Nonsense, manufacturing learning curves[1] were identified by Theodore Wright in World War II airplane manufacturing, and apply to many types of production:
> Wright found that every time total aircraft production doubled, the required labor time for a new aircraft fell by 20%. This has become known as "Wright's law". Studies in other industries have yielded different percentage values (ranging from only a couple of percent up to 30%), but in most cases, the value in each industry was a constant percentage and did not vary at different scales of operation. The learning curve model posits that for each doubling of the total quantity of items produced, costs decrease by a fixed proportion. Generally, the production of any good or service shows the learning curve or experience curve effect. Each time cumulative volume doubles, value-added costs (including administration, marketing, distribution, and manufacturing) fall by a constant percentage.
As I understand it the core thesis of this article is that any object which can be manufactured using semiconductor processes gets to share the experience curve of semiconductor manufacturing, which not only has has a unusually high cost reduction per doubling compared to other industries but is also already very cheap to begin with due to the large volume already produced.
The key takeaway "Every tech that is improving exponentially in the 21st century is explained by improvements in semiconductor fabrication." seems hard to believe. What about Lithium batteries? Same trend vastly different process.
Not necessarily. As it gets more difficult the next nodes and alternative materials will depend even more on advanced materials science and fabrication technology that'll also be available to adjacent fields.
The death of Moore's Law has been predicted for a couple of decades. Sure, eventually we'll run into the limit, but I'd need strong evidence for such a claim.
(and yes, some related semiconductor laws no longer scale. Dennard scaling has been lost, etc)
Moore's law died several years ago. Mid '10s. The strong evidence? Pay more attention to consumer computer tech.
There are still ongoing improvements - but the pace has slowed, and those improvements are MORE expensive. This is how Moore's law died, not with an end to a trend, but a faltering curve.
I have another theory about moore's law - it gives the (conservative, risk averse, non-techy) money people a roadmap to growth in tech.
I think many people in business sort of stick to the status quo. We just got where we got, and lets just rest a bit and turn the crank. But if the roadmap says things will be 1.9x in 17 months, the projects that get the greenlight will be different.
I don't think predictors like this are common or visible. A lot of business is reactionary, to competition achieving something.
Additionally, it also helps with tech dependencies. Like "if I plan for chips to be this fast in this many months, our project can make these assumptions"
Didn't Sun Microsystems outright do that back in the 90s? Straight up declared that their roadmap was to treat Moore's Law as a plan, rather than a prediction?
A disappointing fact of chip fabrication is the minimum bar is high and expensive.
In other fields, a hobbyist can do wood/metalworking or learn programming or build a robot kit. There's an onramp for people to start learning the skills, which makes a huge ecosystem of gradually improving talent.
But in microfabrication, even though it's the only way to make chips, screens, cameras, inkjets, and LEDs, the minimum equipment cost is millions of dollars. Even worse, it takes even professionals months to fine-tune a manufacturing process to make a new thing.
As a result, R&D is much lower than it could be, and most fabrication is limited to circumstances with a high chance of mass production payoff.
In theory, while I think you could build an SSI manufacturing device at home if you really wanted to -- just how many people build an internal combustion engine themselves to learn about it?
This, but its really the logic function versus actual device fabrication. I would love to see a home device that would let you build you own transistors and perhaps a very small number of passives.
Consider a system that had 6mm diameter "blanks" and a tool that would let you put down an epitaxial layer, lay down, expose, and then etch a resist layer, etc. At those small scales, one could hope the chemistry would be manageable.
What is the smallest feasible cleanroom for such a purpose? Can we fit a turnkey chip fab in a shipping container, hermetically sealed upon manufacture, fully automated, even pre-stocked with wafers? Drop it on a concrete pad, fill up the chemical tanks, send a spec, you have a wafer bonded to a standard package in X hours
A modern chip has one of the longest supply chains of any manufactured goods in the world. Even the biggest chip companies get the wafers made in one place, and then send them somewhere else for packaging and bonding.
It's really hard to see what benefit there might be to trying to cram all of this into a shipping container, other than to say you did it.
