3 separate shifts iirc. But don't Intel run 24/7 too? Or is that just for prod? I remember some plant (not Intel, a memory plant) had an issue and lost power for a few hours and lost a shite load of memory wafers and took a couple days to come back into prod.
Intel certainly do run machines 24/7 but perhaps those R&D engineers/PhD's don't, so maybe only the techie's running the machines have full coverage...?
As pure designers yeah but Chinese government is about to do to chips what they did to solar and batteries so I wouldn't count them out yet. Might be 5-10 years before they catch up but they are by no means out of the fight.
Not only do they currently have the largest share of current technologies they are going to be first to market with next-gen batteries too with CATL and BYD both entering mass production of sodium-ion batteries this year. These have lower energy density for now but that will likely chain as improvements land.
Japan and Korea dropped the ball is what happened, it wasn't any singular error but many unforced errors over a good 10 year period that led to them being now substantially behind.
You mean Chinese battery companies have the largest Lithium battery market share in China where foreign competitors aren't allowed to compete? Last I checked CATL makes mostly NCM, largely based on LG Chem's tech, and then LFP.
>> Japan and Korea dropped the ball is what happened, it wasn't any singular error but many unforced errors over a good 10 year period that led to them being now substantially behind.<<<
You don't seem to understand the battery market. Japan and South Korea have been in the battery business at lease since the mid 1990's. Japan's manufacturing has declined over time, but LG Chem is the largest EV battery manufacturer in the world. Of course, that's the global market share, outside China -- ie, there won't be any Chinese battery in North America.
Considering the overall investment goes into dozens of billions, it seems a little hard to believe they wouldn't source worldwide talent to make it 24/7 as well. Also they probably source top talent. I'm always skeptical of those "we just work a little harder" explanations.
Except in manufacturing, getting your yield up and tuning a process is basically 'just work'. You define a space of parameters you want to explore and then you brute force it by building samples at each parameter step and then analyzing it.
This can be pipelined and parallelized to some extent, but then you have to convince enough PhD level employees to do night shifts, because each process step is basically a miniature physics or chemistry experiment that has to be monitored and tuned constantly (at this stage).
It's one thing to make one perfect transistor, it's a totally different ballgame to make 10 billion perfect devices with better than 90% tool uptime, and an essential component of closing that gap is brute force experimentation.
I just think that if TSMC can find such PhD level employees in Taiwan, why couldn't other competitors find them in places way more abundant in those types of people? Convincing them is a matter of paying them more, there are plenty of highly educated physicians who work night shifts. And it's not like TSMC could hide this secret sauce either, so you would think that before dumping another 20 billion in a new investment, Intel would consider simply replicating what they could easily observe from TSMC.
I remember reading something that TMC has links with the local universities to train talent, and nearly guarantee them a job in the end... Ireland has an Intel Fab here, and I don't think there are many courses around here doing chip development... Mind you, not sure Intel Ireland does chip development, but could be wrong... they have something like 6k employees, god only knows what they are doing...
