Brian Potter explains the construction of a semiconductor fab

May 4, 2024 8:57 AM

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab. By Brian Potter of Construction Physics.
posted by russilwvong (8 comments total)

"The history of semiconductor manufacturing is a chronicle of an endless war against these minute effects and their catastrophic impacts. "

Construction physics is an excellent site, and this is an excellent article.!
posted by lalochezia at 9:21 AM on May 4 [2 favorites]

I have been riding my bike out by the site of Samsung's Taylor plant since before ground broke. I remember one day a huge field was cleared and a huge number of prefab buildings—hundreds—were assembled on the site, which were just construction offices and the like.

I rode by there as construction was getting closer to completion and pulled over just to count the cranes on the site. I counted 32.

And of course, this is so much more than just a plant. The roads have been improved. New water lines have been laid for miles. The town of Taylor (population 16,000), which is frankly kind of a shithole, is going to be completely transformed.

I also, coincidentally, work for a company that supplies chip-fabrication equipment to this plant.
posted by adamrice at 11:09 AM on May 4 [6 favorites]

The sensitivity of these things is wild:

When semiconductors were being researched at Bell Labs in the 1940s, mysterious component failures were eventually traced to researchers who had touched copper door knobs; the tiny number of copper atoms that migrated from the door to the workers hands was enough to ruin their work material. Early semiconductor manufacturers found that their processes were influenced by, among other things, the phase of the moon, whether workers had recently visited the bathroom, and female workers’ menstrual cycles.

…

Fabs are typically built away from airports, rail lines, busy highways, and any other significant outside source of vibrations, and the fab supporting facilities themselves must also be designed to eliminate vibrations. (In one case, unacceptable cleanroom floor vibrations were being caused by an exhaust vent 400 feet away from the fab building.)

posted by migurski at 1:30 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]

Wow I had lost track of construction physics since his Katerra articles. So much to catch up on! In the current climate soberly written and informational articles are a precious commodity.
posted by q*ben at 8:01 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]

> migurski: "In one case, unacceptable cleanroom floor vibrations were being caused by an exhaust vent 400 feet away from the fab building."

Oh yeah, this jumped out at me too. Like, if the process is getting bothered by an exhaust fan 400 ft away, does that mean I'd have to cut beans out of my diet if I worked there for fear of a stray fart knocking things off-kilter? Well, after looking up the linked paper, it turns out that: a) it wasn't exactly the fans themselves but actually a huge blast door that was rattling (due to the fans' vibrations) and then reaching a resonant frequency, and b) the vibrations were being transmitted through the ductwork and metal supports (not through the air, which was my first instinct).
posted by mhum at 5:24 PM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Considering that steppers are inscribing features smaller than the wavelength of light with light, I wouldn’t be too surprised if Mars-quakes would affect them.
posted by adamrice at 9:42 PM on May 6

The first half of this article is actually a great introduction to what a computer chip is and how it works. I kind of wish this was covered in school, because it's hard to understand the modern world at all without this kind of basic knowledge. It's not magic. It's art, but very precise and with some exotic materials. Like stencils and masking tape and spray paint and mod podge, but
tiny.

All the elaborate detail about the construction is helpful too. Technology development isn't like evolution. It doesn't just happen. It takes a lot of money and a lot of effort. I feel like people would be less fatalist about technology development, if they understood better the human craft and design decisions being made. Whatever AI threats people are worried about aren't going to just happen on their own. There's all this stuff that goes into designing and then making those GPUs. Conversely, technology isn't going to just automatically save us from anything either. This is what "technology" is. Elaborate networks of tiny lines painted on semiconductors.

It's all kind of fragile, too. Requires a lot of resources to keep operating.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:31 AM on May 7 [1 favorite]

Air travel without oil is hard to imagine, but even more so after reading A Cycle of Misery: The Business of Building Commercial Aircraft.

Air travel going away should be celebrated of course, given air travel helps drive global empire and multi-national corporations, ala Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires by Cesare Marchetti and Jesse H. Ausubel.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:12 PM on May 9 [1 favorite]