Fracking ban.

[Grant-53]

To understand climate we must understand the Sun as it is the dominate factor. Cause and effect methods and systems analysis are valuable tools to assess policies through simulation before implementing them. Population and demographics is more than just raw numbers. Look at the rates of production and consumption of regional populations. Infanticide is the mark of failed leadership. Poverty most often arises from the lack of opportunity to secure resources. The economics of substitution affects the rate of change from one product to another. The changes are either evolutionary through continuous improvement or revolutionary when a paradigm takes place.

[freebeard]

Space Weather News

[oil pan 4]

The true hard core koolaid drinking believers insist the sun has no effect on climate.

Originally Posted by Xist

Those who could afford to slash carbon usage are vastly outnumbered by those who can't.

Exactly.
China will take us to 600ppm. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

[oil pan 4]

Hey this just in, from a few months ago, according to the energy info agency:
In 2020, 40% of the electricity generated in the United States came from natural gas.
Luckily the environmental idiots failed to block natural gas facking and pipelines.
Or we would still be getting 40% of our electricity from coal.

[Piotrsko]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Exactly.
China will take us to 600ppm. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Eventually the climate penalties will affect everybody. They know they pollute and need to change but making a couple billion of something is a bit pricey. Same for India

[oil pan 4]

This is probably near the peak of world solar panel production.
So solar panels won't save the world.
Best case scenario solar panels take up the peak day time load.

[freebeard]

Solar panels are just a bridge to get us to multi-planetary status. There's all the energy and materials you could want there.

Also:

Artificial photosynthesis - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis
Artificial photosynthesis is a chemical process that biomimics the natural process of photosynthesis to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen.

[redpoint5]

Can we blame chip shortages on solar?

Is it the substrate that's in short supply, or is it the photolithography process that's the bottleneck?

[freebeard]

duckduckgo.com/?q=chip+shortages&ia=web

Scanning the front page, it seems to be the Plandemic, but I suspect it also involves liberal unemployment benefits.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

duckduckgo.com/?q=chip+shortages&ia=web

Scanning the front page, it seems to be the Plandemic, but I suspect it also involves liberal unemployment benefits.

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.