The US may have technological supremacy when it comes to design and the resultant products, but it lags behind in terms of actually manufacturing semiconductors. The dominant players are in Asia (TSMC, Samsung, GF) and Europe (GF). Intel has their own fabs, but they are currently behind the competition, and up until very recently only fabricated their own products. There are a lot of other companies in the industry with fabs, but they're generally making their own products - discrete devices - rather than integrated circuits/System-on-a-Chip's.

Another issue is the equipment used for manufacturing. It's very hard to come by, and the classic example is ASML (Netherlands), which dominates the market for lithography equipment.

I work on the design side, not in a fab, so I can't tell you much about sourcing or refining the silicon for wafers. Wafers are used to make every single microchip you can imagine. There has been a slow but continuous push towards using larger wafers, since its more cost-effective. I imagine it's more difficult, but couldn't tell you any specifics.

As far as manufacturing each individual integrated circuit: yes, larger is harder to manufacture because there is more physical space for a defect to occur. There are some design challenges as well when you get very large, but it's not a significant overhead because you're usually doing your design in sub-pieces anyways.

Some designs do use redundancy, as you mentioned. This is more often the case for very large, very uniform structures, like DRAM, flash, CPU cache, etc. But there's a tradeoff because you waste money on that redundancy for every chip that comes out with no defects. And there's overhead to actually testing the part in order to utilize the redundancy. In my experience, yields are targeted at the high 90%s these days, so the redundancy would have to be very cheap to be worth it. For almost all RF, analog, and mixed-signal circuits, there is no redundancy. I'd say most digital circuits, except the largest, also don't have any.

Thank you so much for this industry info. When you design, do you think that Shenzhen is the best in terms of innovation in microchips? They have very interesting random chips that are undocumented, underground, and seemingly random, like the ESP8266 being used in some consumer goods, people noted it, hacked it to run custom software, its essentially a cheaper more powerful and higher energy usage arduino type reprogrammable chip with wifi built in, the company later released an SDK and aruduino studio was also ported. I don't know if there are some wafer that cannot have any defects in them, camera sensors come to mind.

I’d never heard of Spruce Pine, interesting. I wasn’t able to read the wired article but another article said it wasn’t the silica/silicon that’s the world-beater there though, it’s the quartz for use in crucibles etc?

Also - does the US really have microchip supremacy? The highest tech fabs are non-us (Samsung and TSMC)

https://web.archive.org/web/20180808115837/https://www.wired... Here you go. Who gave them the technology in the first place and who do they rely on? They did not make it on their own, and the US's reseach, sphere of influence, technology shared in the western world is why these countries were able to advance in advanced electronics. Look at the founder's history in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Chang Its hard to say what country multinational companies are, you can note their location but does Toyota become Mexican if they assemble their cars in Mexico, Are they American if they assemble it in the US or does Apple become Chinese if they use Foxconn a Taiwanese company in China? If by fabrication location, when TSMC's 3nm plant opens in Arizona, or Samsung opens their 3nm in Texas that mean Taiwan or South Korea has supremacy or the US? The US controls the supply of the best materials, who gets technology, and sells goods like military technology, its lead the semiconductor business and I would have to say without the ideas, and materials from the US, it would not exist.

If I remember correctly, the silicon used to manufacture transistor-grade wafers is purified to roughly 10 impurities for every billion silicon atoms. Less pure starting stock might increase the cost of getting there, but probably not by too much.

No, it is not possible. Refinement isn't changing to lower quality, if that was true then every enemy of the US would be refining their own materials. It is in everyone's interest not to rely on a single place for every microchip materials, but the fact that is hasn't happened, and if it didn't incraes the cost by much why hasn't it happened with the US's global enemies? The USSR was never able to gain eqivalence even with the same blueprints and they were not able to be made in bulk.

>Soviet computer software and hardware designs were often on par with Western ones, but the country's persistent inability to improve manufacturing quality meant that it could not make practical use of theoretical advances. *Quality control*, in particular, was a major weakness of the Soviet computing industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...