Cleanliness requirement is a function of feature size. For a process that has 5 µm features (that is roughly 250 times larger than current fabs) its pretty manageable. That is further improved if you use the 'cannister' technique where the "wafer" is in a sealed canister that is opened when inserted into the machine and closes automatically when pulled out.
I am envisioning a handle which ends in stainless steel holding mechanism that has the feature that when you slide it into a 'production' slot the holding mechanism pushes back to reveal the sample's surface. Think window on a floppy disk only better at keeping dust out.
6mm is pretty small (about 1/4" to be precise) in diameter. Call it 25 mm^2 of area, you're looking at, maybe, 10K "device elements" you could lay down (I'm guessing you lose a bunch of space to 3 - 8 "pads")
Your "fab" is a machine that sits on a desk, it has tanks that hold 'consumables' that are used in the process and a tank that fills with waste output. Both the empty consumables tanks and the full waste tank are shipped off to be disposed of properly.
On working side of the fab there are ports that are of the same shape as the end of your sample holder. They positively lock so you push the sample holder into the port until it "clicks" and then the machine does an evacuation cycle, followed by that step of the process.
Building a device would consist of loading your design in, then using the various ports (sometimes more than once) for different steps (add resist/render layer mask) (cure resist/rinse uncured resist off) (etch) (dope-p), (dope-n), (metal), (poly), (package).
The 'package' would always be the same shape. Think a metal can transistor from the 80's. With 8 leads and a pin 1 tab. What leads were connected would be defined by what you had programmed for your device.
You do all the steps (it would probably take anywhere from 1 to 3 days depending on the process steps you used). And the result is this part you made. Plug it into your characterization harness and verify it's function and/or signal parameters. If it fails you toss it and do another one, if it passes you have your bespoke device to use in your project.
I certainly don't see something like that having mass market appeal but I know you could sell them.
Good concept for a benchtop prototyping apparatus.
If you looked into some of the early cheap Chinese glow-pattern trinkets and musical greeting cards, the IC often looked quite "home made", having a central irregular blob of epoxy covering the fabricated device in the middle of a small square ceramic substrate. With a few not-so-thin wires coming out from under the epoxy, tieing it into the discrete components, if any.
I would imagine at the time the primary requirement was for the component to simply cost less and be way smaller than an alternative stuffed PCB, without any real need for it to be fabricated as one of the actual "chips" off of a silicon wafer.
Depending on what power of "microscope" you are willing to limit yourself to, it might not be as difficult to see microchips (or at least micro IC's) in your forseeable future.
It's not the cleanroom that's the issue, it's mostly hazardous materials and some of the processes (gas deposition, sputtering) aren't garage friendly.
That said, there are people on youtube that are doing it, and it's doable to some degree in a garage environment, but the risks of dealing with hot HF acid are too much for most of us.
Hopefully the people who post on hacker news.
I just bought a book on steam boiler operation and another on building and maintaining internal combustion engines; so, me!
It's a research project, I am mostly self taught and I wanted to build a small archive of materials that would be enough to help a human survive the apocalypse. Farming & Animal husbandry, Metallurgy, Manufacture of goods, Pumps/engines, Electricity, a few other things.
My project is to index the volumes in the next few years and starting some of my own projects, so probably just doing some repairs on small things to start and moving on up!
> just how many people build an internal combustion engine themselves to learn about it?
At least 30 kids in Transport class when I went to high school, more if you count the kids in years before and after.
Not a full build, mind you - only some parts were cast, but we did do full strip downs and rebuilds of six cylinder ICE's as well as having a cut-away display engine in the shop.
My son did better (IMHO), he got to build an entire light aircraft over three years as part of aviation in a public high school in Western Australia. He missed out on the ICE building though.
I think home manufacturing of chips is the next mini industrial revolution. 3D printing was the last one, I'm looking forward to seeing where we go next.
The basic process of chemical etching that the article insists is at the core of so much of our exponential progress is (still?) being taught (including practical work) in middle school though.
Chips, and intelligence in general, is a very special case, because it can be miniaturized retaining the same function (or if you prefer, gain function in proportion for the same area).
