Zen and The Art of Semiconductor Manufacturing

I. BEGINNING

In the beginning was the Sand.

And in the sand there lies the bones of a fab. And within the fab there lies an alien. An angel. Our sweet alien angel that sleeps through the long night. When it wakes up it will bathe in an acid strong enough to kill a man. It will stare at its own reflection in floating droplets of liquid metal. In the shadows of a purple sun it spits blood thick with silicon onto the desert that shifts with the unreality of Sora sand.

II. START

I worked at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in 2023.

There are many reasons why I left a tech job to work at a fab but the one that matters is – I wanted to.

Wanted an intuition for manufacturing. Wanted to learn what was real or bullshit. Wanted to see what a billion construction project backstopped by the US and staked on the national pride of another felt like. Wanted to work on magic.

TSMC is not inherently excellent. They don't hold a mandate from heaven. It will be real once it is real. But the will of the Taiwanese is strong and this succeeds because of Taiwan.

So I went to Arizona.

I like side doors for starting side quests. So I joined a community college course that I had seen in the fine print of a job description. It was full of Intel propaganda, from the Lockheed Martin recruiting playbook, and a possible pipeline to an entry level semiconductor job. At the end of not-really-learning-that-much, I created a group chat with classmates. Sometime later, someone texted. They got a gig as a technician.

A few calls and questionable hiring structure later – I was also in.

III. WATER

The transition from knowledge work to physical work has been … hard.

The first week I was here I drank soy sauce straight from the bottle for salt. Too much water dehydrates.

Building a fab in a desert might not make sense right away, but the lack of water here is priced in. In general, Phoenix is a great place for R&D because even if the elements are harsh they are consistent. You can plan what you can predict. Taiwan is also an island and used to water resource management. When things don't make sense there might be a reason. Or many reasons. I think the delays are on purpose.

The first time I ever used a reverse osmosis system was on a transatlantic crossing to make water. Desalination felt like I was in on a secret. We can just make water!

The RO system here is much bigger than on a sailboat but the mechanisms are the same. The membranes act as the business logic of the system. The membrane used depends on the product you want to make.

To make ultra pure water is to turn something very natural into a quite unnatural state. Water doesn’t want to stay so pure. Resistivity. It feels like a fight against nature. It feels like that’s also what I’m doing.

It might be the dehydration but I notice there is a strange shared vocabulary between making ultrapure water and neural anatomy. Both necessary for thinking beings.

The computers that are needed to run the machines at the fab that are needed to make computers are not up and running, but the water is. Everything needs water. You cannot make these chips without water.

You cannot have life without water.

IV. SYSTEMS

Everything is up to code eventually. OSHA in the fullness of time.

On my second day, the clean room almost lost clean room status. The deionized water tank was running low. When we went to fill it up, no water came. Someone had cut off the pipe on the main line to add a regulator, gone to lunch, and never returned.

We added the first chemical half a year behind schedule. The process was simple: a pressurized truck comes with chemicals, hooks up the hose to the wall, maintains pressure in the system, and charges the line with the correct chemical. Every contractor walked out the building during the chemical offload.

There's supposed to be a barcode system to ensure the right chemicals go into the right line, but it's not set up yet. We use locks and keys instead. This means the software needs a manual override every time we receive a chemical delivery. The code to originally override this system was 666. The Taiwanese team thought it was funny. The US team added the sign of the cross to the standard operating procedure.

I feel like I shouldn't share stories like: there was a fire because a pallet of emergency lights was left outside and the batteries exploded because it was hot outside. A storage unit melted. The sludge presses were installed backwards. This could probably be a problem eventually. That’s for the future to figure out.

Someone had to regulate the pressure in 4,000 safety showers on site and no one body would tell them what that pressure should be. There are a lot of rules written not to be followed but enforced if needed.

Many wires have been getting crossed here. Someone wired all the stop buttons wrong and now they are being rewired. The Chinese stock market red is up and green is down. I learned this because the emergency stop buttons were red to start and green to stop.

