Preface. Thomas Thwaites’ book, “The Toaster Project” illustrates why it will be so hard, if not impossible, to bounce back from collapse in the future to anything like what we take for granted today. Thwaites set about trying to make a simple toaster from scratch. How hard could that be? Well, toasters, it turns out, are not so simple. The most basic toaster Thwaites could find had 404 parts, consisting of steel, mica, plastic, copper, and nickel.
You’d think that plastic would be the easiest, but that is the most recent material in a toaster, since it is derived from petroleum, while humans have been smelting and forging copper and iron for thousands of years.
What made industrialization possible was fossil fuels, coal to begin with, and later oil and natural gas. In the future, there may well be lots of fossil fuels left, but most will be miles under the deep ocean, the Arctic, and other places hard to get at or to even now.
To find out how to make iron, Thwaites had to use one of the first metallurgy books ever written from the 16th century.
Modern books don’t tell you how to make iron at home, because you need a multimillion dollar factory. Figuring out how to use coke (coal roasted to remove impurities), instead of charcoal (since nearly all the trees were gone), to make iron is what started the Industrial Revolution.
It took a long time to figure out how to make iron and steel because there are still several kinds of impurities remaining in the coke, and each impurity requires different processes to remove them. For example, to remove the oxygen (which causes iron to rust), you need to tempt it away with carbon monoxide at 1200 degrees Celsius (2370 F) which involves a very tricky precise calibration of not too much or too little air and other calibrations. Check out the contents of Metallurgy for the Non-Metallurgist, Metal Forming: Mechanics and Metallurgy, or Physical Metallurgy Principles in “Look Inside!” Table of contents or Surprise Me! for an inkling of how complex metallurgy is.
It’s not something you can do at home, as Thwaites discovered trying to make iron with coal rather than charcoal. He resorted to using a microwave oven.
Plastic
Plastics are all derived from natural gas or oil, appliances typically use polypropylene. They are much harder to make than iron.
Crude oil is composed of hundreds of different hydrocarbon molecules (carbon and hydrogen) ranging from just a few atoms to longer molecules with 30 atoms. Oil refineries split these molecules into dozens of different products, including propylene, a carbon chain so small it’s a gas, that you need to turn into a solid.
Oil refineries cost billions of dollars, and check out the flow diagram of a typical refinery. So you can’t refine raw oil at home to get the propylene out. Nor was Thwaite able to talk an oil company into doing this for him.
Even if you managed to do this, plastic is much harder than iron to make. As Adrian Higson points out to Thwaite (page 115):
Metals are refined physically through heating and cooling. “We’ve been making iron since the Iron age, but we’ve only been making plastic for about 100 years (most only for 60 years). Plastic needs physical , molecular, and chemical transformations with “strict control of temperature, pressure, mixtures of chemicals, and catalysts” which are difficult to make. Polyethylene is one of the simplest plastics to make, but requires a “minimum of 6 chemical transformations”.
Nor is it easy to melt down and reuse existing plastic, that’s why so little of it is recycled. This is what Thwaite resorts to, and the result is a sorry mess.
In the end, the project was a failure. Thwaite says “It worked for a few seconds, but then the element melted itself. It was quite scary, since there was no insulation on the wires.”
Nor did he make anything from scratch. Thwaites ended up having to use a microwave to make iron, and melted down existing plastic, after failing to make it from potatoes or raw oil. He obtained copper by melting coins, and didn’t attempt to make nickel (doesn’t exist within Great Britain, the boundaries of his project). Only his hunt for mica was successful.
Preface. Most of us are unaware of how complex our society is, how things are made, how food is grown, how stuff is delivered, and the people, energy, transportation, and kinds and sources of materials in every day objects. This essay, written over 50 years ago, gives you an idea of how complex the antecedents of simple objects in your life are, how difficult many will be to make locally. I’ve shrunk and paraphrased much of the essay.
