[Doomsday Economics] your economic system is a piece of shit

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Doomsday Economics] your economic system is a piece of shit

(Thread IKs: skooma512)

90sgamer: Jun 28, 2023; fuck off worms butthole guy!!!

I want to bring attention to the fact that Microsoft promoted a black woman to head of Xbox right before bad news started to drop regarding having to go third party and shutting down beloved studios to cut costs. She just did an interview on Bloomberg that was terrible and you can tell she had no good answers and very little prep so every response was a word salad. This was all done so she could take the fall for Phil Spencer�s insane pigout buying spree over the past few years.

These companies think they are slick but it really bothers me what Xbox did because it�s so blatantly obvious. Sickening

# ? May 10, 2024 03:31

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Jun 7, 2024 19:16

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

cool av posted:

yeah I�m a prompt engineer. my trains are always on time.

# ? May 10, 2024 03:34

PoundSand: Jul 30, 2021; Also proficient with kites

Danann posted:

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/st...MHPZJn72fEk4rvX
Archive Link

IMF being honest about why the US continuously lies about being the land of freedom, milk, and honey.

Is there really an ongoing perception? Or is it just cause of southern border?

Like I get american racists are perpetually concerned than a brown person just appears in the country and is offered better benefits than them, but I doubt the same perception is held by people trying to "illegally" immigrate. Work regs tend to make it so even people employed under the table are using faux ssn that they still pay taxes towards but will never reap the benefits of. You get like all the downsides of america without even the meager safety nets we have.

# ? May 10, 2024 03:38

hailthefish: Oct 24, 2010

Business Gorillas posted:

I used chat gpt today to make a cover letter

A bullshit solution to a bullshit issue

the only ethical use of llms

# ? May 10, 2024 03:41

Scarabrae: Oct 7, 2002

send a worm in to eat up the implant, bing bing bong

# ? May 10, 2024 03:45

OBAMNA PHONE: Aug 7, 2002

CN CREW-VESSEL posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7GUf9wDs9U

This guy is great and reminds me of donoteat back in the Franklin days.

lol if you think anyone in this thread will actually listen to this entire thing

# ? May 10, 2024 03:54

CN CREW-VESSEL: Feb 1, 2024; 敌人磨刀我们也磨刀

90sgamer posted:

I want to bring attention to the fact that Microsoft promoted a black woman to head of Xbox right before bad news started to drop regarding having to go third party and shutting down beloved studios to cut costs. She just did an interview on Bloomberg that was terrible and you can tell she had no good answers and very little prep so every response was a word salad. This was all done so she could take the fall for Phil Spencer�s insane pigout buying spree over the past few years.

These companies think they are slick but it really bothers me what Xbox did because it�s so blatantly obvious. Sickening

This is called the glass cliff or something, isn't it?

# ? May 10, 2024 03:56

triple sulk: Sep 17, 2014

euphronius posted:

maybe the 330 billion spent on Ai would have helped stave off global warming

oh well better luck next time

the best part is it's actively making it worse with astronomical energy consumption that has probably already surpassed all of crypto combined. lol. lmao

# ? May 10, 2024 03:58

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

PoundSand posted:

Is there really an ongoing perception? Or is it just cause of southern border?

Like I get american racists are perpetually concerned than a brown person just appears in the country and is offered better benefits than them, but I doubt the same perception is held by people trying to "illegally" immigrate. Work regs tend to make it so even people employed under the table are using faux ssn that they still pay taxes towards but will never reap the benefits of. You get like all the downsides of america without even the meager safety nets we have.

https://www.kff.org/report-section/understanding-the-u-s-immigrant-experience-the-2023-kff-la-times-survey-of-immigrants-findings/

Yeah

quote:

In Their Own Words: Reasons for Coming to the U.S. from Focus Group Participants

Stories focus group participants told of why they came to the U.S. reflect the survey responses. While many pointed to economic and educational opportunities, some described leaving harsh economic and unsafe conditions in their home countries.

�I came to the U.S. hoping that my children will have better educational opportunity.� � 58-year-old Vietnamese immigrant woman in California

�[My husband] came here, and I followed him. So, he came, and I came with the kids afterwards�so we could have a better life. It�s not easy�we wanted to have�better opportunities for our children, for ourselves.� � 46-year-old Ghanian immigrant woman in New Jersey

�The thing is that there are more opportunities, and the standard of living is much better. We can make ends meet even through manual labor. That is not possible in Vietnam.� � 33-year-old Vietnamese immigrant man in Texas

�Then, my mom had to make a decision because the gangs took control of her place. They started asking for rent, extorting her life. If she didn�t pay the extortion, the rent, they were going to take me, or my siblings, or her. �since I was the oldest, she brought me, making the sacrifice of leaving behind my two siblings.� � 25-year-old Salvadorian immigrant man in California

�Actually, it wasn�t my decision to come. I left when I was 13 years old, fleeing from my country because I had a death threat, along with my eight-year-old sister. I didn�t want to come.� � 20-year-old Honduran immigrant woman in California

�Because of the earthquake, you know, I lost my house, and I wanted to go to a country with more opportunities and I came here.� � 30-year-old Haitian immigrant man in Florida

quote:

In Their Own Words: The Best Thing That Has Come From Moving To The U.S.