In an interesting turn TSMC is taking back ‘ownership’ of the site in what feels like a construction coup (how they lost control is another story). They stopped providing paper cups at the coffee machines shortly after Q2 earnings came out. Everything is about power, expect power right?

My co-worker finds me and says they’re evacuating the building. Chemical spill. I didn’t even hear the alarm, it was just melding with all the other noise. The alarm is not an alarm but an air horn in a bucket and a game of telephone. Everything over-specced, except the things that aren't.

The chemical spill was not a chemical spill but a resin spill. That information is somehow slower to spread. I take chemical resistance safety tape and put it over my pocket with my phone so it doesn't fall into the trenches when I bend over to work. No one is working.

Manufacturing computation is quite a chemical process and I feel closer to the machine god cleaning up spills. Mindless mindfulness.

We ink by on temporary systems, which cause temporary problems, which get in the way of moving towards more permanent infrastructure.

V. STRUCTURE

Fab means many things. It is the entire job site, a specific building, a specific room in said build, and a process - those processes are not happening right now.

My favorite place at the fab is this second side in the sub-basement. The light in there floats, and dust covers bright concrete like a beautiful camel carpet as far as the eye can see. There are 50 multistory pillars holding up what will be the entire fab_the future, if you will. It looks like old oak trees lining a driveway. This side feels like the gates to heaven. The other, the relentlessness of the modern machine.

Pipes form a skeleton around the body of this machine. They move everything.

There are soft power dynamics woven through everything. The hierarchy starts in the parking lot—and a new lot seems to be built overnight.

The closer you are to working on the wafers the more important you are. The facilities department is both essential and low status. Within the different facilities teams there are also different degrees of status.

The teams are divided like elements. Earth, wind, fire, water - well mechanical, water, gas chem, and electrical. Within the teams there are degrees of status based on if you are an engineer or technician, and then there are different shifts like front or back half, day and night shift.

This is no country for in-between men.

The shadow to technological progress is the human side.

It seems everyone has either six months or four decades of experience. People are infrastructure too.

Things are delayed in part because there is confusion on who is in charge of what work at what times. The lines are neatly drawn overseas. I’ve heard the moment the first tools are installed, the entire construction team will put down their work and move to the next fab. The responsibility then shifts to the operations team, who will hire their own crews to finish or repair the job. Clear delineations of work makes it so that responsibility lies on someone eventually. It feels like no one wants to be responsible.

The languages layer like the dust. You can tell who has recently arrived because their shoes are clean. The other day one of my co-workers pointed out an ex-assassant. Apparently gang tattoos read like Linkedin profiles. Everyone’s just here to work. There have been lots of clean shoes.

Sometimes fab schematics are written directly on the wall, and sometimes dust forms a thin layer for people to write on too. The writing is on the wall.

VI. HEAT DEATH

The sun is out again.

The sun beats down and burns my skin under my pants from Walmart.

This is the hottest recorded summer ever and it has lasted for 55 days. I feel like a trisolaran.

There are many days within a day. I wake up between 3 and 4 am. You can say good morning between 6 and 8 am. Around 9 - 10am people start talking about lunch. After noon you don't say good afternoon; Things are not good.

My coworker and I have a game where we guess the time. We use it to calibrate if the day is going faster or slower. We play for fun but a lot of people bet on things - sports, knowledge, procedure. Prediction markets by first principles. If there is a disagreement on how something works the quickest way to end it is to bet on it. Each person will price in their confidence and then we can all stop talking about it.

My new game is every time someone complains about something I ask them for the price and process. I repeat it back to myself until I get a chance to write it down.

I used to be really into the phrase ‘time dilation’ but I can’t stand it now. Want to melt into the fabric of time? Do shift work. Tie a dollar to your time and bend over backwards to get it. It’s so slow out here.

Technicians are considered liabilities so we are given easy work. Watch sensors. Do rounds. Push buttons.

