Semiconductor Manufacturing – Part 2

2024-04-14 —Categories: Manufacturing, Microfabrication, Semiconductors

Semiconductor Manufacturing – Part 2

The post on Processors & Microfabrication was a brief but helpful refresher on the current state of the art in microfabrication. I have found some (more current) interesting videos on chipmaking this past week. After reviewing an introduction to manufacturing, I found myself wondering which area of manufacturing would be interesting to me (one of the chapters had a question like that). It hit me that fabs are the only manufacturing industry that seem really intriguing at this point (perhaps based on my background in computer science). Therefore, I have been trying to get up to speed with what’s happening in semiconductor manufacturing.

The first video on chipmaking in TX gave me a good sense of how many companies are in this space. Learning that the integrated circuit was invented at Texas Instruments leaves me surprised at how little I know about the history of chips. Some of the companies manufacturing chips in TX are Samsung, Texas Instruments, Infineon, Global Wafers, NXP, and Applied Materials. TI mentions their Power management solutions as part of the vast reach of their products. The video highlights the importance of space, power, and water.

How Texas Became The American Chipmaking Hub

Micron is the focus of the following video. It has a fascinating history, having been founded in the basement of a dental office in Boise, ID. Something that stands out to me in the document showing 2.1 million common shares when Micron went public in 1984 is the now infamous Lehman Brothers. It’s interesting seeing the distribution of market share across memory manufacters: Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron sharing about 94% of market share. The rest is split into slivers taken by Winbond, PSMC (powerchip.com), CXMT, and others. I haven’t paid much attention to the memory industry, so HBM3E | Micron Technology Inc. is new to me. I was also surprised to learn that the cost of power is lower in the US than in Asia. How cool is it that Micron also runs a chip camp?

Micron HBM3E 8-high 24GB will ship in NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs starting in the second calendar quarter 2024.
HBM3E | Micron Technology Inc.

The next video is yet another overview of semiconductor manufacturing. One of the key takeaways for me is that Taiwan leads not just in logic (CPUs, GPUs, etc) but also in memory, courtesy of Micron! 25% of Micron employees are in Taiwan, producing 65% of Micron’s DRAM!