Fracking ban.

[freebeard]

My question was what step in the fabrication process was the bottleneck to fulfilling demand, not why demand in general went up....

And my answer was that one step that requires warm furry mammals to show up to move the knobs and levers.

[redpoint5]

My previous employer would use slack sales demand to produce extra product and warehouse it for when demand exceeded production capacity. I'm sure that inventory was chewed up.

Perhaps solar production should be curtailed until IC demand is met.

[freebeard]

The lateral move would be concentrated thermal solar driving Stirling Cycle/turbine/thermo-electric power into liquid metal batteries.

Else artificial photosynthesis....

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Luckily the environmental idiots failed to block natural gas facking and pipelines.
Or we would still be getting 40% of our electricity from coal.

Regardless of how energy is generated, they would find an excuse to complain.

[Piotrsko]

AFAIK, the bare wafers. The one major manufacturing facility slowed down because orders dried up and it takes them a long while to re-speed back up. No dies, nothing to grow chips on and JIT sucks on error recovery for critical parts, particularly when they are long lead expensive.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

AFAIK, the bare wafers. The one major manufacturing facility slowed down because orders dried up and it takes them a long while to re-speed back up. No dies, nothing to grow chips on and JIT sucks on error recovery for critical parts, particularly when they are long lead expensive.

That's part of the reason why my previous employer never stopped making wafers when there were fewer orders. Just keep the machines running and store the excess product for when it's needed later.

It doesn't take that long to spin back up though. We would schedule a shut down to upgrade a power circuit somewhere, and make it coincide with the planned 1:00am shutdown for "fall back" time change. They'd be up and running within 24hrs of the shut down. Of course, it takes forever to melt down silicon rocks, let alone grow the crystal ingots, but we're talking a day or 2 of lost production and not weeks.

The bottleneck was DSP, so shutting down the crystal pullers didn't really put the company behind schedule either.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Of course, it takes forever to melt down silicon rocks, let alone grow the crystal ingots

Makes me wonder to which extent it would be more efficient to use carbon-based chips instead of silicon.

[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

Makes me wonder to which extent it would be more efficient to use carbon-based chips instead of silicon.

So you dope the carbon with silicon? I haven't seen where you can build a control junction out of carbon, but it ain't my sphere of specialty.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by CR

Makes me wonder to which extent it would be more efficient to use carbon-based chips instead of silicon.

That's what you call a forward-looking statement.

IBM builds graphene chip that's 10,000 times faster, using ...
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...cmos-processes
Engineers at IBM Research are claiming to have built the world's most advanced graphene-based computer chip, with performance that's 10,000 times better than previous graphene ICs. The key to the ...

Tiny graphene microchips could make your phones and ...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/tiny-g...ay-scientists/
Graphene strips folded in similar fashion to origami paper could be used to build microchips that are up to 100 times smaller than conventional chips, found physicists - and packing phones and ...

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I was actually considering graphene as a way to eventually move away from silicon-based chips, and maybe simplify the logistics.