Other technologies might have some improvements from miniaturization, but I don't think the principle applies for solar cells. You obviously can't just shrink a cell and keep the same output[1]. What you can do is learn how to shave costs and improve efficiency, and also amortize R&D. Eventually you reach somewhere with very good efficiency and costs close to the raw material cost.
[1] That said, maybe you can shrink the thickness of a cell? That being the case, at one point just the cost of the frame for keeping the cell integrity (specially under wind loads etc.) would start dominating costs, and also the (copper) wiring outputting power from cells. I wonder how far we are from this being the case?
Wind power is interesting because it's mostly a mechanical problem (or at least there's a significant mechanical component). You have to transport the forces on a moving blade, or some kind of moving part (it has to be moving due to P=F.v), so all those parts have a minimum thickness necessary to offload those forces to the ground. It would increase mechanical efficiency (by requiring less load for a given power) if you could increase the velocity of the moving parts, but wind speed itself is limited. You could try funneling the wind, but that introduces structures which themselves suffer stresses (and also induce drag lowering efficiency). There's a limit (at material/W) given by wind speed, and specific strength of the structural material.
This very long exponential improvement (miniaturization) march is a somewhat unique effect to information processing[2], because information can in principle be represented at any scale. That's not to say that all those technologies can't be significantly improved. Generally automation, mass production, along with (limited) efficiency improvements and general cleverness can go a very long way.
[2] I don't mean to be taken as law: there are probably also applications (outside information processing) that you can only do well with the benefit of certain scales. For example, the cells of our bodies are wonderful mechanisms whose magic really works because they can each play tiny mechanisms and deploy molecular-scale objects to act on such tiny scales, and the billions of them make machines that have no parallels in terms of large-scale fabrication (including self-repair, filtration of compounds, ...).
>at one point just the cost of the frame for keeping the cell integrity (specially under wind loads etc.) would start dominating costs
Pretty sure I've seen that the cells themselves are already a minority of the total cost of a solar installation. Most of it is labor, permitting, framing (as you mentioned) and other ancillary things. Dropping the price of PV cells is all to the good, but it's not the limiting factor for mass adoption of PV.
Increasing the efficiency of cells would help more, since you could get more power from a given amount of the other supporting stuff.
One big related point not discussed in the actual software used for semiconductor design at all levels (note: I'm biased toward this point since I work in this area on a day-to-day basis)(also this is most related to computing devices rather than things like solar panels and LEDs).
Unlike the software world (which has great open-source foundations for a lot of the core tools used, such as compilers and operating systems), many of the software tools used in electronics design automation (EDA) and semiconductor fabrication are developed by industry giants at high costs (edit: high costs to the users), with little consideration given to the quality and performance of the software itself (not all parts are bad, but typically most are).
Fortunately, academia and open source have been accelerating progress within the EDA stack with long-standing tools like Yosys, full-stack academic projects for tape out with good backing like OpenROAD, and workgroups like CHIPS Alliance.
However, I believe that there is still a gap between academic + open-source efforts and industry research. To really enchippify everything, the academic and open-source communities need more open and accessible tools for people to use, without having to rely solely on industry tools, funding, and higher motives.
yeah. i am optimistic about it though. i mean just look at falstad's circuit simulator; it's not that far behind LTSpice. this is a (former) professional piece of software compared to a dude's pet project. imagine what we could do if we got some serious work into it.
Integrated circuit manufacturing scales well because the cost per transistor is lower with every process improvement, so as process improvements accumulate, more value (or perhaps more productivity) per wafer is created. This strictly applies to digital circuitry - most analog circuitry requires a certain geometry or process technology not available on a massively optimized modern digital process. While some analog technology improvements are made, it's at a much slower pace. Moreover, a lot of analog redesigns come about as a means to abandon older, less cost-effective semiconductor technology - so the argument that cheap older tech is a boon to any industry outside of limited volume and high cost R&D is suspicious.
