Foundry is the chip-industry term for a contract manufacturer, like a $15 billion Kinko’s. Auto-component makers-not the brand-name car companies but their suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers-canceled orders.īut a semiconductor fab can’t turn on a dime. Sales were off by a third in April, May and June 2020. The only thing it seemed no one needed was a new car, at least at first. In New York City alone, the department of education purchased 350,000 iPads. Chips powered the pandemic response-webcams, laptops, COVID-19 testing machines. The world needs us to continue to make semiconductors.'” It was not an understatement. “We told our team, ‘We entered this pandemic together we’re going to exit together. As in so many industries, Caulfield’s initial financial models left him bracing for the worst. The business shocks proved harder to handle.
#SIMPLE SHUTDOWN TIMER CHIP FULL#
Long accustomed to wearing masks and full PPE, the engineers kept their usual watch on the robots. “We never shut down a single factory-not for an hour,” recalls Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, in his office two levels above the fab floor. “When one of those go down, it is all hands on deck,” says Belfi.Yet when COVID-19 hit, the fab never stopped. The showstopper is a problem with one of the lithography machines, which set the pace of the whole operation. “It’s a lot of putting things on, taking it off, printing, putting more on, taking more off.” Humans intrude only when something goes wrong. “We basically are bouncing wafers to and from each section of the fab, all day every day,” Belfi says. Electron microscopes inspect the wafers for imperfections, and a robotic arm immerses them 25 at a time into a chemical bath like a carnival dunk tank. Another uses lasers to imprint circuits just 12 nanometers wide-about the length your fingernail grows in 12 seconds. One polishes wafers with a slurry that acts like liquid sandpaper. The robots do the driving, careening on their suspended tracks above machines the size of small RVs. The whole time, the chips travel in sealed pods called FOUPs, entirely untouched by human hands. At GlobalFoundries, the journey from raw material to finished chip-what engineers like Belfi call the “process flow”-is typically 85 days and encompasses more than a thousand steps. If Henry Ford imagined an assembly line, a silicon wafer’s path through a factory is more like a labyrinth. Semiconductors are astonishing, with billions of transistors packed into a space the size of a dime, and they are astonishingly hard to make. (A typical new car can contain more than a thousand chips.) Chip manufacturers saw the slack and shifted their output to serve the surging demand for consumer electronics, like webcams and laptops. When the initial lockdowns caused car sales to collapse, automakers cut their orders for parts, including semiconductors. The car industry has been hardest hit of all. But as with toilet paper and chicken wings, the pandemic shocked the global semiconductor supply chain, leading to shortages in surprising places-and pulling the U.S.
Since it opened in 2011, Fab 8, as it’s known, has kept a low profile. Its shipping docks send out finished wafers, ready to be cut up, encased in metal and ceramic shells, and assembled into everything from airbags to blenders, headphones to fighter jets. Its receiving docks pull in 256 specialty chemicals, like argon and sulfuric acid. This $15 billion complex tucked away behind trees north of Albany, N.Y., is one of only a handful of advanced semiconductor factories, or “fabs,” in the U.S.
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