Re:Intel Solidifies $3.5B Deal to Make Chips for Military
by kennyloginz on Saturday September 14, 2024 @01:33AM
(#41537693)
The analogy of a wafer bank to a seed bank is new to me. I would imagine the wafer bank is a bad idea, because they would just be playbooks that would lead to the collapse. So kinda pointless.
Re:Intel Solidifies $3.5B Deal to Make Chips for Military
by realityking on Saturday September 14, 2024 @02:29AM
(#41537904)
Interesting. But why store the somewhat unwieldy wafer instead the packaged chip? I’d imagine that doesn’t add much cost but makes storage significantly simpler.
Re:Intel Solidifies $3.5B Deal to Make Chips for Military
by adrian_b on Saturday September 14, 2024 @09:29AM
(#41539672)
Storing the wafers avoids paying the costs for packaging and testing in the case the chips will not be needed.
Moreover, the packaged chips typically require a much larger volume for their storage than the wafers. A wafer may contain many thousands of chips.
The wafers are normally stored in dry nitrogen, to avoid their chemical degradation during long term storage.
This technique is already done for things with long operational lifetimes. It would be nice if we made a distributed (geographically) wafer bank so that we will have a long supply of semiconductors, esp after a civilization scale catastrophe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP