Where are you now, gambit, Cali? can you tell us more on Intel activities in Vietnam mean ?
I shuffle between CA, ID, and UT.
As far as Intel Viet Nam goes on what this, this is a positive move for both parties. Viet Nam needed to break away from the failed economic policies of the communists and Intel needed low labor cost. But there is a reason why VN will be doing a lot of backend (BE) processes and it is the same issues that mainland China faces when China began entering the semicon industry -- clean electricity.
BE processes are not as sensitive to electrical power fluctuations as device construction during wafer processing. BE processes are extractions from the wafer according to a map, encapsulation, assembly into a final package form, then testing. Any electrical supply fluctuation and the machines doing those processes will stop but no real harm done to the device, be it a CPU or a memory device.
The only real risk is when the chip is under electrical reliability stress testing, which is when the chip is under high voltage/ampere/temperature designed to simulate time and wear. Some of these tests are actually physically destructive at the device construct level and the chips are sampled testing, not actually all of them are stressed. The data is then extrapolated to mean so-and-so chip, CPU or memory, to last so-and-so yrs under so-and-so environmental conditions. Some of the samples may be sent to a separate facility to test for even more extreme demands for customers such as NASA and the military. I used to design and run Burn-In experiments for DRAM memory for military oriented customers such as Raytheon.
This is where I used to work...
Test - Micron Technology, Inc.
Simulating actual usage, Micron's proprietary AMBYX™ ovens run monitored performance tests on every chip. This helps to guarantee the reliability of the parts customers receive and reduces overall test time and production costs.
See those blue structures in the first image ? Those are Micron's proprietary Burn-In ovens. They are literally ovens running temperatures high enough to bake pizzas. They were my playgrounds for about five yrs. I learned Python with them since their test codes were written in Python.
Viet Nam needs to clean up her national electrical power grid. When a wafer device is under construction in a chem bath, any electrical fluctuations will affect the bath's temperature and when you are dealing of measurements in nanometer, any deviations can ruin the entire wafer. Depending on how far a device have been constructed, rework may not be possible and usually the further along the device's construction, the harder it is to rework to recover any mistakes, human, machine, or process related.
For example...CMP...
Chemical-mechanical planarization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...is a process of smoothing surfaces with the combination of chemical and mechanical forces. It can be thought of as a hybrid of chemical etching and free abrasive polishing.
If a CMP machine is stopped at this point due to power loss, the wafer is scrapped. There may be over or under polished, causing various failures at BE electrical testing. The slurry and the pads working on the wafers, several wafers at a time, must be constantly in motion. The duration and level of polish are precisely controlled. If a wafer is not scrapped, then the dies (chips) will be sold at a loss. Instead of Tier One customers like Sony or Raytheon, the dies would go to Joe Schmoe's Memory Supply, a Tier Three customer.
The Chinese and the Taiwanese went through the same national ordeal when they started out. No different than what VN is going through now. I saw alot of shitty wafers from Micron fabs that experienced power loss -- from lightning strikes. The entire fab literally went dark. The loss from one hour were tens of million$$$.
Do not let the Chinese trolls put down what is happening in VN with this venture. BE testing is
NO LESS important than front end construction in semicon manufacturing of any product.
