
TSMC's Photoresist Material Incident: $550M Loss - Itsdijital
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13975/tsmcs-fab-14b-photoresist-material-incident-550-million-in-lost-revenue
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xoa
If you haven't watched it, there was a fantastic 2009 talk (given during
HOPE09) on what goes into fabrication called "Indistinguishable From Magic:
Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" [1]. Keeping in mind things have advanced
even farther over the subsequent decade, even at that point it was mind
blowing what goes into the hardware at the core of what we all do. The level
of purity and consistency needed for a lot of basic inputs is measured in
atoms, really digging into the details it's amazing some of this works at all
let alone with high yields. Helps give some context of how an incident like
this can happen and how easily the cost could rapidly rise to eye watering
levels.

I think Andor has posted on HN since too with some other high level talk,
though not further updates per se since unsurprisingly details around
fabrications are very heavily guarded trade secrets. I still rewatch it every
year or two, it remains a real source of wonder to me what we've pulled off
there.

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1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4)

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Joona
Definitely one of my favorite talks. I believe this is a higher quality
version of the same talk a few years later:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL-I3-C-KBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL-I3-C-KBk)

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ljoshua
Of the $550 million, I wonder how much of it is in materials cost and how much
of it is in penalties paid to renegotiate delivery dates for the affected
customers.

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lefty2
it's $550 million lost revenue in 1Q, which is recognised in 2Q instead. The
loss for the whole year is $66M

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sevensor
I'm a little surprised this ended up being resist. Photolithography usually
involves quite a lot of looking at SEM imagery of test patterns. (These
usually go in the scribe lines.) The problem must have been pretty subtle for
it not to get flagged. Maybe (since they mention unexpected polymerization) it
left an unexpected residue after cleans? Post-photo clean usually starts with
ashing in an oxygen plasma, so it would have to be some pretty serious gunk to
survive that and the subsequent wet clean.

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rbanffy
What is the size of the market for framed almost-complete wafers? Say you can
sell a framed wafer for $50, of which $10 is materials and $10 is labor, you
still make $30 x ~20,000 or ~$600,000 for the whole batch, minus taxes.

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masto
Imagine a state actor with the resources and motivation to engage in serious
sabotage (a-la stuxnet). These processes are so sensitive and complex, I bet
they could come up with a really devious way to introduce a contaminant that
isn't detected until it's too late -- maybe even when the parts start failing
after delivery. Pretty wild to think about having that kind of target on your
back and what you'd have to do to even try to defend against it.

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xenadu02
Supply chains are so interconnected it would be impossible to limit the damage
to your intended targets.

Probably similar to GPS "selective availability": turns out it would hurt the
US Military more than anything else these days so the military has essentially
abandoned the idea.

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pas
Is there a tl;dr on why and how it would hurt the US Mil the most?

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skissane
Shortages of the special military GPS receivers (which support decrypting the
encrypted signal) resulted in the US military having to use ordinary civilian
GPS receivers instead in many cases. So, limiting the accuracy of the civilian
signal was having a negative impact on the US military's own operations.

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baybal2
Dow Chem must be owing TSMC some good explanation...

