Comment by andsoitis
13 hours ago
> “Building advanced chip manufacturing is extremely hard,” Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, said at a TSMC event on Thursday.
Perhaps. But if TSMC, Samsung, Intel, GlobalFoundries, SK Hynix, SMIC, and UMC can all do it, it isn't THAT esoteric.
Lol. I assume you’re being facetious. But those companies have all been at it for decades.
Are any of them making compostable sustainable chips out of graphene or carbon nanotubes yet though?
They all compete for Silicon (SiO2) and P and B and Copper (Cu) and Neon (Ne), and PFAS for photoresist masks.
Graphene can be made from CO2 and unsorted plastics, though graphene is typically manufactured from imported graphite FWIU.
Traditional nanolithography works on silicon carbide.
FET nano transistors can be patterned into graphene and other forms of carbon.
Graphene oxide and Carbon epoxide are probably better substrates than doped Silicon.
The work functions of graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes are different enough for reduced graphene oxide to be the substrate for carbon-based integrated electronic, phononic, and photonic computing chips.
Alternate semiconductor materials (Graphene, SiC) could circumvent some of the expensive steps required for Si, but not all. Here's a good article about the unimaginably high purity standards for the water used in the industry:
https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-purest-water-in-the-world
The average fab uses about 2,000 gallons of ultrapure water each minute, 2-3 million gallons each day.
Pipes and tubing are constantly shedding particles into flowing water - with random bursts that drive everyone crazy.
Once the killer particle size limit ratcheted down to 20 nanometers - a limit we hit roughly about ten years ago - engineers realized that there existed no detection tool for consistently detecting sub-10 nanometer particles in low quantities.
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Supposedly, Taiwan based TSMC employees are always on call, and they'll get out of bed during the night to answer the call and go to work. I read that a while back... but it makes sense. Extreme work ethic and extreme competence.