In a few words, what is the best thing that has come from you moving to the U.S.?

�Educational opportunities, economic opportunities, political and human rights, housing, food and basic needs, neighborhood safety, lower crime rates�- 28 year old Mexican immigrant woman in Nebraska

�Best education for my kids. Professional job. Healthy environment. Good system. The opportunities everywhere!� � 67-year-old Nepalese immigrant man in Maryland

�Better job, education, and economic opportunities� � 48-year-old Indian immigrant woman in North Carolina

�Education and improved quality of life in terms of obtaining basic needs� � 39-year-old Dominican immigrant woman in New Jersey

�Stability, freedom, better finance[s], having the opportunity to have a family� � 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant man in New York

�Educational and employment opportunities for myself and my children� � 60-year-old Filipino immigrant woman in California

There's a bunch more quote boxes worth, but people really do still think that if they can move here they'll be striking gold eventually.

# ? May 10, 2024 04:00

holefoods: Jan 10, 2022

shrike82 posted:

https://twitter.com/Nash076/status/1788640112252715380

extremely shocked this guy isn�t dead yet honestly

# ? May 10, 2024 04:00

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

CN CREW-VESSEL posted:

This is called the glass cliff or something, isn't it?

are there four balls in the edge of it?

# ? May 10, 2024 04:01

SKULL.GIF: Jan 20, 2017

90sgamer posted:

I want to bring attention to the fact that Microsoft promoted a black woman to head of Xbox right before bad news started to drop regarding having to go third party and shutting down beloved studios to cut costs. She just did an interview on Bloomberg that was terrible and you can tell she had no good answers and very little prep so every response was a word salad. This was all done so she could take the fall for Phil Spencer�s insane pigout buying spree over the past few years.

These companies think they are slick but it really bothers me what Xbox did because it�s so blatantly obvious. Sickening

No. I refuse to feel sorry for a Yalie, Harvard Business School, and McKinsey alumni

Go gently caress yourself.

# ? May 10, 2024 04:10

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

holefoods posted:

extremely shocked this guy isn�t dead yet honestly

*simpsons meme* yet

# ? May 10, 2024 04:20

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

shrike82 posted:

https://twitter.com/Nash076/status/1788640112252715380

RFK Jr has found his VP

# ? May 10, 2024 04:26

Glumwheels: Jan 25, 2003; https://twitter.com/BidenHQ

P&g had an ad I think where they were telling people it was totally ok to run a half load or less in the dishwasher because the machine knows to use less water but yet you can�t use a half pod or less.

# ? May 10, 2024 04:33

Only Kindness: Oct 12, 2016

90sgamer posted:

I want to bring attention to the fact that Microsoft promoted a black woman to head of Xbox right before bad news started to drop regarding having to go third party and shutting down beloved studios to cut costs. She just did an interview on Bloomberg that was terrible and you can tell she had no good answers and very little prep so every response was a word salad. This was all done so she could take the fall for Phil Spencer�s insane pigout buying spree over the past few years.

These companies think they are slick but it really bothers me what Xbox did because it�s so blatantly obvious. Sickening

Leaving aside she's just as terrible as the rest of them, it always astonishes me companies even bother saying anything, let alone embarrassing themselves on e.g. Bloomberg. Just put out a press release / investor blurb saying yeah we shut some studios, this will position us for future growth, move on and shut up. If anything, it just shows these masters of the universe don't know their own business. We already know g*mers won't actually punish them for this (they have no real mechanism to do so: you can't choose to buy or not buy a game that isn't being made), and will happily gobble up their poo poo and demand even more poo poo, no matter what they do, so investors - the only people that really matter - should be happy, no?

# ? May 10, 2024 04:39

Tempora Mutantur: Feb 22, 2005

comedyblissoption posted:

110% price increase in 4 years

number is absolutely tumescent with value

# ? May 10, 2024 04:39

skaboomizzy: Nov 12, 2003; There is nothing I want to be. There is nothing I want to do.
I don't even have an image of what I want to be. I have nothing. All that exists is zero.

we're watching the world's dumbest billionaire do the "it's not rocket science, it's just brain surgery, how hard could it be?" bit in real life

what a time to be alive (until we aren't)

# ? May 10, 2024 04:43

CN CREW-VESSEL: Feb 1, 2024; 敌人磨刀我们也磨刀

Real hurthling! posted:

are there four balls in the edge of it?

No balls, that's the whole point.

# ? May 10, 2024 04:45

i vomit kittens: Apr 25, 2019

shrike82 posted:

https://twitter.com/Nash076/status/1788640112252715380

this had already happened by the time they released the video of the guy playing chess, in which they did not mention it at all lol

# ? May 10, 2024 04:47

no lube so what: Apr 11, 2021

Only Kindness posted:

Leaving aside she's just as terrible as the rest of them, it always astonishes me companies even bother saying anything, let alone embarrassing themselves on e.g. Bloomberg. Just put out a press release / investor blurb saying yeah we shut some studios, this will position us for future growth, move on and shut up. If anything, it just shows these masters of the universe don't know their own business. We already know g*mers won't actually punish them for this (they have no real mechanism to do so: you can't choose to buy or not buy a game that isn't being made), and will happily gobble up their poo poo and demand even more poo poo, no matter what they do, so investors - the only people that really matter - should be happy, no?

maybe their is a weird threat if they don't do the business show circuit the stations will talk poo poo?

but yeah, drop a press release at 5pm on a Friday and don't take questions until the quarterly business call and have a dead souled vulture be prepped for all the analyst usuall questions. the institutional money is not buying the stock based on an interview but they sure as hell might sell it

# ? May 10, 2024 04:47

Nocturtle: Mar 17, 2007

Father Wendigo posted:

FED'S DALY: No more sunrises until the streets run red with the blood of the unemployed.

https://twitter.com/financialjuice/status/1788640909107609872?t=QWWOENPAq8muoLl-ADE3_Q&s=19

It's helpful that Federal Reserve officials explicitly state that they raise rates with the express purpose of putting people out of work, and rates aren't going down until that happens. Here's a Yahoo Finance article with slightly more detail, though I haven't found any kind of transcript of Daly's remarks:

quote:

Fed's Daly favors waiting to gain confidence that inflation is dropping
Jennifer Schonberger�Senior Reporter
Thu, May 9, 2024, 2:51 PM EDT3 min read

San Francisco Fed president Mary Daly said uncertainty about the inflation outlook has increased and made it difficult to make projections for policy until the central bank gets more clarity.
...
Instead Daly outlined two possible scenarios for the path of interest rates. One has inflation resuming its downward trajectory with a cooling job market, and in that case lowering rates would be appropriate.

The other scenario has inflation continuing to stall out as it has during the first three months of this year. If that happens, it would not be appropriate to cut rates unless the job market falters, she said.
...

It's strange Federal Reserve officials can go on national news, repeatedly over several months, to state they're trying hard to put people out of work via rate hikes and yet many people (certain family members lol) still assert that people are unemployed by choice and so don't deserve sympathy. A bit like Cobra Commander going on prime time to reveal their plan to turn people into snakes and everyone is like no those people are turning into snakes because they're LAZY.

# ? May 10, 2024 04:51

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

Glumwheels posted:

P&g had an ad I think where they were telling people it was totally ok to run a half load or less in the dishwasher because the machine knows to use less water but yet you can�t use a half pod or less.

why the hell are you using pods and not regular rear end detergent?

# ? May 10, 2024 04:51

George H.W. Cunt: Oct 6, 2010

Powder is king. little sprinkle for pre wash and a table spoon at most in the main bit and you�re golden. lol pods. you�re poor because you use pods

# ? May 10, 2024 04:59

Xaris: Jul 25, 2006; Lucky there's a family guy
Lucky there's a man who positively can do
All the things that make us
Laugh and cry

Shipon posted:

why the hell are you using pods and not regular rear end detergent?

costco only sells pods and if someone is a six figgie computergoon, i presume they only shop there and they simply just buy whatever costco sells (aka higher margin $$$ products)

# ? May 10, 2024 04:59

Nitevision: Oct 5, 2004; Your Friendly FYAD Helper
Ask Me For FYAD Help
Another Reason To Talk To Me Is To Hangout

OBAMNA PHONE posted:

lol if you think anyone in this thread will actually listen to this entire thing

I did bitch. And I learned a thing or two :tipshat:

# ? May 10, 2024 05:03

Glumwheels: Jan 25, 2003; https://twitter.com/BidenHQ

Xaris posted:

costco only sells pods and if someone is a six figgie computergoon, i presume they only shop there and they simply just buy whatever costco sells (aka higher margin $$$ products)

I�m not a computer goon and Costco sells cascade gel but also Kirkland brand pods. I buy cascade pods only on sale and I only run my washer when it�s completely full.

