TSMC uses intricate cutting-edge laser etching to display less than one thousandth of the size of erythrocyte on the purest wafer thin silicon. TSMC uses a large army of super robots to produce on orbit. The amount of these robots walking is equivalent to around the earth ten times a day. The cars and mobile phones used in people's lives are inseparable from chips produced by TSMC. What does the creepy yellow lights in TSMC do? Today, let’s get to know the world’s largest computer chip factory, and let you name the world’s most important chip manufacturer in daily life. You may say Intel , AMD , Arm or Samsung . Perhaps most people have never heard of TSMC, which currently controls more than half of the customized chip market.
It is reported that the construction cost of TSMC's single factory is worth US$17 billion. In a sense, this makes it the most expensive factory ever built, and by comparing Tesla's new Gigafactory in Shanghai only cost one fifth of it.
The company serves Apple , Huawei , and various automakers around the world in a relatively unknown situation. TSMC's foundry services allow it to fully concentrate on breaking new boundaries on the tiny scale and unparalleled complexity of its chips.
Over time, the computer becomes faster and stronger. For example, the laptop is equipped with m1 chip made by TSMC, which is stuffed with more than 170 million transistors on silicon wafer per 1 square millimeter of . What is the concept of
five nanometers? To compare, a virus is about ten times larger than 5 nanometers, and a red blood cell is 100 times larger than 5 nanometers, which is 60,000 times smaller than a human hair. Five nanometers are not the end point. TSMC has signed a supply contract to use a 3-nanometer architecture chip. TSMC has even tried 1-nanometer chips in a process involving semi-metal bismuth.
So do you want to know how TSMC produces cutting-edge chips? The core clean room of TSMC factory, TSMC's new wafer fab has 22 football fields, about 1600,000 square meters of clean room . TSMC clean rooms, more precisely, are level 10 clean rooms, which basically means they are kept in a state of less than 10 dust particles per cubic foot. It can be imagined that working on such a nanoscale means that even the tiniest foreign body can cause serious damage to precision circuits, so fab workers, TSMC, hired more than 50,000 employees, and needed to be thoroughly cleaned before it was completed. This means hiding the outside shoes in the storage cabinet, tying the hair in the net, and performing a thorough air shower, with conventional air coming from the outside passing through a multi-layer filtration system to prevent outside particulate matter from entering.
also has strict requirements on environmental interference. Temperature and humidity fluctuations, random vibrations and even magnetic fields are strictly controlled. Silicon, the most important raw material of TSMC, happens to be the richest element found in the earth's crust. The silicon refined into quartz sand has a purity of 99.99999999999999999%. High-purity silicon is transported to the clean room in the form of a steel cylinder, and the cylinder is cut into thin slices.
In operation, accuracy is necessary because even the slightest error can lead to problems. The silicon wafer is first treated with chemicals, including arsenic, phosphorus and boron to optimize conductivity and other useful properties. These wafers are moved to the so-called partitions and are placed in an oven tube that accurately controls temperature and gas flow, forming an insulating silicon compound film on the wafer surface.
chip should be both conductive and insulated, so the next process is called ion implantation , injecting charged ions into the silicon wafer in a specific preselected area, and the conductivity level manipulates the final chip by fine-tuning the ion penetration depth at this stage. From there the wafer is moved to the so-called chemical vapor deposition or CvD region of the wafer fab, where solid reactants are formed by chemical reactions, deposited on the chip as thin photosensitive films.
chip architecture is the key to the chip. It is not carved out by machines, but light is used.This special advanced technology is carried out in the photolithography area of the fab. The light is etched with the chrome plate with the chip layout, allowing the light it passes through to etch into a photosensitive film, which carves out all these tiny features and paths. The chip design itself is obviously a strictly protected commercial secret, a dense, complex architecture of each layer. The chips usually have 20 to 30 layers packed together, produced from a computer-aided design system, and the wafer is moved to the etched area, fine chemical used to remove any excess silicon, and then polish it until it is flat. Check it carefully and then stack it to make the final chip.
All these parts are transported on the ceiling using robots, and the 12-inch silicone cylinder is too heavy for humans. These robots travel a total of about 400,000 kilometers per day.
So what does the yellow light in the clean room do? Everyone knows that TSMC uses light to engrave chips. Yellow light has a very long electromagnetic wave length, so it will not interfere with the lithography process.
’s biggest challenge for TSMC is to move towards a beautiful new world of 1 nanometer and beyond. TSMC uses newer processes, which is the famous extreme ultraviolet lithography, achieving more detailed details that other chip manufacturers cannot compete for. In contrast, the veteran chip maker Intel was forced to embarrassingly take back its bold words, and Intel plans to outsource 20% of its five-nanometer or even seven-nanometer chip manufacturing to TSMC.
TSMC's core role in global economy has become the focus of the recent global chip shortage has caused automakers like Toyota , Ford and Volkswagen to stop production because they cannot get TSMC chips fast enough. TSMC is currently expanding into mainland China and opening factories in Europe and the United States.
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