Solar cost improvements are in large part a function of massive economies of scale coupled with cheap manufacturing costs and government subsidies from the primary country of origin (which country? Take a guess). I'm sure there's been improvements in a handful of solar material designs, but if you make a large enough volume of panels in a country with cheap labor and massive government subsidies, costs go down. It's not rocket science. To the extent that modern semiconductor technology has improved solar, maybe an argument can be made for improved digital inverter controllers and for silicon carbide FETs maturing enough to make high-voltage panels efficient and ubiquitous at grid-scale deployments. But it's mostly volume, cheap labor costs, and government subsidies.
I don't know about biotech. The following is speculation. I think a lot of biotech was feasible 25 years ago in terms of manufacturability of microfluidics or molecular identification circuitry; but the cost of mass manufacture, and particularly the compute requirements to quickly recover signal from a highly noisy process, wasn't economical or simple to build until digital signal processing and general purpose compute became cheap and fast enough to integrate alongside the biosensors, often as copackaged modules, or generic coprocessors (ARM, RISC-V, etc) that can be built on a ton of different processes and which export raw sensor data quickly enough to allow much heavier duty professors to do the bulk of the work.
I think actual fabrication tech improves slowly, because at its core it's chemistry and material science which also improves slowly (see: batteries). Digital circuitry is a mind-blowing exception, thanks to the incredible amount of usable abstractions that can be built from the manufacture of two specific transistor recipes. But digital circuitry is so powerful, it becomes possible to abstract away massive chunks of otherwise difficult problems in software, firmware, or dedicated transistor-level algorithm implementations, which reduces the amount of physical-world improvements needed to make useful innovations.
> And simple circuit-based devices don’t need hundreds of billions of components on a single chip, so they don’t need tiny feature sizes and they can use the semiconductor industry’s decades-old, now-cheap fabrication equipment.
How cheap is that? Cheap enough to do it at home?
Because that's something we really need right now. We should be able to fabricate our own integrated circuits at home just like we can make software at home. Democratization and decentralization of this technology would be world changing and would protect us against numerous government and industry interests. It would be enough to safeguard computer freedom forever.
44 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread> Wright found that every time total aircraft production doubled, the required labor time for a new aircraft fell by 20%. This has become known as "Wright's law". Studies in other industries have yielded different percentage values (ranging from only a couple of percent up to 30%), but in most cases, the value in each industry was a constant percentage and did not vary at different scales of operation. The learning curve model posits that for each doubling of the total quantity of items produced, costs decrease by a fixed proportion. Generally, the production of any good or service shows the learning curve or experience curve effect. Each time cumulative volume doubles, value-added costs (including administration, marketing, distribution, and manufacturing) fall by a constant percentage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
(and yes, some related semiconductor laws no longer scale. Dennard scaling has been lost, etc)
There are still ongoing improvements - but the pace has slowed, and those improvements are MORE expensive. This is how Moore's law died, not with an end to a trend, but a faltering curve.
I think many people in business sort of stick to the status quo. We just got where we got, and lets just rest a bit and turn the crank. But if the roadmap says things will be 1.9x in 17 months, the projects that get the greenlight will be different.
I don't think predictors like this are common or visible. A lot of business is reactionary, to competition achieving something.
Additionally, it also helps with tech dependencies. Like "if I plan for chips to be this fast in this many months, our project can make these assumptions"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Technology_Roadm...
In other fields, a hobbyist can do wood/metalworking or learn programming or build a robot kit. There's an onramp for people to start learning the skills, which makes a huge ecosystem of gradually improving talent.
But in microfabrication, even though it's the only way to make chips, screens, cameras, inkjets, and LEDs, the minimum equipment cost is millions of dollars. Even worse, it takes even professionals months to fine-tune a manufacturing process to make a new thing.
As a result, R&D is much lower than it could be, and most fabrication is limited to circumstances with a high chance of mass production payoff.
You can learn a lot by programming FPGAs.
In theory, while I think you could build an SSI manufacturing device at home if you really wanted to -- just how many people build an internal combustion engine themselves to learn about it?
Consider a system that had 6mm diameter "blanks" and a tool that would let you put down an epitaxial layer, lay down, expose, and then etch a resist layer, etc. At those small scales, one could hope the chemistry would be manageable.
It's really hard to see what benefit there might be to trying to cram all of this into a shipping container, other than to say you did it.
