I'm happy to be here with you.
We’re here in our Munich office, where we work together in
one of the most important areas of the world.
I wanted to ask: what is it that are we doing together?
Why is it interesting and why is it so complicated?
Alex, I am really happy to be here today, and that we
are talking together about a very important topic that is
on everybody's mind.
Semiconductors are a very important topic at the moment.
I'm Kai Beckmann from Merck KGaA in Darmstadt, Germany.
And we have been working together for a very long time,
many, many years - and recently on the
topic of semiconductors.
Yes, and we came together in another area.
So, semiconductors, most people think there's a
semiconductor produced somehow, much like there's
milk in cows.
But, making semiconductors is one of the most complicated
things in the world.
How are they made and why is it complicated?
And why is it helpful to work together?
It's pleasant to see you.
We like to work with you.
But why do we need to work together?
What are the complexities and why does the whole world
depend on semiconductors?
I think this year everybody realized- well, it started
last year- that suddenly semiconductors became scarce and
suddenly semiconductors became important for everybody,
for all people.
And semiconductors are not an interchangeable object,
there are only a few.
There’s a conception that I can take this one or that one
and then my car still works, but, rather, they are highly
specialized components of which there are thousands of
different kinds and are manufactured using very different
technologies by different companies
and then fulfill a very special purpose.
In a car, they ensure the navigation works, that you
can drive automatically, that the airbag opens at
the right moment, that the window regulators work.
In a mobile phone, they take over all the functions;
each of these semiconductors is highly specialized and
consists of billions of transistors in the processor.
A processor in a mobile phone today has over
ten billion transistors, which all have to work together to
function and are all very, very small.
We are talking about nanometers.
They are very, very small structures and it takes three
months to make a chip like that.
It's not like you put one in the machine in the morning and
it's ready in the evening; it takes three months from the
beginning of the process to the end of the process with
thousands of steps in between.
And what do we do together and how is Foundry used?
Why would you need software to make semiconductors?
What is the problem?
We now know, thanks to your explanation, that we basically
can't have life as we know it without semiconductors.
But why software?
Why your expertise?
What is the added value?
Or why is it important that we come together?
And what will we as a society get out of it?
The production of semiconductors is done with
very complex equipment, and requires a lot of highly
specialized materials and chemicals -- several thousand
different ones are used in semiconductor technology today.
Perhaps you can imagine it vividly.
We all liked chemistry at school
or didn't like it so much.
If you take the periodic table of the elements, half of it
is used for semiconductor production.
Half of this periodic table is used, and these materials
are highly specialized, highly pure.
They have to be brought together to produce the
semiconductors across the various process steps.
And why do we use Foundry together?
Because, out of these individual process steps, we get
billions of datasets about purity,
the quality of the materials,
temperature, pressure and various things.
By optimizing these parameters, we can improve the
semiconductor manufacturing process, improving our yield.
In other words, more chips work in the end,
and every decimal place in the yield is a gain
for the manufacturer, of course.
Making things cheaper and better for the environment --
because the process produces less waste.
With Foundry, I create a better impact
for the environment.
Sustainability is an important point.
And I can test new technologies faster because I don't need
as many cycles to test new technologies.
These are all effects that are very important for our
customers – for the semiconductor manufacturers.
… and the world.
When supply chains have to be rebuilt
in complicated times, a process that is so complicated that
you can hardly optimize it in normal times,
then we have a world where the cars don't work,
the heating doesn't work, the computers that power everything, don't work
And that's bad.
It's not just an academic thing; it's a thing that we all
basically depend on.
And the primary strength is that it's not just two
partners collaborating – one manufacturer and one material
supplier - there are different equipment manufacturers and
different material manufacturers.
It's “many to many”.
Many people work together and a common data platform is,
of course, incredibly helpful, because the exchange is
standardized and does not always have to be negotiated
individually between two partners.
Yes, that is also something that I think
most people don't understand.
The cooperation of many businesses is a prerequisite for
building a semiconductor, and that also requires that the
data is all in a form that can be exchanged, that can
be handled operationally.
And then you need know-how, which is also very rare,
and software that can back it up.
An important point on the data is that these connections
are not obvious.
The specialists – and there are really highly trained and
highly focused specialists working – they naturally can't
detect all these connections that we can
make using Foundry.
That was a surprise in the end.
We were surprised which parameters of the materials
suddenly influenced the effectiveness.
That's a whole new way of looking at things that we
wouldn't otherwise have been able to do.
Yes, it's interesting that in a lot of things we're active,
the lay perspective is that it's all
easily producible – one hundred percent of the time.
Science has progressed so far, has come so far, that
one can just determine the parameters beforehand.
But we're not there yet.
With these complex processes, there's a lot of room for
improvement and we simply need these advances now,
because the network is suddenly more complicated
for political reasons.
Exactly.
There are more players, more ingredients that then
play a role.
And, of course, the danger of having, I think the Americans
call it confirmation bias –….
So you have an assumption and you try to confirm it and
when you look at the data, suddenly a completely different
view comes along.
And that's what our researchers have seen,
that you see things very, very differently when you look
at the data.
But thank you very much.
This has meant a lot to us, to work with you for years,
to deliver our platform to you .
This collaboration with you and the fact that this plays
such a big role and also that a lot of businesses will
participate in it, motivates us at Palantir and is a big
motivation for me personally.
It’s a great thing.
Thank you very much.
Very briefly – the fact that we worked together during the
pandemic without people meeting in person, I found
particularly inspiring that that worked.
We worked across how many countries…
across three continents Asia, Europe and North America
during the pandemic without people getting on a plane once.
This also shows how well the teams worked.
Many thanks for that.
It was a very inspiring collaboration and still is,
because we are always working to improve it further.
Thank you, Alex.
Thank you.