josaka · HackerTrans

I suspect it's, in part, because humidity is low. The fab needs to tightly control humidity and temperature. Pulling water from air is energy intensive. Facilities team in the fab I used to work in said their most energy intensive days where the most humid days.

josaka

3 years agodiscuss

My intuition matches yours. It's abundant enough to find its way into alloys for jet engine blades at single digit percentages: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/science-features... And if used in chips, you don't need to make the full substrate with this material, just a few hundred nanometers at the top, in the active area.

josaka

3 years agodiscuss

Same fab, same experience. I would add that a deep understanding (and ability to explain) statistics was more critical than understanding the underlying device physics for most roles I encountered. Enormous amounts of noisy data, characterizing several hundred process steps, is harnessed to apply massive pressure on engineers to "fix" problems that might just be a statistical blip. Economic stakes of minor yield deviations are so high that you often have to act as if something might be wrong before signals reach statistical significance. I bailed after four years, but it was great experience to start my career.

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