[ackbar03]

I don't really know much about ic manufacturing.

Are you sure university labs are really able to to this? If so how come only a few companies like tsmc and that one Dutch company are able to manufacture microchips? Or are those two completely different things and I'm just confusing myself?

[rasz]

University students in Poland, under russian occupation no less, managed to clone and manufacture Intel 8080 using 6um Uni lab in 1982. Writeup in Polish http://retrokolekcja.pl/MCY7880.php

In 1983 cult Polish science education TV program SONDA documented design and manufacturing of first batches in a humorous lets bake a cake fashion. Paper plotters, light pens, developing/rinsing dies by hand, electron microscope debugging, the whole nine yards!

part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJGp7keIA_o

part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHl6m93Hay0

part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcOTwkT-PDU

[duped]

> Are you sure university labs are really able to to this?

Yes, I know of multiple universities that have labs for small scale IC production. In fact anywhere doing research in the field will have some ability to build these things, or access to the industrial labs nearby. Even in industry, there are small scale labs that are used to develop the processes before they get built out at scale.

> If so how come only a few companies like tsmc and that one Dutch company are able to manufacture microchips?

There are thousands of chip manufacturers worldwide. TSMC is just the largest/most cutting edge. ASML is the company that makes special tools for IC manufacturing (however, researchers can/do experiment with the things that ASML is doing on smaller scales).

But keep in mind - no researcher at a university is trying to manufacture millions of 3nm CPUs for next year's iPhone. Just as an example, today we have GaN switches in our 100+W USB-C chargers that fit in your pocket. That directly came from university and industry research in small scale labs into high bandgap semiconductors, which was developed by fabbing real circuits and testing them.

[schmidtleonard]

The trillion-dollar-hard part is doing it profitably at scale. Drop that constraint and nearly any feature size is "only" million-dollar-hard (maybe 10M or 100M to run a R&D shop).

You can poke and prod anything into place with e-beams and FIBs and manually dipping wafers in baths and ovens and such. 1% yield, hour long write times, and all sorts of R&D jank are perfectly fine for checking functionality of your fancy ultra-FET design or making a ring oscillator to simulate integration. Did a grain of dust land on the wafer and ruin 100 of them? No prob, use the other 300, just try not to let it happen again. But integrating a billion transistors, coordinating them to do a billion calculations per second, QAing them to work for a billion seconds with 0 errors, and manufacturing them to profitably sell at $100 a pop? No jank allowed, no small scale antics allowed, and your budget now requires all the zeros it can find and more besides.

[andrewla]

That's at the very highest end. As the element size gets larger there are more fabs capable of doing the work. The equipment gets slightly more standardized, etc., although ASML (the Dutch company) is still the big dog in the equipment space.

But even running a small-scale fab spitting out 7400 series chips and 555's is still pretty serious business; you need chemical engineers and material scientists as well as electrical engineers and software engineers (and multidisciplinary versions of those people) to keep things running at all. And nobody can do this stuff out of college -- everyone has extensive apprenticeships and practical experience working in other fabs because so much of the process is knowhow rather than technical specifications.

[km3r]

There is a wide gap between TSMC's cutting edge processes and what a university lab would produce. The features on the microchip go from a couple nanometers (TMSC cutting edge) to tens of micrometers (1000-10000x larger). Large size means less transistors, but million instead of billions still is plenty for large complex chips, just not cutting edge.

[brendoelfrendo]

Yes, my alma mater has a nanofabrication lab on campus: https://www.rit.edu/facilities/semiconductor-nanofabrication...

They are even able to work with external clients to sell the chips they make.

ASML, that one Dutch company, is the only manufacturer of EUV photolithography machines, which are required to produce the cutting-edge of chips. There are plenty of chips that aren't cutting-edge, though, and plenty of reason to produce them in both academic and commercial settings.

[undersuit]

Semiconductor Fabs have come a long way. The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in a small commercial lot in Mountain View in 1956. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shockley-Semiconductor-L...

There was lots of older or used equipment Universities could buy before Fabs started being millions of square feet with hundreds of million dollar pieces of equipment.

[tjohns]

Yes indeed. My university had a clean room and research-scale fab equipment right next door to some of the lecture halls.

https://nanofab.usc.edu/

The key here is research scale. Larger process nodes, minimal automation, and smaller yields. Which is just fine, because the idea is to prototype new ideas rather than produce millions of chips.

[johnny22]

that dutch company makes machines involved in creating the ICs, not the ICs themselves.

[mercurywells]

not even that, they really make the machines that make the patterns that are used to develop the electronic circuits on the ICs

[denotational]

I’m not sure that’s accurate: ASML don’t make masks (i.e. the patterns), they make the EUV photolithography machines that are used in conjunction with the masks.

The physical masks themselves are usually made by Hoya, and the technology to actually etch the masks is made by Veevo.

[wil421]

That’s like saying why can’t Toyota made a car that competes with Koenigsegg. One is on the absolute bleeding edge of everything and the other sells more cars than anyone else.

[hooverd]

TSMC (and AMSL) are the bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing. There's a long tail of other semiconductor manufacturers that don't operate at that bleeding edge.