[Music]
this chip controls your car stores data
about what you bought
and runs the software on your laptop
these chips have come to power our lives
and only a handful of fabrication plants
or fabs in the world
have the know-how and infrastructure to
make them so most of the chips are
produced outside of the us
like at this fab in singapore to build a
fab
is a big investment and now the world is
running out of chips because companies
can't make them fast enough
when order really flooding in we had to
turn on every single piece of machine
that we can find in the factory
the pandemic rattled supply chains and
led to a surge in demand for electronics
when people were stuck at home
while a perfect storm of natural
disasters a fire at one of the world's
leading auto chip makers
and the ongoing u.s china trade war
disrupted the production and
distribution of semiconductors
this shortage has affected whether you
can drive a jeep off the lot or buy a
new playstation 5.
we visit one of the world's largest
contract chipmakers to see the complex
process
and why there's no quick fix to the
supply crunch
chip usually takes about two to three
months to make
daniel rajkumar is a manufacturing
manager at one of the fabs at global
foundries
the american company is the third
largest contract chip manufacturer in
the world
companies like intel amd and bosch give
some of their circuitry designs to
global foundries
and then its fabs like this one in
singapore manufacture the chips
once we finish the fabrication of the
circuitry
it has to go for testing it has to go
for repackaging
altogether it could take as much as six
months before a chip is ready to go into
your tech
this long process starts here at the
center of the fab called the clean room
before going into the clean room we need
to gown up because ships can be as small
as a fingernail and crammed with
billions of components
they have to be handled with free care
any form of dust that
falls onto the way first it will cause
the chip to be defected
and then now we are able to go into the
air shower
global foundry says this clean room is a
thousand times cleaner than an operating
room
and it also takes up a lot of space two
footballs feel
that's how big it is we have about seven
to eight hundred machines
it's also yellow in here because chips
are sensitive to uv rays
and this lighting has none of that this
is always the first step
the starter material for any chip is
here in this room
these super thin discs are called wafers
and made from silicon
eventually one of these will produce
about 1 000 to 1500 individual chips
but before it does the wafer is placed
in a special container
we have the raw silicon we are now
trying to
register this material and transfer it
into our
wafer carrier each carrier can hold up
to 25 wafers and there are about 4 000
of these
moving around the facility at one time
we are also the source of
particles when we go into the clean room
so never once during manufacturing does
the wafer come in contact with any of
the workers
it will bring the wafers directly to the
machine
and in this foundry basically 95
of all processing jobs is fully
automated these raw wafers are cleaned
before starting a process that rajkumar
describes as similar to making layered
cake
the main function of diffusion furnace
is basically to grow layers of
oxide or to dab the nitride onto the
silicon
that creates a protective coating next
is a layer that makes the wafer light
sensitive so it's ready for one of the
most important steps called lithography
this is the most expensive module in any
wafer foundry the number of lithography
machine
will define how many wafers you can
produce in a month or a year
one lithography machine can cost
anywhere between 25 million to over
a hundred million dollars and that's
because it's responsible for adding
layers of the circuitry
basically electronic components like
transistors and diodes
that allow the chips to eventually store
data or run apps
what i'm holding here is basically a
pattern design
of a circuitry inside this pink box is a
photo mask
which is like a glass stencil and
clients send these directly to global
foundries
the lithography machine blasts uv light
through the photo mask
and prints patterns on the wafer over
and over again
the difference between an advanced chip
for a 5g smartphone versus one for your
credit card
comes down to the type of wavelength
that's used shorter wavelengths mean you
can etch finer features and get more
performance out of the chips
some of these transitors are so small
that they're measured in nanometers and
compared to dna strands
once the circuitry pattern is imprinted
the wafer has to be charged
these machines use a lot of energy to
produce
electrical charge that allows the
electrical to flow
to the chip and also creates the
different type of function for your
electrical chips
rajkumar says many of these steps are
repeated hundreds of times before the
fabrication is complete
and to get to this point these orders
have to be made at least a
year in advance i have a demo wafers
here
the finished wafers are tested then
finally sliced into individual chips
one is the small dye wafers which is
mainly used for bank cards or chips
and then you have the other one which is
the bigger die wafers which can go into
other kind of applications like computer
processing chips or electrical
appliances
global foundry says its fab in singapore
typically makes about 600 000 wafers a
year
but with the recent surge in demand it's
making around 120
000 more this whole year is fully booked
up we don't have any more space for new
customers
tan yukung is the vice president and
general manager of global foundries fab
seven in singapore
and he says there's no quick solution
there's no space that you can house
another lithography to
or any other tools that you like to buy
it is
a lead time easily a one year to 15
months
you you can see a tool that is coming
into your factory
it's not just a backlog of equipment but
tan says expanding or building a fab
from the ground up
would require deep investments more than
the 1.4 billion dollars that global
foundries has already committed to spend
this year
on expanding its three fabs around the
world you easily
need to spend 7 billion to 15 billion
depending on the size of the factory you
want to build and the technology that
you're going to develop
can easily take you decades to build the
foundations
so to fill as many orders as quickly as
possible the company turned on idle
machines
and opened this factory control tower
engineers here have a bird's eye view of
the entire fab
and the green boxes show which machines
are running at max capacity
before this control tower when there was
a problem engineers had to sort through
data and piece together information
themselves
compared to today just looking at the
screen you already know that
this is a piece of machine you need to
pay attention now
tan says any time saved is precious but
to truly address the shortage
the company is working more closely with
its clients suppliers and the government
we're going to continue seeing more
government support
because it is becoming such an important
part of the entire global supply chain
there's no reason why
americans should wait we're investing
aggressively in areas like
semiconductors and batteries
the biden administration has proposed 50
billion dollars to boost america's chip
production
that's because while the u.s is one of
the largest semiconductor markets
the majority of the complex and
expensive manufacturing happens at a few
companies based
in china and east asia that's because
the world's biggest foundry in the world
tsmc is located in taiwan samsung also
has a sizable foundry
as well as some chinese players this
concentration of fabs
means any disruption to the supply chain
like a drought in taiwan
or political tensions with china can
have big ripple effects
especially when global demand is
expected to grow by more than 12 percent
this year
we have technologies like 5g and
artificial intelligence
and these types of advanced technology
means that more trips would be needed
to operate the devices that we use every
day
to meet that demand the chip industry
association says it will require an
investment of three trillion dollars
globally over the next three decades
so for us to buy new devices tan says
his fab will work around the clock as it
turns this challenge into a business
opportunity
from the ambitions or wanting to grow
the company this is definitely a
positive point for us
this over demand is going to be around
for a while