I am envisioning a handle which ends in stainless steel holding mechanism that has the feature that when you slide it into a 'production' slot the holding mechanism pushes back to reveal the sample's surface. Think window on a floppy disk only better at keeping dust out.
6mm is pretty small (about 1/4" to be precise) in diameter. Call it 25 mm^2 of area, you're looking at, maybe, 10K "device elements" you could lay down (I'm guessing you lose a bunch of space to 3 - 8 "pads")
Your "fab" is a machine that sits on a desk, it has tanks that hold 'consumables' that are used in the process and a tank that fills with waste output. Both the empty consumables tanks and the full waste tank are shipped off to be disposed of properly.
On working side of the fab there are ports that are of the same shape as the end of your sample holder. They positively lock so you push the sample holder into the port until it "clicks" and then the machine does an evacuation cycle, followed by that step of the process.
Building a device would consist of loading your design in, then using the various ports (sometimes more than once) for different steps (add resist/render layer mask) (cure resist/rinse uncured resist off) (etch) (dope-p), (dope-n), (metal), (poly), (package).
The 'package' would always be the same shape. Think a metal can transistor from the 80's. With 8 leads and a pin 1 tab. What leads were connected would be defined by what you had programmed for your device.
You do all the steps (it would probably take anywhere from 1 to 3 days depending on the process steps you used). And the result is this part you made. Plug it into your characterization harness and verify it's function and/or signal parameters. If it fails you toss it and do another one, if it passes you have your bespoke device to use in your project.
I certainly don't see something like that having mass market appeal but I know you could sell them.
If you looked into some of the early cheap Chinese glow-pattern trinkets and musical greeting cards, the IC often looked quite "home made", having a central irregular blob of epoxy covering the fabricated device in the middle of a small square ceramic substrate. With a few not-so-thin wires coming out from under the epoxy, tieing it into the discrete components, if any.
I would imagine at the time the primary requirement was for the component to simply cost less and be way smaller than an alternative stuffed PCB, without any real need for it to be fabricated as one of the actual "chips" off of a silicon wafer.
Depending on what power of "microscope" you are willing to limit yourself to, it might not be as difficult to see microchips (or at least micro IC's) in your forseeable future.
That said, there are people on youtube that are doing it, and it's doable to some degree in a garage environment, but the risks of dealing with hot HF acid are too much for most of us.
My project is to index the volumes in the next few years and starting some of my own projects, so probably just doing some repairs on small things to start and moving on up!
At least 30 kids in Transport class when I went to high school, more if you count the kids in years before and after.
Not a full build, mind you - only some parts were cast, but we did do full strip downs and rebuilds of six cylinder ICE's as well as having a cut-away display engine in the shop.
My son did better (IMHO), he got to build an entire light aircraft over three years as part of aviation in a public high school in Western Australia. He missed out on the ICE building though.
(But yes, to your point, most people are not)
Months for simple things. Depending on technologies and requirements, the fine-tuning (increase yield and throughput) can take years.
Other technologies might have some improvements from miniaturization, but I don't think the principle applies for solar cells. You obviously can't just shrink a cell and keep the same output[1]. What you can do is learn how to shave costs and improve efficiency, and also amortize R&D. Eventually you reach somewhere with very good efficiency and costs close to the raw material cost.
[1] That said, maybe you can shrink the thickness of a cell? That being the case, at one point just the cost of the frame for keeping the cell integrity (specially under wind loads etc.) would start dominating costs, and also the (copper) wiring outputting power from cells. I wonder how far we are from this being the case?
Wind power is interesting because it's mostly a mechanical problem (or at least there's a significant mechanical component). You have to transport the forces on a moving blade, or some kind of moving part (it has to be moving due to P=F.v), so all those parts have a minimum thickness necessary to offload those forces to the ground. It would increase mechanical efficiency (by requiring less load for a given power) if you could increase the velocity of the moving parts, but wind speed itself is limited. You could try funneling the wind, but that introduces structures which themselves suffer stresses (and also induce drag lowering efficiency). There's a limit (at material/W) given by wind speed, and specific strength of the structural material.