This is also a good way to appreciate the concept of Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Every single step of gathering the ingredients for a pencil and making it required energy. Though this is mainly a concern for building devices that will supply energy, like solar panels or nuclear power plants. If their construction uses more fossil energy than they can deliver, the energy return is negative. But for pencils it doesn’t matter, unless the materials for it grow too expensive.
“…not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”
This sounds fantastic, especially when there are about 1.5 billion of my kind made in the U.S.A. every year. Pick me up and what do you see? Not much — some wood, lacquer, printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
My family tree begins with … a cedar tree from Northern California or Oregon. Now contemplate the antecedents — all the people, numberless skills, and fabrication:
all the saws and trucks and rope and countless other gear to harvest and cart cedar logs to the railroad siding
the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors
the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope
the logging camps with their beds and mess halls
the cookery and the raising of all the foods to feed the men
the untold thousands of persons who had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drank!
The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine how many people were needed to make flat cars and rails and railroad engines, to construct and install the communication systems required? These are just a few of the antecedents.
Consider the mill work in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than a quarter inch thick. These are kiln dried and then tinted. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Plus the sweepers and the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!
Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.
Once in the pencil factory—worth millions of dollars in machinery and building—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat on top—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched” sandwich.
My “lead” itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.
The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder-cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.
My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involve the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!
Observe the labeling. That’s a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what is carbon black?
My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.
Then there’s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the plug,” the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives “the plug” its color is cadmium sulfide.
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?
Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on.
Preface. This is an introduction to how microchips are made to give you an idea of how difficult and amazing they are. This is a very high-level overview gathered mostly from the textbooks of Quirk (2001) and Van Zant (2004). Given the improvements since then, multiply whatever I say many fold as chips have only gotten more complex since them.
Microprocessors are essential, they’re in just about everything
Billions of chips are created every year for a myriad of applications: in autos, airplanes, ATMs, air conditioners, calculators, cameras, cell phones, clocks, DVDs, machine tools, medical equipment, microwave ovens, office and industrial equipment, routers, security systems, thermostats, TVs, VCRs, washing machines – nearly all electrical devices.
Microchip fabrication
Creating a chip begins by cutting a thin 12 inch slice, called a wafer, from a 99.9999999% pure silicon crystal, one of the purest materials on earth. Wafers require such a high degree of perfection that even a missing atom can cause unwanted current leakage and other problems in manufacturing later on. This is the platform that about 5000 computer chips will be built on. Each chip will contain millions of transistors, capacitors, diodes, and resistors built by punching and filling in holes in more layers than a Queen’s wedding cake.
Cleanliness
Particles 500 times smaller than a human hair can cause defects in microchips. The more particles that get on a wafer, the greater the chance there is of a killer defect. Some particles are worse than others — a single grain of salt could ruin all the chips on a wafer. Sodium can travel through layers even faster than stray bits of metal. Particles that outright kill a chip are caught during the testing phase at the factory. Sometimes only 20% make to the end. The traveling particles are insidious, and can cause a chip to malfunction, perform poorly, or die later on (hopefully before your warranty expires). Consumer reports recommends not even trying to repair a personal computer after four years, and in the two to four year range it’s a tossup whether to repair or buy a new one.
Typical city air has 5 million particles per cubic foot. There are processes that require a maximum of 1 particle per square cubic foot.
People are among the worst offenders, as far as particle generation goes. If you walk at a good clip, you emit 7.5 million particles per minute. Even sitting still, you are still emitting particles. A smoker is a particle-emitting dragon long after the cigarette, and a sneezing worker is even worse, a veritable Krakatoa.
City water is not pure enough to be used — it’s full of bacteria, minerals, particulates, and other junk. To make city water clean enough requires many filters, UV-light, and other water treatments. Intel has two plants in drought-stricken Arizona that use 11 million gallons of water a day and even more than that with a new expansion underway. This requires a huge investment in water processing and delivery systems.
Microchip fabrication is primarily a chemical process, requiring ultra-clean 99.9999% chemicals and 99.9999999% gases. About one in five steps use water or chemicals to clean the wafers or prepare their surface for the next layer.