# ? May 10, 2024 05:06

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

Glumwheels posted:

I�m not a computer goon and Costco sells cascade gel but also Kirkland brand pods. I buy cascade pods only on sale and I only run my washer when it�s completely full.

i dont do that

# ? May 10, 2024 05:13

Feral Integral: Jun 6, 2006; YOSPOS

Justin Tyme posted:

It will help u dummy. When it's all said and done we can ask the AI how to stave off global warming. It'll say "consume less"

Oops looks like the ai broke again

# ? May 10, 2024 05:14

Shipon: Nov 7, 2005

goons talk about how microplastics are ruining the world and then use loving detergent pods lol

# ? May 10, 2024 05:15

Glumwheels: Jan 25, 2003; https://twitter.com/BidenHQ

Honestly that�s a really good point, I�m going to switch to gel.

# ? May 10, 2024 05:23

silicone thrills: Jan 9, 2008; I paint things

Shipon posted:

goons talk about how microplastics are ruining the world and then use loving detergent pods lol

I mean at this point I dont know how you avoid them. Cant even brush your loving teeth with out getting microplastic

Gonna hunt down some bamboo handle boar hair tooth brushes or something?

# ? May 10, 2024 05:25

Rectal Death Alert: Apr 2, 2021

https://x.com/business/status/1788607992780198316

(Non-paywalled link)
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/amazon-fees-sellers-likened-kick-163120031.html

quote:

Duncan Freer, who sells weighted blankets and sleep masks on Amazon, expects his profit margin to slide to 8% from 20% as a result of the new fees. One, imposed in March, charges a levy on shipments sent to the company�s fulfillment centers. That will drive the cost of shipping two pallets of Freer�s products to Amazon to more than $800, up four-fold from what it cost him in October, he said. Amazon reduced the cost of fulfilling each customer order, but Freer said it only partially offsets the new fees.

The people buying random bullshit from Temu/Aliexpress and having it sent to Amazon warehouses so they can charge 10x markups might be getting hosed and I'm here for it

# ? May 10, 2024 05:40

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Can't post for 22 hours!

Someone put it that the mid state of enshittification is that after you've reoriented your operation around scamming your customers, you start scamming your own partners and clients. This comes right before you start flat out looting the company itself, of course.

# ? May 10, 2024 06:07

anime was right: Jun 27, 2008; death is certain
keep yr cool

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Someone put it that the mid state of enshittification is that after you've reoriented your operation around scamming your customers, you start scamming your own partners and clients. This comes right before you start flat out looting the company itself, of course.

theyve already been scamming the partners and clients with amazon. truck drivers, merchants, etc. why do you think so many big name brands actively avoid amazon now and its mostly dropselling overseas poo poo

# ? May 10, 2024 06:18

Shear Modulus: Jun 9, 2010

Nocturtle posted:

It's helpful that Federal Reserve officials explicitly state that they raise rates with the express purpose of putting people out of work, and rates aren't going down until that happens. Here's a Yahoo Finance article with slightly more detail, though I haven't found any kind of transcript of Daly's remarks:

It's strange Federal Reserve officials can go on national news, repeatedly over several months, to state they're trying hard to put people out of work via rate hikes and yet many people (certain family members lol) still assert that people are unemployed by choice and so don't deserve sympathy. A bit like Cobra Commander going on prime time to reveal their plan to turn people into snakes and everyone is like no those people are turning into snakes because they're LAZY.

lol yeah it owns that the government just tells people now that its job is to crush the working class

# ? May 10, 2024 06:55

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab

quote:

...

In the late 60s and early 70s, a semiconductor fabrication facility (or �fab�) cost on the order of $4 million (~$31 million in 2024 dollars). Today, a modern fab can cost $10-$20 billion or more. Intel is building a pair of fabs in Arizona which are projected to cost $15 billion apiece, and Samsung�s fab in Taylor, Texas is projected to cost $25 billion.

These enormous costs are ultimately due to the same factor that has steadily driven down the cost of semiconductors: Moore�s Law, the observation that the number of components on an integrated circuit tends to double every two years. (There is a Moore�s Second Law, also known as Rock�s Law, which posits that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.) The smaller semiconductor components get, the more difficult it is to create the conditions to manufacture them.

...

On its own, a large number of process steps wouldn�t require $20 billion manufacturing facilities. After all, many complex manufactured goods require as many or more steps to produce. An early 20th century watch, for instance, consisted of 150 parts that required over 3700 operations to produce.

