs. We have unions and labour laws, that’s bad for margins and CEO pay, we lost bleeding edge nodes due to corporate greed and US intervention.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
GlobalFoundries is still in Dresden, but the smallest process they have there is 12nm. They’re just not at the forefront anymore and focus on other market segments.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
Building the machines and running them are two different skillsets. Like building a race car vs driving one.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
TSMC is building in Europe too, specifically in Dresden, Germany, but it’s afaik a 20nm fab mostly for automotive chips.