Inside The Worlds Largest Semiconductor Factory - BBC Click

For 30 years Taiwan experienced massive industrialization in what is known as the Taiwan miracle, huge technology companies grew to become household names like Asus HTC Acer and the center of this was the

semiconductor

industry led by a Which you've probably never heard of, TSMC, is one of the

largest

semiconductor

manufacturers in the world. They produce the chips inside some of the best phones, including the iPhone 11. Chances are if you have a smartphone you have something made. by TSMC and these chips were only possible thanks to the discovery of semiconductors, why are some an important or interesting contactor because it changes your life with factories or fabs as they are known around the world, the

largest

is here in Taiwan and is has given us exclusive access to see what those chips that form the heart of our electronic devices are like. created but before we could enter the

factory

it was quite a process to go through.

I have to take off my shoes on the carpet. The locker is put away and that was just the beginning. I had to put on a hair net, wash my hands, and use this to keep the dust out pretty, but it's time for an air shower. Wafer manufacturing has to be extremely precise, they can't tolerate any particles that could fall on the wafer and damage the chips, so they finally let us into the

factory

and there was a good reason for all that nonsense is that the speed of these chips depends on how many transistors you can cram into a small space and when I say small I'm talking nanometers so even specks of dust would matter.

I really don't know how to describe it. It's okay if it's five nanometers or seven nanometers, but I think people often say that if you look at xx one nanometer, it was like thousands of the diameter of a human hair. In this fully automated factory, the lights stay yellow to protect the product and machinery is moving everywhere, but there's quite a bit here that we can't film because it's cutting-edge technology, so it has to stay pretty secret. We have to protect our customers' information in any way we can. So basically, we don't allow cameras to roam freely within our factory because they can inevitably collect customer information between all the automated devices in this facility.

They travel 400,000 kilometers a day, to put that in context, which is 10 times around the Earth, that's all. about the concept of keeping up with Moore's Law as predicted by Intel engineer Gordon Moore in the 1960s, refers to doubling the transistors on a chip every 2 years while calculating the cost, a concept every increasingly difficult to follow even though we wait a lot. more of our lives becoming more connected, the next driver is what we call ubiquitous computing, it is computing everywhere and at any time, all devices are connected, billions and billions of edge devices that are smart and They can compute at any time, communicate and link, and that would be the future enabled by semiconductors