What does TI do with their out-of-tolerance products? Straight in the garbage?

Yes, though depending on the product line it may be binned into lower quality parts first. Remember though, the marginal cost of these chips is so small the packaging is usually more expensive than the silicon. They often get tested before the wafer is even sliced up so any waste is hardly worth mentioning until you get into modern processes with large error rates and huge chips like CPUs.

TI isn't patterning $10000 wafers at 3nm with massive chiplets and questionable yield, they are making mostly commodity ICs on cheaper processes - they can afford to discard rejects.

I think the implied question is do they discard, or do they destroy.

Discarded things tend to get lost. Lost things tend not stay in the Anduin forever.

Lol I love the deep cut to LOTR! Took me a sec but then brought me so much joy. Viva la nerds!

> "Discarded things tend to get lost. Lost things tend not to stay in the Anduin forever."

I'll have to put that on a warning label near our non-conforming-product containment shelf!

Not only that, leakage goes way up as you shrink the transistors, an ADC on a 3nm wafer would require a complete redesign, if it could be made to work at all.

Binned wafers are viable source material for photovoltaics.