But when these process steps are being used to make components whose size is measured in the billionths of a meter, manufacturing complexity is enormously magnified. With most manufacturing processes, even those using precision methods to produce interchangeable parts, there is a fair degree of tolerance in the process. If a part is a fraction of a millimeter too long or too short, it will still fit. If the impurity content of a metal is a tiny bit too high, the metal can still be used. If a process runs slightly too fast or too slow, the output is still usable.

In semiconductor manufacturing, allowable tolerances are whittled away to almost nothing. Making transistors a few nanometers across requires processes that are hundreds of thousands of times more accurate than conventional manufacturing. The tiniest rogue particle can short out a connection and destroy an entire chip. A few atoms in the wrong place can cause a process step to fail. Imperceptibly small amounts of impurities can irreparably damage materials.

The history of semiconductor manufacturing is a chronicle of an endless war against these minute effects and their catastrophic impacts. Even getting semiconductor devices to work at all required paying extremely close attention to chemical concentrations and rogue impurities. 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.

And as semiconductor features have gotten smaller, the problem has only gotten more difficult. As transistors shrank, Intel found that even the most innocuous equipment change � using a slightly longer pipe or cable, for instance � could cause process disruptions to new fabs and cause months or years of lower yields. To combat this, Intel instituted a process known as Copy EXACTLY! New fabs would be identical to existing fabs to the extent possible, right down to the color and brand of the paint on the walls.

A modern semiconductor fab must thus create a world of incredible precision and predictability. Every possible effect that might disrupt the manufacturing process, no matter how small, must be screened off, any subtle deviation hunted down and eliminated. And this control must be maintained in a mass production environment, where hundreds of thousands of wafers and millions of individual chips (each one with billions of transistors) are produced each year.

The structure of a fab

To create this environment, a modern semiconductor fab typically consists of four levels. The heart of the fab is the cleanroom level; the factory floor where the fabrication process actually takes place. Below the cleanroom is the sub-fab, one or more levels (typically two) that contain the ducts, piping, wiring, and equipment needed to support the cleanroom operations. And above the cleanroom level is an interstitial space with fans and filters used for recirculating air into the cleanroom below.

The cleanroom level contains the process tools: the individual pieces of equipment that perform the various operations discussed above. Tools range from lithography machines (such as ASML�s EUV machines), to chemical vapor deposition machines, to ion implanters, to �wet benches� for cleaning and etching, and so on. These machines are made by a small handful of specialty manufacturers such as ASML, Lam Research, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron, and are incredibly expensive. Major process machines can cost $5-$10 million, and some can cost upwards of $100 million. ASML�s cutting edge photolithography machines cost nearly $400 million.

These tools might perform one specific process step (such as furnaces for wafer heating) or integrate several individual process steps. Applied Materials, for instance, makes machines which incorporate multiple layering and surface preparation steps. To produce a large number of wafers (a modern microprocessor or �logic� fab might produce 40 to 50,000 wafers a month; a fab producing memory might produce 120,000), a large number of tools are required, 1,000 or more.

Process tools will be clustered together by type; this allows the tools to share requirements for things like chemical and gas lines (it�s easier to run piping if all the demand for a certain chemical is in one place), and it makes it possible to isolate certain contaminants. Since copper impurities can have catastrophic effects on semiconductor behavior, parts of the process that use copper (such as the tools depositing microscopic copper wiring) might be isolated from other parts of the fab. HVAC systems will similarly be isolated between different process zones. To minimize interference from things like columns or load-bearing walls, the roof of the fab is typically supported by large, long-spanning trusses which allow the cleanroom space to be as open as possible.

The cleanroom is designed to minimize contamination. Semiconductor fabs are typically built with Class 10 or Class 100 cleanrooms, meaning there can be a maximum of 10 or 100 particles 0.5 microns or larger in each cubic foot of air. By comparison, an ordinary house has on the order of 500,000 particles per cubic foot of air, and a surgical operating room will have about 100,000.) To achieve this, large air handling units force air down through HEPA or ULPA filters in the cleanroom ceiling. The air is pulled down through the floor into the sub-fab, then recirculated up through the ceiling over and over again.

To prevent particles outside the cleanroom from entering, the cleanroom is kept at positive pressure relative to the outside. Keeping the air at the level of cleanliness required means the air is being changed hundreds of times per hour, compared to the 5-10 times per hour in a typical office building. This volume of air flow, combined with the size of semiconductor cleanrooms (which might be 500,000-1M square feet or more on large fabs), means that fab HVAC systems are enormous.

