What It’s Like Inside a Chip Foundry During the Covid-19 Pandemic

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processors/heres-what-its-like-inside-a-chip-foundry-during-the-covid19-pandemic

by segfaultbuserr • 6 years ago

58 16 6 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

netsharc• 6 years ago

Man, the first word of that article is already wrong...

“Ironically, one of the safest places to be right now is in a cleanroom,” points out Thomas Sonderman, president of SkyWater Technology, in Bloomington, Minn.

That's not irony! If it's usually dangerous to be in a clean room, then it is an irony. If they were running a clean room in a virus lab, now that's irony.

What they have is probably an Alanis Morissette song...

segfaultbuserr• 6 years ago

There is an easy fix to this sentence: Ironically, one of the safest __workplaces__ to be right now is in a cleanroom (during a pandemic, a workplace is not usually perceived to be safe).

mhb• 6 years ago

Perhaps better: Ironically, one of the safest places to be right now is a workplace. If you work in a cleanroom.

jsmith99• 6 years ago

Chip makers do use a lot of toxic chemicals such as pirahana solution and carcinogens https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-...

colechristensen• 6 years ago

The meaning of the word 'irony' has changed in what people mean when they use it. It suffered from being an obscure word which gained popularity without most people ever being taught what it means and only learning from context. All words are made up, there's no 'real' meaning.

Another word like this is 'crisis'. It went from meaning "decision" in old Greek to something like "tipping point, or a time of major change" to how most people use it today "time when lots of bad stuff happens". Much of English is poorly translated and pronounced French. Déranger in French is to bother, to be deranged in English... French itself being malformed Roman... you get the picture.

If you go chasing what words "really" mean, you'll learn that almost all of English is loan words which mean something not entirely unlike the word borrowed, and you'll end up trying to reconstruct 7000 year old languages to get to the bottom of a bottomless well.

bigdict• 6 years ago

malformed Roman

Latin

newacct583• 6 years ago

You're picking on sentence construction and not meaning. It's true this is an editing failure, but the sense of the point is fairly clear:

Under the current circumstances, "going to work" is considered dangerous due to the social interaction. But employees going to this workplace are arguably safer than they would be at home, because it's a clean room. (Whether this is true or not is sort of an open question.)

That's irony, as typically understood.

mikejulietbravo• 6 years ago

srsly - comments on this site are kinda outrageous. Is grammar nazi-ing really how people spend time?

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this gem from George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKdvTecYAM

dang• 6 years ago

Let's not go on generic tangents please; especially not nitpicky ones.

This is the sort of thing where in person people would chuckle and move on, but on the internet it leads to a cascade. We all have associations that we can't quite resist adding, and pretty soon it dominates the thread, an outcome no one actually wants.

eternauta3k• 6 years ago

So foundries are still working... what about packaging and testing?

extra__tofu• 6 years ago

Most things are still running, at least in my specific niche within the industry, because nearly everything is in Taiwan.

devonstopps• 6 years ago

Also, clean rooms are designed to keep dust out of the Fab. They are positive pressure rooms versus a virus lab which would be negative pressure rooms to keep material inside the lab. Similarly with protective suits. I.e. in the Fab they don't care if anything enters the clean suit you are wearing - just that nothing leaves it. In a virus lab it would be a positive pressure suit.

aaron_m04• 6 years ago

Is that an important distinction though? In a clean room, there shouldn't be viral particles in the room so the suit wearer would be equally safe if their suit was positive or negative pressure (so long as everyone else has their suits the same way).

What It’s Like Inside a Chip Foundry During the Covid-19 Pandemic

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