Firemen practically need a chemical engineering degree to inspect and fight fires in a chip fabrication plant. During a fire, they risk being exposed to volatile, flammable, or combustible solvents, and chemicals like arsine, used in chemical warfare.
The chips also require humidity to be just right. If the humidity is too high, the wafers accumulate moisture, and the layers won’t stick. Too dry and static electricity will suck particles out of the air and practically glue them to the surface, they’re so hard to remove.
So it shouldn’t surprise you that it costs over billions of dollars to build a clean room. The inside is composed of non-shedding materials, especially stainless steel. Floors have sticky mats to pull dirt off of operators’ shoes. Pens, notebooks, tools, and mops – everything is built of material that sheds as few particles as possible, but even so, equipment particles cause a third of the contamination.
The slightest vibration can make the expensive machines malfunction, so the plant is built with huge concrete slabs on top of special shock absorbers. To make the foundation requires 890,000 cubic yards of dirt to be removed and dumped, then filled in with 445,000 cubic yards of concrete with 100,000 tons of embedded steel — more than required by the world’s tallest building, the burj Khalifa in Dubai.
It takes over 100 trucks to bring in the pieces of the huge cranes required for the project, which can life 55-ton chillers.
In order to move large amounts of liquids and gases, the plant needs to be very tall. Intel’s factories top level is 70 feet high to make room for giant fans to circulate air in the clean room below. Beneath the clean room there are thousands of transformers, pumps, cabinets, utility pipes, and chillers.
How chips are made
Wafers move from workstation to workstation and have different operations performed on them at each one. Wafer fabrication for a chip might involve 450 processes with operations that overall take several thousand individual steps. The machines that make this all happen include high-temperature diffusion furnaces, wet cleaning stations, dry plasma etchers, ion implanters, rapid thermal processors, vacuum pumps, fast flow controllers, residual gas analyzers, plasma glow dischargers, vertical furnaces, optical pyrometers, and more.
If you were shrunk to chip size and tied to a wafer, you’d go through the car wash from hell. You’ll be moved along by robotic wafer handlers from one machine to the next, where you’d be layered with different materials, centrifuged, electro-polished, dyed, scraped, heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, ultrasonically agitated, sputtered, doped, hard baked, dipped in toxic chemical baths, irradiated, blasted with ultrasonic energy, spray-cleaned, dry-cleaned, scrubbed, micro-waved, x-rayed, shot with metal, etched, and probed.
At various points, the chip “Survivor” TV show comes on. Chips are examined at an atomic level for defects, and their electrical functioning tested. They’re usually thrown out if anything is wrong, since most mistakes can’t be fixed.
There are many problems that can cause a chip to fail besides contamination. The wafer must be perfectly flat in structure and while it goes through the workstations. If the wafer were 10,000 feet high, you’d see bumps or holes no higher than 2 inches – more than that and the layering is thrown off. If the wrong step was performed after 3,841 correctly performed steps, the chip was under or overheated, the layer didn’t fully stick, was improperly aligned before the next layer was added, or a chemical misapplied, the chip is thrown out. It’s amazing any chips make it out the door.
After your makeover, you’d emerge in a designer outfit composed of up to 25 layers embedded with millions of transistors, diodes, and resistors. You’ll find yourself “best in show” at tattoo competitions and irresistible to Terminator fans.
Discussion
Chips are the pinnacle of human achievement, the most complex objects on earth, requiring fabrication plants costing ten billion dollars or more. They require chemicals, water, and air that are up to 99.99999999% pure. It takes thousands of steps and up to four months to process a wafer, all of them lost in an electricity outage.
Their precision is phenomenal. Before fossil fuels objects could be crafted to within a tenth of an inch. Today chips are created at an atomic level of precision.
They are also subject to a single point of failure. More than 90% of the world’s manufacturing capacity for the most advanced chips is in Taiwan, so any time Taiwan has a drought, earthquake, invaded by China, or can’t get the components needed for chips, the whole world is affected. And some of the machines that make chips are from just one factory. In Germany a fire impacted the only manufacturer making extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to etch circuits onto silicon wafers for Apple, IBM, and Samsung and other companies (Koc 2022).