In addition to these large HVAC systems, the materials and process tools used in the cleanroom need to be specially designed not to emit particles. To minimize contamination from people inside the cleanroom, workers don bunny suits in a special gowning area before entering, and go through a special cleaning procedure.

As semiconductor features shrank, cleanroom requirements became more stringent. In the 1980s fab cleanrooms were being built to Class 1000 standards, but by the 1990s, some manufacturers were building incredibly clean Class 1 cleanrooms (just one 0.5 micron particle per cubic foot of air). Because achieving this level of cleanliness is costly, manufacturers have adopted a strategy of isolating the wafers from the rest of the cleanroom. Wafers are transported between process tools in sealed pods called FOUPs (front opening unified pods), and the process tool itself is enclosed and sealed off. This TSMC fab, for instance, was built with a Class 100 cleanroom, but the wafers themselves are handled inside Class 0.1 �mini-environments.� By adopting the mini-environment strategy, fabs have been able remove even more impurities from the air without having to purify the millions of cubic feet of air in the cleanroom.

...

But rogue particles aren�t the only thing that can disrupt the manufacturing process, and every part of the fab, from the cleanroom down to the foundation, must be designed to minimize outside interference. The extreme precision required means process tools are extremely sensitive to vibration (even loud noises can negatively affect the manufacturing process), and fabs are designed to minimize it. 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.) This extreme vibration sensitivity is exacerbated by the enormous amount of potentially vibration-generating machinery and equipment in a fab such as motors, pumps, HVAC systems, and even fluid flow in pipes. Fabs must limit vibrations to several orders of magnitude below the threshold of perception, while simultaneously absorbing 100 times the mechanical energy and 50 times the air flow as a conventional building.

To minimize vibrations, the floor of the cleanroom is typically built as a deep concrete waffle slab two to four feet thick, supported by closely spaced columns to make it as stiff as possible. Above the slab is a raised metal flooring which allows pipes and cables to be routed below it, and allows process tools to be placed on separate supporting pedestals to prevent worker footsteps from causing vibrations. Some extremely sensitive equipment, such as lithography tools, might require even more stringent measures like active vibration dampers that can sense and cancel out any rogue vibrations. In some cases a fab might be built with a structural isolation break to keep the cleanroom floor physically separated from the rest of the building and any vibrations it might induce.

Preventing vibration also means, ideally, placing your fab in a seismically inactive area. When this isn�t possible (such as in Taiwan or Japan), other measures might be taken, such as adding earthquake dampers or using special foundations that isolate the building from the surrounding soil.

In addition to particles and vibrations, there are numerous other sources of interference a fab is designed to eliminate. To prevent light from accidently exposing photoresist, lithography areas often use special yellow lights that won�t expose the chemicals. Anti-static materials must be used for things like flooring to prevent the buildup of static electricity. Tools are sensitive to electromagnetic interference (even the fields from nearby power lines might cause equipment disruption), and tools must be shielded and EMF sources minimized. Fabs have backup generators and uninterruptible power supplies in case of power outages, and equipment must be designed to handle the voltage variations in utility electricity supply. (Prior to design standards that required this, it was apparently common for utility voltage variations to cause semiconductor manufacturing issues.) Temperature and humidity in the cleanroom must be maintained in a narrow range, which places further burden on the HVAC system. A fab also may be designed to be radiofrequency (RF) shielded for security purposes.

Beneath the carefully controlled conditions of the cleanroom lies the sub-fab: one or more levels of equipment needed to support the operations of the cleanroom. An EUV lithography machine, for instance, is a complex piece of equipment the size of a truck, but the cleanroom tool is only a portion of the total equipment required. Beneath the cleanroom lies the enormous CO2 laser that drives the EUV system, and the pumps required to create the vacuum within the process chamber. Many other process tools, such as ion implanters and sputtering machines, also require a vacuum, and a large fab may have thousands of vacuum pumps in the sub-fab.

...

The sub-fab also contains the exhaust systems for handling the various byproducts generated by the process tools. To prevent byproducts (particularly ammonia) from reacting with each other, several separate exhaust systems must be used. Many of the processes require abatement equipment (which will burn off any harmful byproducts) or scrubbers to remove hazardous material. This equipment might be mounted to the process tool itself, or be part of a centralized exhaust system.

In addition to chemical handling and exhaust equipment, the sub-fab contains electrical boxes, transformers, fans, air handlers, chillers, RF generators, heat exchangers, and all the other equipment needed to keep the fab tools operating. Sub-fabs are often divided into a �clean� sub-fab (where the air from the cleanroom recirculates), and a separate �dirty� or utility sub-fab below that. And while the level of control can be relaxed somewhat in the sub-fab (workers don�t need to wear bunny suits in it), variations and potential disruptions must still be minimized. Even slight changes in voltage, pressure, or vibration, or the smallest particle emitted by the piping, can negatively affect the manufacturing process.

