Inside The Worlds Largest Semiconductor Factory - BBC Click

over 30 years Taiwan underwent massive industrialization in what has become known as the Taiwan miracle huge tech firms grew becoming household names Asus HTC Acer and the center of this was the semiconductor industry led by a company you've probably never heard of TSMC it's one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world producing the chips inside some of the best phones including the iphone 11 it is most likely if you have a smartphone you have something made by TSMC and these chips were only made possible thanks to the discovery of semiconductors why some a contactor important or interesting because it changes your life with factories or fabs as they are known across the globe the largest is here in Taiwan and we've been granted exclusive access to see just how those chips that form the heart of our electronic devices are created but before we could go into the fab it was quite a process to undergo I have to take my shoes off on the carpet Locker it saves and that was just the start I had to put on a hair net wash my hands and wear this to keep the dust out cute but it is time for an air shower [Music] the manufacturing of wafers has to be extremely precise they cannot tolerate any particles they may fall onto the wafer and damaged the chips [Music] so finally we were allowed in the factory and there was a good reason for all of that faff the speed of these chips relies on how many transistors you can cram into a tiny space and when I say tiny I'm talking nanometers so even specks of dust would matter I don't really know how to describe how fine that five nanometer or seven nanometer is but I think people very often say if you look at xx a nanometer it was like one thousands of a the diameter of a human hair in this fully automated Factory the lights are kept yellow to protect the product and the machinery is moving all around but there are quite a few things in here we're not allowed to film because this is seriously cutting-edge technology so it needs to remain pretty secret we have to protect our customers information whichever way we we can and so basically we do not allow cameras to freely roam inside our fab is because inevitably they may pick up customer information between all the automated devices in this facility they travel 400,000 kilometers a day to put that into context that 10 times around earth all of this is about the concept of keeping up with Moore's law as predicted by Intel engineer Gordon Moore in the 60s he refers to the doubling of transistors on a chip every 2 years whilst the cost is carved a concept increasingly hard to keep up with despite us expecting a lot more from our ever connected lives the next driver is what we call ubiquitous computing it is computation everywhere at anytime all the devices are connected billions and billions of edge devices that are smart that can compute at any time and communicate and link and that would be the future enabled by semiconductors

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 570,376

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, news, bbc news, tech, technology, science, made in taiwan, taiwan, china, japan, asia, taiwan miracle, asus, htc, acer, ai, artificial intelligence, tsmc, semi-conductor, moores law, gordan moore, intel, fabs, taipei, factory, automation, machine

Id: Hb1WDxSoSec

Length: 4min 17sec (257 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019