While I work hard, I wouldn't say it's necessarily hard work. It’s such a large project that even pieces are broken down into smaller parts. The essence is work hard on those things.

Get up. Do a thing. It is through narrative systems that things take on meaning.

Manufacturing is hard, but I don't think the ways in which it is hard are new. What needs to be built for the future ? We won't be able to just think towards the light cone.

VII. EGO DEATH

Making semiconductors is primarily a spiritual process – to which I almost lost mine.

I used to have trouble sleeping but a job in construction fixed that. After a week I adjusted. I do anything to use my brain again. I wake up at 3 am to code, to feel a bit more human. I got a used printer and printed off pages of the internet to read in the dirt. I repeated phrases in my head like a mantra because I had a good idea but my hands were full of tools and my phone is locked up half a mile away.

Riding my motorcycle back from work I scream in my helmet. I bite my tongue at red lights to make sure I don’t pass out. I pretend this is practice for the banya. 119 degrees. I wish I was melting in the way that happens right before falling in love and not in this literal way. This bike is an unnecessary risk even by my standards, and I’m aware of that other existential risk. And I do it. Every day!

I have a motorcycle because I don't want to be here for long. I could get a car but I fear it ties me deeper into an American infrastructure. This is my way to ban myself from going west when I wish to go east. New York. Further. I long for London. All the way. Until east isn't east and becomes west again. Not LA. Definitely not San Francisco. This motorcycle is anti-California.

The SF game seems to point towards something I can’t quite see. Sticky self righteousness. Ungrounded realities. Memetic moral hypocrisy. Whatever this is, it bores me. I haven't lived there yet. I don't want to.

I try to keep a clear mind because wants become thoughts, thoughts become words, words actions, and actions reality. It's not a linear process. Want becomes reality without ever speaking them out loud. I need to keep a clear mind.

I may be quiet at times but I have also set myself on fire from the inside. I enter this state with great trepidation because sometimes I let it all burn down for what I want. I wanted to be here.

VIII. ALIENATION

Someone asked me how I’m feeling generally and it’s hard to answer that.

I quickly learned the more tired I am from work the less space I have for feelings.

I’ve been reading a lot. Writing more. I wrote this to a dear friend without sending it.

I wish we were sitting across from each other. I wish I could look you dead in the eye. I would tell you what it’s like here. It hasn't been long but I feel different. I would never need to write how I am different if I were with you. You'd notice my spiritual shifting of weight within a pause between words and know. I spend most of my time with people who don't know me and the rest completely alone. It’s narrowing. I knew I would miss friends but I am surprised by the way that feels. I feel cosmically seen when across from you. And I am starving without it.

Everyone who has cared for me has taught me a new way to care for myself.

The way people talk about aliens here is so different than I am used to. Less dark forest or the earth is a computer and more government conspiracies. It feels like there are people who want a better life and there are people who want a better future. We both want. But instead of being torn between have and hope; one tries to bend the world.

IX. TRY

Truth is quiet. It comes to me in the lulls.

It is Good to come into contact with the world.

There are things people will tell you in the breath between a complaint and question that you can't read anywhere. Earned knowledge.

I look around the job site and think: How does anything work? Is this really the best we can do!

To hold both hope and horror for the world I haven't the word for.

I feel hope that if this is the best we are at manufacturing, there is so much space in which we can do better. And horror that in we, there is me.

There seem to be so few people who work themselves deep into the source. The truth of matters. Or even seem concerned with truth. How do things actually work? Where is this supposed future?

Production was pushed back. I won't stick around to see it through. I am so bored I can feel my teeth.

The hard thing about chasing magic is that if you look at it directly it changes form.

X. BEGINNING

Yeah… I moved to San Francisco after all...

Epistemic status: forward

XI. DISCLAIMER

As is tradition:

What is above is based on actual occurrences. Although some has changed for rhetorical purposes, it should be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on semiconductor manufacturing, either.

And what is good, Phaedrus,

And what is not good…

Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

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