Achieving this means that sub-fab equipment must be manufactured with much more stringent requirements and much tighter tolerances than in conventional manufacturing. Things like pipes, ducts, pumps, and other material handling equipment are stainless steel and teflon-coated. The interior of pipes must be electropolished to prevent particles from being emitted or providing places for contaminants to accumulate, and pipes must be joined using special orbital welding methods to prevent leaks or contamination. Often sub-fab equipment and material must itself be manufactured in a cleanroom using specialized manufacturing procedures, and transported to the jobsite double-wrapped in plastic bags to prevent contamination during transport. All chemical and gas piping and handling systems must be designed to deliver a smooth, uninterrupted flow of material; even slight variations in pressure can have �disastrous� effects on the production process.

Outside of the sub-fab, many other facilities are required to support cleanroom operations. Moving heavy process tools into the cleanroom requires industrial elevators that can lift tens of thousands of pounds. A fab uses nitrogen and oxygen in such large amounts (a large logic fab might use 50,000 cubic meters of nitrogen every hour) that fabs will often have air separation plants on-site that produce gasses like nitrogen, oxygen and argon. Similarly, a fab will use very large amounts of ultrapure water for wafer cleaning and CMP, along with the regular water for things like chillers for process cooling. A large fab can use millions of gallons of ultrapure water a day, as much as a town of 50,000 people, and producing it requires its own specialized plant. As with other aspects of the fab, the requirements for ultrapure water have gotten more stringent as features have shrunk. Other fab support equipment includes boilers, chillers, emergency generators, and wastewater treatment.

All this equipment and processes consume large amounts of energy. A large fab might demand 100 megawatts of energy, or 10% of the capacity of a large nuclear reactor. Most of this energy is used by the process tools, the HVAC system and other heating/cooling systems. The demands for power and water are severe enough that some fabs have been canceled or relocated when local utilities can�t guarantee supply. And to ensure the proper conditions are maintained in the fab, tens of thousands of sensors are used for monitoring things like particle levels, pressures, and impurity levels.

Constructing a fab

A large fab will have hundreds of thousands of square feet of cleanroom, and the facility might be spread over hundreds of acres. Building it requires tens of thousands of tons of structural steel, and hundreds of thousands of yards of concrete. Intel boasts that its fabs use twice the concrete as the Burj Khalifa, and five times the metal used in the Eiffel Tower.

Putting this material in place at the necessary level of precision requires thousands of specially trained construction workers. Intel�s new fab in Magdeburg is expected to require over 9,300 workers at its peak, and TSMC�s new fab being built in Arizona is using 12,000. Workers must follow specially-designed �clean construction� protocols to keep materials clean, minimize particle intrusion and to ensure the cleanroom can operate successfully when it's completed. In some cases this has meant things like using equipment to �eat� welding smoke, and painting the edges of anything cut on-site with epoxy paint to prevent particle emissions. To meet the level of cleanliness and precision required, piping and mechanical equipment might be prefabricated off-site and then delivered and installed. To help clarify requirements, SEMI, a semiconductor industry association, publishes numerous standards and design guides on various aspects of facility design and equipment production.

Once the fab is complete to the point where positive pressure can be maintained in the cleanroom (known as �blow down�), the process tooling can be installed. Equipment might arrive in many separate pieces and need a long and careful assembly process � one of ASML�s advanced EUV machines �ships in 40 freight containers, spread over 20 trucks and three cargo planes.� Tools must be handled carefully: the sensitivity of production tools means that a dropped or bumped piece of equipment can result in delays and millions of dollars of repair. And once tooling is installed, it might take six months to a year of ramp up before the fab is hitting acceptable process yields.

Despite their size and complexity, fabs are built surprisingly quickly, around two to four years on average. This is not all that different from other large commercial building projects, and far faster than some other tightly controlled process facilities, like nuclear power plants.

In the US, however, fabs are built slower than elsewhere in the world. Fab construction time in the US has increased from just over 650 days on average in the 1990s to over 900 days on average in the 2010s, compared to around 600-700 days in Asian countries, in part because of increasingly stringent environmental review processes. US fabs are also more expensive to build than in other parts of the world, with estimates ranging from 30% more expensive (per Intel) to up to four times as expensive (per TSMC).4

Cost breakdown of a fab

It's not surprising that building fabs is so expensive: they�re large, complicated, and have extremely stringent performance requirements. But the fab exists to provide the necessary environment for the thousands of process tools to function, and it's these tools that are by far the most expensive part of building a new fab. Roughly 70-80% of the cost of a new fab will be the process tools that go in it. (One side effect of this is that upgrading an existing fab to use a more advanced process node can cost an appreciable fraction of the cost of a totally new fab.)

