This is not the first time that Elon Musk has blasted the foundry industry. While he admired Tesla's partners TSMC and Samsung Foundry, in recent months, he has criticized the foundry industry for slow fab buildout and insufficient capacities, which is slowing down the development of Musk's xAI artificial intelligence initiatives. Musk once mentioned that at some point, Tesla could build its own semiconductor production facility , but given the extreme complexity of such an endeavor, this is something that is unlikely to happen. Furthermore, given the comments made by Musk, it does not look like he had an expert-level understanding of how modern leading-edge semiconductor fabs work.
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Anton Shilov Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
cyrusfox Seems absurd, while its fine while the wafers are contained, what about when you need to do maintenance and open up the tools that are part of that contained clean environment. The dirty envelope will then spill into said environment, and it will take a good deal longer to bring the tool back in defect spec. Its about layers of cleanliness, and wafers are already pretty well contained in a higher cleanroom environment then the general fab, but keeping the fab itself clean helps maintain higher level of cleanliness down the layers. Reply
Notton So, if I'm to understand him, he wants to put the wafers inside an airtight, or dust free box, and move the box around a dirty room? Even if you were to somehow make a box that's perfectly dust free, you'd still have to open it up because EUV isn't going through a pane of glass or plastic covered in grease and dust. So, does he want the box to open up like a pizza box, or an MD disc shutter? Because neither of those are perfectly dust free devices. Reply
vanadiel007 I sometimes wonder why they claim Elon Musk is a genius, considering some of the thing she says… Reply
COLGeek Sounds like the idle ramblings of a bored person. When we see it, I'll believe it. Reply
-Fran- Makes sense from a Capitalist mindset: you lower the long term survability of your work force, so they can't claim retirement and/or benefits if they just drop dead before that age. And if they quit due to health issues or you fire them because the health issues are in the way, you still end up winning as a business owner. Generally, people are stupid and blind enough to allow this because "muh freedoms". Well, natural selection and all of that I guess? Regards. Reply
ezst036 When you have a guy like Elon who throws out a thousand ideas every hour, this is definitely one of the worst. It does sound like more of an off-handed comment and perhaps even a joke though. Fabs are clean rooms. So dirty is not realistic in a clean room environment. That said, I can understand and connect with the idea underlying it though that employees might appreciate a more relaxed environment. I've worked at super-stuffy places before, it gets really old and its also morale-draining. I am not a robot. Having a cheeseburger once a month outside of the actual clean rooms would lighten the mood. Again, it's a stupid idea. It's hard to ignore the employee morale viewpoint though. Reply
George³ https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/ws/640/cpsprodpb/7727/production/_103330503_musk3.jpg.webpBut he also not live healthy? Reply
Bigshrimp Whoever thinks they are and claims that Musk is a genius, is not, quite the opposite. Reply
acprogrammer Notton said: So, if I'm to understand him, he wants to put the wafers inside an airtight, or dust free box, and move the box around a dirty room? Even if you were to somehow make a box that's perfectly dust free, you'd still have to open it up because EUV isn't going through a pane of glass or plastic covered in grease and dust. So, does he want the box to open up like a pizza box, or an MD disc shutter? Because neither of those are perfectly dust free devices. We have those already. They're called FOUPs (Front Opening Unified Pod). The cleanroom is clean, but what's inside those is even cleaner. You still need the cleanroom because at nanometer scale, you don't mess around with cleanliness. Everything matters and keeping stuff clean enough so that yield doesn't suck is already hard. And realistically, I have no idea why he thinks the cleanroom is a big deal. Yes, they're annoying to work in, but that's not where the big money and time sinks are when it comes to building a fab. Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/elon-musk-wants-to-build-a-dirty-fab-that-you-can-smoke-and-eat-cheeseburgers-in-bets-that-tesla-will-turn-the-concept-of-cleanrooms-upside-down#main
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