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Does anybody have any questions about working in a semiconductor fab is like? Is there a market for writing up an effortpost on how semiconductor manufacturing equipment works? I met a handful of techy people this weekend who were fascinated by it and asked non-stop questions, so I figured there may be some interest here.
I'd really like to hear about the day to day procedures, clean room process and whatnot. And an overview of stuff like how new your machines are, what's needed to switch to making different chips, etc
Daily work varies wildly. My title is equipment engineer, also known as tool owner (equipment is interchangeable with tools), so I'm responsible for making sure certain pieces of equipment (about 25 in total, which is a decent amount of anybody) in the fab are running properly. We also have 24/7 equipment technicians that will fix the tools. As my old boss described it, my job is to make sure the tools don't stop working, while the technicians want to get them working again if they're broken. When they're all working well or the techs are handling it themselves, I work on self-conceived projects to make them run better, faster, or longer. The manufacturing environment can be a bit brutal since I'm technically on call 24/7 for issues the technicians can't handle or aren't involved in, which requires the occasional weekend laptop log-in.
So what are some things I've done over the past few weeks? (Apologies for the vagueness)
Cleanroom protocol is surprisingly lax compared to cutting-edge fabs. There's no air shower to remove particles from the bunny suit, nobody freaking out that your nose is out, and plenty of dirty-ish parts and hand tools lying around all over the place. This is allowed because a) wafers are almost always contained in their own mini environments, whether it's inside the tool or inside their carrier (called a FOUP and pronounced foo-p), and b) our technology node size is a bit larger and a few particles here and there isn't catastrophic.
You'd be surprised how old our equipment is. Semi equipment is notoriously expensive, so when you combine that with a company that is notoriously cheap and processes that don't require the best equipment on the market you get some old equipment that we're just forced to take care of. Plus if ain't broke, don't buy a new one. A few of my tools are almost 20 years old now, and Theseus doesn't own them—many still have original parts on them! Thankfully the OEM still does a decent job of a) offering spare parts to support part failures, and b) offers replacement parts for obsolete parts. My newest tool was manufactured in 2019. The fab regularly installs new tools as we remove old ones and ramp our production levels.
Preventive maintenance is critical to ensuring parts on the tool last a long time (like how your engine lasts as long as your oil) and preventing product from scrapping because the process' tolerances are all out of whack.
Different chips generally means smaller chips, which require more advanced tools, especially in the photolithography department (also called photo or litho for short). I think this video, this video, and this series offer an excellent overview of cutting edge litho methods that are required to manufacture low nm nodes you hear about coming from Intel, TSMC, Samsung, etc. It's important to note the insane capital required not to just invest in a fab itself, not just the tool that go inside, but the litho tools themselves. New SOTA EUV tools cost around $200MM, or over 1% of a (higher end) fab's cost, and that's just a single tool. Ouch!
How many processes depend on gravity at all? How many require specifically 9.8 m/s^2?
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