The equipment proportion of fab cost has risen over time. DRAM fabs in the mid-1980s, for instance, were roughly equally split between facilities and equipment cost, but by the late 1990s equipment made up the vast majority of the cost.

For the cost of construction, we see a somewhat similar breakdown as the cost of single family homes, with line items for the structure, architectural finishes, sitework and landscaping, and services and mechanical systems. The main difference is that a fab has a much higher fraction of mechanical, electrical and other services. Things like ultrapure water facilities, multiple exhaust systems, and enormous HVAC needs mean that services make up close to 2/3rds of the cost of a new fab, compared to less than 20% of the cost in a single family home.

For the cost of equipment, the largest expense will typically be the lithography machines followed by equipment for deposition and cleaning and etching. The cost of lithography machines is often estimated as 20% of the cost of a new fab, which means that lithography tools can cost as much as the entire fab facility itself.

As time has gone on and transistors have shrunk, the cost to build a fab has risen. For modern semiconductor fabs, each new process node increases fab cost by about 30%. There are two main drivers of this increase. One is that more advanced process nodes require more expensive equipment. ASML�s EUV lithography machines, for instance, are far more expensive than the deep ultraviolet machines that they replaced. The second main cost driver is that as transistors continue to shrink, more masks and process steps are required to manufacture them. Connecting transistors together requires more layers of metal wires, and FinFETS (transistors made from �fins� that project up from the wafer�s surface) require more layering steps than the simpler transistors they replaced. (EUV, however, temporarily reversed this trend, as it made it possible to do in one mask what previously took two or more, and thus reduced the number of process steps.) More layers and more process steps means more equipment: if product A has twice the manufacturing steps as product B, it will require twice as much equipment to produce if the output level is to remain constant.

But there are also other cost drivers beyond these two factors. As semiconductor features have gotten smaller, the silicon wafers used to produce them have gotten larger. Chips were produced on 50 mm wafers in the 1970s, but today�s leading-edge fabs use much larger 300 mm wafers (a transition to 450mm wafers was planned but never executed), and larger wafers tend to require more expensive equipment. The switch to 300 mm wafers, for instance, necessitated much greater use of automated material handling equipment, as the wafers were too heavy to carry around in FOUPs by hand. These handling systems, in turn, required larger structures with taller cleanroom ceilings.

The ever-increasing cost of fabs has created a shift in the structure of the semiconductor industry. When fabs were cheaper to build, any chip producer could afford to have their own fabs. But as fab costs increased, it became more and more burdensome for manufacturers to operate cutting edge manufacturing facilities due to the high costs, and fewer manufacturers had the production volume to spread those costs over. The �efficient scale� of a 150 mm wafer fab is around 10,000 wafers a month, but for a 300 mm logic wafer fab, that jumps to 40,000 wafers. (And memory wafer fabs will be even larger, at 120,000 wafers per month. Thus only a very small number of companies (currently TSMC, Samsung, and Intel) attempt to operate leading-edge nodes, and the industry has shifted to a �fabless� model where companies like Apple and Nvidia design their chips but have them manufactured by �foundries� like TSMC. By pooling the orders of many different chip companies, the foundries can achieve the scale necessary to afford cutting edge fabs.

Conclusion

The enormous expense of a modern semiconductor fab boils down to the intersection of two things. One is that semiconductor fabs are mass production factories, with modern �gigafabs� producing hundreds of millions of chips per year, each chip containing billions of transistors.5 The second is that producing semiconductors requires almost unfathomable levels of precision. Manipulating huge volumes of matter on the atomic level, repeatedly and reliably, 24 hours a day 365 days a year, is an enormously expensive undertaking.

# ? May 10, 2024 07:27

CN CREW-VESSEL: Feb 1, 2024; 敌人磨刀我们也磨刀

The Russians simply used a broom to sweep up the pencil shavings.

# ? May 10, 2024 07:40

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Can't post for 22 hours!

Neoliberals are aghast that it actually takes time, effort and resources to build things.

# ? May 10, 2024 07:57

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 19:16

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

quote:

A large fab can use millions of gallons of ultrapure water a day, as much as a town of 50,000 people,

ah yeah, thats why you build them in arizona and texas

# ? May 10, 2024 08:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Doomsday Economics] your economic system is a piece of shit

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