Chipmaker TSMC, which produces cutting-edge chips for the likes of Apple, AMD, and Nvidia (to name a few), took viewers inside its Arizona fabrication plant in a new video. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s worth your next few minutes, and if you’ve already seen it, you know it’s worth watching again. Getting a chance to check out the clean room and its whirring robots—and see how the digital sausage gets made—is an unusual opportunity.
The video takes you down the “silver highway,” in which pods carrying wafers zip from one place to the next. They run along the ceiling on tracks, then move down into the machines below.
“We have about 700 unified pods that carry the wafers,” says Jared Allen, AMHS Engineer at TSMC Arizona.
Less than a minute into the video, the wafers make an appearance, and you can see the machines in action. Phase One of the Arizona fab makes use of TSMC’s N5 and N4 processes (5nm and 4nm class, respectively), so presumably we’re watching those processes in action as the wafers zip from one tool to the next in their pods.
Dutch tech firm ASML builds the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that etch billions of microscopic transistors into the wafers. As Tom’s Hardware points out, the EUV machines are probably Twinscan NXE:3600D models. According to ASML, that model uses a 13.5 nm EUV light wavelength source and supports 5nm and 3nm nodes.
In recent years, the Netherlands has restricted what companies like ASML can sell to China, with the support of the US. The result is that China appears to have been unable to get the latest of ASML’s EUV systems. Although China has been able to modify some systems to enhance their capabilities, it is believed to be well behind the West in the race for smaller nodes.
The video takes place at Fab 21, which is located in Arizona. The facility you see in the video is estimated to be producing at least 15,000 wafers per month, and it’s likely getting close to its capacity, which is thought to be 24,000 per month. TSMC keeps much of the details regarding its plants close to the vest, which is why it’s surprising (and rare) to get a video walkthrough of the Arizona fab’s clean room.
TSMC had modest plans for the Arizona facility when it announced in 2020 that it would build a fab on US soil. Since then, however, government interest in bringing manufacturing jobs to the US has helped TSMC expand Fab 21. The company now plans to build this site a “gigafab cluster.”