This very long exponential improvement (miniaturization) march is a somewhat unique effect to information processing[2], because information can in principle be represented at any scale. That's not to say that all those technologies can't be significantly improved. Generally automation, mass production, along with (limited) efficiency improvements and general cleverness can go a very long way.
[2] I don't mean to be taken as law: there are probably also applications (outside information processing) that you can only do well with the benefit of certain scales. For example, the cells of our bodies are wonderful mechanisms whose magic really works because they can each play tiny mechanisms and deploy molecular-scale objects to act on such tiny scales, and the billions of them make machines that have no parallels in terms of large-scale fabrication (including self-repair, filtration of compounds, ...).
Pretty sure I've seen that the cells themselves are already a minority of the total cost of a solar installation. Most of it is labor, permitting, framing (as you mentioned) and other ancillary things. Dropping the price of PV cells is all to the good, but it's not the limiting factor for mass adoption of PV.
Increasing the efficiency of cells would help more, since you could get more power from a given amount of the other supporting stuff.
Unlike the software world (which has great open-source foundations for a lot of the core tools used, such as compilers and operating systems), many of the software tools used in electronics design automation (EDA) and semiconductor fabrication are developed by industry giants at high costs (edit: high costs to the users), with little consideration given to the quality and performance of the software itself (not all parts are bad, but typically most are).
Fortunately, academia and open source have been accelerating progress within the EDA stack with long-standing tools like Yosys, full-stack academic projects for tape out with good backing like OpenROAD, and workgroups like CHIPS Alliance.
However, I believe that there is still a gap between academic + open-source efforts and industry research. To really enchippify everything, the academic and open-source communities need more open and accessible tools for people to use, without having to rely solely on industry tools, funding, and higher motives.
Integrated circuit manufacturing scales well because the cost per transistor is lower with every process improvement, so as process improvements accumulate, more value (or perhaps more productivity) per wafer is created. This strictly applies to digital circuitry - most analog circuitry requires a certain geometry or process technology not available on a massively optimized modern digital process. While some analog technology improvements are made, it's at a much slower pace. Moreover, a lot of analog redesigns come about as a means to abandon older, less cost-effective semiconductor technology - so the argument that cheap older tech is a boon to any industry outside of limited volume and high cost R&D is suspicious.
Solar cost improvements are in large part a function of massive economies of scale coupled with cheap manufacturing costs and government subsidies from the primary country of origin (which country? Take a guess). I'm sure there's been improvements in a handful of solar material designs, but if you make a large enough volume of panels in a country with cheap labor and massive government subsidies, costs go down. It's not rocket science. To the extent that modern semiconductor technology has improved solar, maybe an argument can be made for improved digital inverter controllers and for silicon carbide FETs maturing enough to make high-voltage panels efficient and ubiquitous at grid-scale deployments. But it's mostly volume, cheap labor costs, and government subsidies.
I don't know about biotech. The following is speculation. I think a lot of biotech was feasible 25 years ago in terms of manufacturability of microfluidics or molecular identification circuitry; but the cost of mass manufacture, and particularly the compute requirements to quickly recover signal from a highly noisy process, wasn't economical or simple to build until digital signal processing and general purpose compute became cheap and fast enough to integrate alongside the biosensors, often as copackaged modules, or generic coprocessors (ARM, RISC-V, etc) that can be built on a ton of different processes and which export raw sensor data quickly enough to allow much heavier duty professors to do the bulk of the work.
I think actual fabrication tech improves slowly, because at its core it's chemistry and material science which also improves slowly (see: batteries). Digital circuitry is a mind-blowing exception, thanks to the incredible amount of usable abstractions that can be built from the manufacture of two specific transistor recipes. But digital circuitry is so powerful, it becomes possible to abstract away massive chunks of otherwise difficult problems in software, firmware, or dedicated transistor-level algorithm implementations, which reduces the amount of physical-world improvements needed to make useful innovations.
How cheap is that? Cheap enough to do it at home?
Because that's something we really need right now. We should be able to fabricate our own integrated circuits at home just like we can make software at home. Democratization and decentralization of this technology would be world changing and would protect us against numerous government and industry interests. It would be enough to safeguard computer freedom forever.