So chances are those finished wafers are either in the trash or sitting in a warehouse somewhere
Is this only based on the assumption that they don’t own their own equipment to manufacture DIMMs, or is there some other context to support this?
I would have guessed that they’d send the wafers to some company who has the equipment. That would seem pretty normal to me (though all of my manufacturing experience was with much simpler products at a much smaller scale).
I’ve not been able to find any solid intel on what actually happened to the wafers.
Thing is though- cutting wafers and packaging can be done at any fab so in theory they could find an older fab with excess capacity and pay them to do some of it.
Binning however requires some more specialized equipment, that from what I understand is more specific to the type of chips you’re making. This is where you test each individual chip- out of a wafer you’ll get some great ones, some good ones, some bad ones, and some that don’t work at all. Thus ‘binning’ is taking a stream of chips and sorting them into bins by their maximum speed, stability, etc.
You might find a fab that has the equipment to bin DRAM chips but not the means to manufacture those chips. Still it seems an odd use of resources to get into the chip production business when your core business has nothing to do with chips.
Is this only based on the assumption that they don’t own their own equipment to manufacture DIMMs, or is there some other context to support this?
I would have guessed that they’d send the wafers to some company who has the equipment. That would seem pretty normal to me (though all of my manufacturing experience was with much simpler products at a much smaller scale).
I’ve not been able to find any solid intel on what actually happened to the wafers.
Thing is though- cutting wafers and packaging can be done at any fab so in theory they could find an older fab with excess capacity and pay them to do some of it.
Binning however requires some more specialized equipment, that from what I understand is more specific to the type of chips you’re making. This is where you test each individual chip- out of a wafer you’ll get some great ones, some good ones, some bad ones, and some that don’t work at all. Thus ‘binning’ is taking a stream of chips and sorting them into bins by their maximum speed, stability, etc.
You might find a fab that has the equipment to bin DRAM chips but not the means to manufacture those chips. Still it seems an odd use of resources to get into the chip production business when your core business has nothing to do with chips.