How Clean?

 I  was reading this months Wired magazine and the featured article was all about TSMC...now that's a subject that I should know about as I had once estimated the cost for our company to build a Super Fab for TSMC. No we didn't get the job, but I am always looking at articles that mention this company. The first time I estimated a TSMC job was back in the 90's when when they were building a 200,000+ square foot fab in Taiwan. Their declared intent was to build an empty fab, complete with filters and grated floors. Then they were going to rent/lease spaces within the fab to smaller companies that couldn't afford a cleanroom of their own. It sounded brilliant! But we stopped our estimating process when we found out the cost of shipping containers and the cost of shipping them to Taiwan. We found out that you would have to buy the containers and then sell them later.

I stopped thinking about cleanrooms once I got into the "falling down, then Pnuemonia and hospitalization" routine. I stopped thinking about everything back then. This article and the recent number of news articles about TSMC made me curious as to what they were doing. My sister lives in Phoenix and the latest Super Fab in the neighborhood is a forty billion plus project with plans for a another forty billion addition. Intel was once the leader in the industry but had to abandon that role once TSMC grew in size and the TSMC chips became smaller than small. 

Their work force is renowned in the industry.  As motivation to work for TSMC they give all their.  employees a 10% discount at Burger King. Yes, that is it. The important motivator is a chance to work at TSMC and they are dedicated to the company.

Their latest products feature a size of 28 nanometers where a trillion or more switches are engraved on the silicon using extreme ultraviolet light lithography, using water as the lens for the lithograph camera. ASML, a Philips company is close partnered withTSMC. They are located in Holland and if you need a lithography machine that can do that, it will cost close to forty million. As the article says, "it's like etching on an atom" that may be, but what are they etching?

They are etching the circuits that will be used to direct decisions and power for a device. The circuits contain transistors  and a transistor is the equivalent of a 'Tube' just as once seen in old radios. It's also known as a 'Switch' as it becomes a Yes/No decision maker...a 1 or a 0 is what the decision is called most commonly.

 Now Intel is not out of business, or out of the race.they are currently building Super Fabs or upgrading their current fabs and they are located coast to coast. I know of 3 in Arizona and 1 in New Mexico, some in Texas and some in Massachusets. The company I worked and retired from has built most of them and when we would setup a job trailer on site, that trailer might be there for years as we remodeled what we had built. A cash cow...