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WTF?! A Reddit consumer claims to have found a whole 12nm TSMC wafer discarded in a dumpster close to one of many chipmaker’s fabs in China. Whereas it was only a take a look at wafer, the discover sparked jokes about chopping it into working GPUs and served as a reminder of the complexities of chip manufacturing.
The Reddit consumer who shared the images, AVX512-VNNI, claims to have discovered the wafer close to TSMC’s Fab 16 manufacturing facility in Nanjing, China. Whereas not cutting-edge, that fab nonetheless produces moderately superior 12nm node chips, that means we’re speaking about extremely precious silicon right here.
However certainly an organization like TSMC would not simply dump their IP this manner for the world to repeat? Certainly, they did not, and there is a affordable rationalization for the “blunder.” The identical Redditor pointed out later beneath the publish that this seems to be what’s generally known as a “take a look at wafer” used to calibrate the lithography machines that sample the circuitry onto manufacturing wafers.
Phew. That is definitely not as disastrous as tossing out wafers containing precise buyer chip designs, like Nvidia’s RTX 50 sequence GPUs. These could be far too precious to misplace. Or maybe the reason is even less complicated: the Redditor is an worker at one of many foundries and is simply joking.
Do not miss our explainer: What is Chip Binning?
Anyway, for some fast context, semiconductor wafers are the clean slates that get transformed into finished chips by means of repeated lithographic patterning, deposition, and etching steps. After processing, they get chopped up into particular person chip dies, a course of generally known as dicing. These particular person dies are then packaged into CPUs, GPUs, and different semiconductor merchandise.
Nevertheless, not all chips carry out equally, even when they arrive from the identical wafer. That is the place chip binning is available in. After dicing, every die is examined and sorted based mostly on components like velocity, energy effectivity, and defect rely. Solely the best-performing chips make it into the best bins, destined for flagship merchandise, whereas extra flawed dies are assigned to decrease bins for mid-range or entry-level elements.
So in that sense, this wafer incident might be seen as a somewhat excessive case of “binning” – as in straight into the trash can. Now, whereas it is already established that the wafer was seemingly a take a look at unit, this hasn’t stopped Redditors from pondering whether or not it could be attainable to salvage the wafer and extract any particular person dies.
One commenter suggested utilizing a pizza cutter to cube up the wafer, whereas one other proposed skipping the slicing altogether and wiring up your entire wafer. Curiously, that is truly a respectable method known as wafer-scale computing, so they could be onto one thing.
The incident additionally sparked some good-natured roasting of Nvidia over the RTX 50 sequence, with one commenter quipping “Hey look, somebody discovered the lacking ROPs” in reference to a few of these GPUs transport with missing render output units.
