I was involved in writing software for a small Fab and there is a big gap in the MES software space. If you want to start a new Fab, you need a manufacturing execution system (MES) to process wafers. This whole MES industry is ripe for innovation. For small Fabs, it’s not possible to afford MES-3000 from Applied Materials ~ multi-million $ license fees and it’s a beast of a system. I’ve had to deal with this ancient dog of a MES written in Coldfusion. Had several conversations with coworkers - “Wonder what the market is like for modern SaaS MES”. It’s a complex problem if you want to auto load recipes and control equipment with SECS/GEM, implement PCS, and run a Fab in the manner like Intel. This is one of the problems with scaling the Fab. Think automotive factory scaling but with expensive precision equipment and garbage software ecosystem.
At that point how is it differentiated from the incumbent product?
If you are running a serious fab you already have AMAT equipment anyway and there's probably good reasons to get the industry standard AMAT MES software.
Realistically, this software will probably continue not to exist because there are not many target customers in this "mini-fab" segment, and they are uniformly poor. That's not a great outlook for sales. If your software is any good, you want to market to the same segment AMAT does and go for the multi-million $ licensing fees.
Then what makes it a service? It would be unwieldy to bring in consultants... unless they can take over for the extant fab techs as soon as they arrive. Any downtime in the fab is millions lost.
There are a few options for smaller fabs. There's SiView from IBM, a few products from Inficon which can handle much of an MES's capabilities and some others:
I'd bet there is a reasonable market for a good SAAS MES, or at least parts of a total solution. I imagine that you would want at last part of the solution to be on-prem, to avoid shuttling the large amounts of data that process tools are producing offsite.
You can read the SEMI standards. All of this is thoroughly standardized to allow interoperability between equipment from different suppliers.
SECS (SEMI Equipment Communications Standard) and GEM (Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment) will be of particular interest.
Environmental regulations were sited without clear specification of what exactly the issue is. There is strong precedence on why we need those regulations to prevent issues that the "future" then has to deal with. How many super fund sites are there in the USA today and how many are a result from companies being able to get away with lax environmental regulations at the time? China is already dealing with this by forcing heavily polluting industries to shut down, cut off power, unbreathable air in cities, etc.. all because of lax environment regulations to begin with.
The way the regulatory environment works in the US is something like this.
Something bad happens, so new regulations are imposed. The regulators don't always know what they're doing and frequently make poor cost benefit decisions. Meanwhile, the existing regulations usually already prohibited whatever the offender did, and the bad thing happened because they were breaking existing law, so they also get sued or prosecuted etc. under existing law anyway.
Despite this being completely nuts, it kind of works to deter pollution. The new regulations are like extra punishment for screwing up. The company, and the entire industry, has to pay more in regulatory compliance forever because they did a bad thing. So they really don't want to do that.
The problem is that the effect is cumulative and doesn't just impact the offender. Every time someone breaks the law in a high profile way, the compliance costs go up. They never go down. The new laws are useless because the bad thing has been prohibited for decades and the actual cause was companies violating existing laws. So the more time passes, the more regulations we get and the less competitive the US becomes.
Somebody who knows what they're doing needs to go through the existing regulations and strip out the ones that are wasteful and redundant while leaving the ones that efficiently prohibit bad acts.
But the political process is terrible at handling details like that. If someone proposes getting rid of an environmental regulation, it doesn't matter what it says. You can predict who will support it and who will oppose it. And it's the same people in support and opposition whether it's an actually necessary regulation with a moderate burden and a very large important reason for existing, or a useless web of red tape which is fully redundant with existing prohibitions but makes everything cost more for no benefit.
I agree, but the US has a very shortsighted attitude here.
If you place regulatory burdens on some undesirable behavior (e.g. pollution) but do not place compensatory tariffs on the import of products resulting from that exact same behavior, you're not doing anything to reduce the undesirable behavior. You're simply encouraging people to do the undesirable things elsewhere. This not only fails to accomplish the goal, but also significantly weakens the country.
The exact same problem totally undermines labor policy and unions (except those of government employees).
There really ought to be some sort of automatic mechanism for "if X is illegal/taxed/regulated then importing the result of X happening overseas is forbidden/taxed/regulated". The US already has a specific, very efficient court that does this for one specific illegal act (patent infringement); it wouldn't be difficult to expand that scope:
I'd like full life cycle accounting. Or something to that effect. Basically "you broke it, you bought."
I have no idea how the accounting and finance would work. Bonds, insurance, set asides...
Putting cleanup on the balance sheet would then incentivize both prevention (harm reduction) and investing in new technologies. Like maybe some sci-fi stuff like new microbes to eat toxins, which could then be another biz opportunity.
It's not a balance sheet problem or an accounting problem or a finance problem. Environmental regulations exist to prevent harms to human life and ecosystems that we deem unacceptable to account for as money damages (sorry about your dad, here's $800,000.)
It's working pretty well in the US -- not perfect, with uneven progress, but very measurable. The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught on fire in about 50 years.
Some of the lead time to build fabs in the US is misleading. Offhand I know of at least one site that was 'under construction' for a long time, but intentionally very slow construction. The company wanted a fab there eventually, but wanted to lock in tax rates and other subsidies today. I guess the math came out ahead just making the project take forever to build.
How would someone with $XXM be able to start a semiconductor factory from zero? What are the materials and processes involved in doing it in a contemporary way? Looking for any and all guidance/resources. Thanks!
600 days to build a semiconductor plant seems quite quick! In my part of Britain just now it is not uncommon for it to take over 250 days to get permissions in place to build a 3 bedroom house.
