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Originally Posted by freebeard
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My question was what step in the fabrication process was the bottleneck to fulfilling demand, not why demand in general went up, though both questions are interesting.
The first link seems to suggest it's substrate (bare silicon wafers) that was the bottleneck.
Apparently auto manufacturers planned on reducing manufacturing capacity during the pandemic assuming sales would be soft, but that wasn't the case. With people scrambling to purchase home office equipment, those industries secured contracts for the chip processing that the automotive industry was no longer utilizing. Finally, after realizing that auto sales are not declining as predicted, the auto industry finds themselves at the back of the line with their chip orders.
The bottleneck at the fab I worked at was DSP (double-side polish). Each machine occupied a large space and took hours of polishing for just a few wafers. It required manually loading, and lots of maintenance as there are mechanical wear items that need frequent replacement (it's an abrasive process after all). There was a rumor that the process would be automated as I left the company, but I bet that never happened. Automation may have made the process slightly more efficient, but mostly it was to reduce the department that required the most human labor.
There was also rumor of building a 450mm fab, but apparently that's not happening anytime soon. Heck, I heard more rumor about expanding 200mm fab (apparently the process the auto industry relies on) than anything else. Our 200mm process was very labor intensive as automation had not been developed as well back when that technology was implemented. Wafers were shuttled around on battery operated robots that followed magnetic dots on the ground. The 300mm process has overhead cranes to shuffle boxes of wafers around to the various machines.