Jon Y: belief

Transcript context

…I watched a video about IRDS or whatever, 10 or 20 years ago, where they're like, "We're going to do EUV instead of the other thing. This is the path forward." How do they do that if they don't have the whole picture of different constraints, trade-offs, and so on? They kind of argue it out. They get together and they talk and argue. Basically, at some point, a guy somewhere says, "I think we can move forward with this. " Semiconductors are so siloed. The data and knowledge within each layer is: A) Not documented online at all because it's all siloed within companies. B) There's a lot of human element to it because a lot of the knowledge, as Jon was saying, is apprentice-master type of knowledge. Or it's "I've been doing this for 30 years," and there's an amazing amount of intuition on what to do just when you see something. AI can't just learn semiconductors like that. But at the same time, there's a massive talent shortage and ability to move forward on things. Most of the equipment in semiconductor fabs runs on Windows XP. Each tool has a Windows XP server on it. All the chip design tools have CentOS version 6, which is old as hell. There are so many areas where it's so far behind. At the same time, it's so hyper-optimized that the tech stack is broken in that sense.…

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