That's what I'm talking about. Who's to say there aren't a few gotchas like this in the new cobalt processing, and that's not exactly something that can be protected under IP law (or even necessarily by NDA, at least provably).
How much time does it save to have the second company attempting it get a hint of "hey, the new process is much more susceptible to problems of X,Y and Z than you would think, and you can save yourself months of headaches by being extra vigilant with respect to those from the beginning." ?
The benefit of the lead time you get as the first really needs to pay off, since the followers almost always have it easier. It's not hard to imagine that sometimes the pain and cost of being first is actually higher than the benefit and profit for that time period.
The example I gave in my previous was simplified the actual root cause was much weirder and included a condition where the flow rate would have to get to X and the temperature to get to just an exact Y for thermal expansion to apparently compress the insulation enoguh for it to matter if the temp would be a tad to low it won’t impact anything if it goes above the next level of flow rate it wouldn’t have an impact yet again because it would drop the temp.
Intel’s whole conflict free campaign was a marketing spin on a real problem and a way to benefit from the extra cost of materials and that extra cost wasn’t because of children in African mines.
Intel needs so much control over the raw materials to prevent contamination that they issue orders on what fuel, hydraulic fluid and lubricants can be used to mine their dirt to prevent or at least reduce contamination.
Heck I’m sure if one will read what ever T&C they attach to their supply contracts the metal composition of the pickaxes will be specified.
They survey and sample everything and essentially tell their supplier ok you can mine this specific area everything in the top 1m you get rid off everything below 10m we don’t want.
Like honestly at this point I think the only way for GloFo to have exactly the same problem as Intel is we live in a simulation.
They will however have their own problems with leakage, bonding, crystallization and w/e else can go wrong with this insanity with Cobalt but likely they’ll have completely different root causes and different solutions.
The cause was that the water pipes under that section would impact that part of the process because of mechanical vibration the reason why it didn’t impact all processes because they were tied to the cooling system and it only had an effect when other procsses put stress on it.
These vibaration were apparently so small that they couldn’t measure the difference they identified this through a process of elimination.
This is a classical story of practical vs theoretical engineering the secret sauce isn’t the recepie it’s the cook.
If you think about it this way if it was so easy to recreate a process through reverse engineering a few hot chips talks and poaching Intel wouldn’t be in this mess and GloFo didn’t had to scrap their 20nm process.
When you almost at the level of moving atoms around the wing flaps of a butterfly start to really matter.
We’re well pass the time where you had Disney animators draw transistors on sheets and copper masks were cut by hand it wouldn’t surprise me if there are no beans days at foundries these days since a fart across the building might increase your defect rate by 3%