Microchips are constructed out of finite critical, precious, platinum group elements, and rare earth elements — 90% of them produced in China. And all of them mined with declining fossil fuels.
Chips have gotten so complex that their miniaturization has been causing hardware problems for over a decade. With switches just a few atoms wide, hardware failures that aren’t easy to identify are occurring more often. I don’t understand why chips work at all after reading this metaphor: Imagine a computer chip with 1,000 processors and 28 billion transistors is blown up to the scale of a building covering the United States. Finding the failure would be like finding the leaky faucet in just one of the apartments which only happens when the bedroom light is on and front door open.
There are trillions of tiny switches with billions of transistors in a microprocessor, so even a tiny imperfection can disrupt the billions of calculations taking place every second. About 4% of Google’s millions of computers crashed unexpectedly from errors that couldn’t be detected. A 2020 report by chip maker Advanced Micro Devices discovered the most advanced computer memory chips were 5.5 times less reliable than the previous generation. Other researchers say the switches are wearing out sooner and shortening the lifespan of processors.
Even really simple objects like pencils and toasters are more complex than you may know.
Microchips are incredibly important to civilization — like energy, there isn’t a single business endeavor, infrastructure, or electronic device that isn’t dependent on them.
New cars can have more than 100 semiconductors in their touch screens, computerized engine controls and transmissions, built-in cellular and Wi-Fi connections, collision avoidance systems, cameras and other sensors (Ewing and Clark 2021).
But because of their complexity, precision, dependency on rare minerals, supply chains, single points of failure, natural disasters, and extremely pure materials, they they will be one of the first industries to fail when the electric grid becomes unreliable and oil shortages become common, forcing society to simplify and localize, cascade to the myriad products that need them and making them obsolete as well.
Nearly all knowledge is being stored in electronically on media and devices that will be lost after energy decline, lost to the future generations forever, since fossil fuels and the mostly fossil-fueled electric grid make them possible. Books and microfiche have a finite lifespan as well, about 500 years if stored in optimal environments. I hope there are material scientists, librarians, and others working on more permanent media. And you can help as well by considering what knowledge you would like preserve, and how we could do so in “Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge“.
Zhong R et al (2021)Drought in Taiwan Pits Chip Makers Against Farmers. The island is going to great lengths to keep water flowing to its all-important semiconductor industry, including shutting off irrigation to legions of rice growers. New York Times: The drought is the worst in over half a century. Chip makers use lots of water to clean their factories and wafers, the thin slices of silicon that form the basis of the chips. Much of the water used by residents is deposited by the summer typhoons. But the storms also send soil cascading from Taiwan’s mountainous terrain into its reservoirs. This has gradually reduced the amount of water that reservoirs can hold.
References Much of above came from the textbooks written by Quirk & Van Zant
Clark D (2022) The huge endeavor to produce a tiny microchip. New York Times.
Ewing J, Clark D (2021) Lack of Tiny Parts Disrupts Auto Factories Worldwide. New York Times.
Koc C et al (2022) ASML keeps part of Berlin manufacturing site shut after fire. Bloomberg.
An electric car uses five times as many minerals as a conventional car (IEA 2020):
IEA, Minerals used in selected power generation technologies, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/minerals-used-in-selected-power-generation-technologies
There are 17 rare earth elements (REE) that China controls up to 97% of (Klare 2012, Shumsky 2011). These are essential for transitioning to so-called green energy — not just cars but solar panels, windmills, solar photovoltaic, computers, electronics, the smart grid and more.
While we can import oil from dozens of nations, REE make us dependent on China, and China is also constructing mines all over the world — it’s as if Saudi Arabia bought up all the remaining oil fields.
Mining is the second most toxic, environmentally damaging industry on earth. So whatever the cost may be, no matter how high, let the Chinese destroy their land. It’s a cheaper price to pay rather than destroy our own nation’s precious topsoil, which in the long run is the most valuable possession we have.
Already 20% of China’s arable land is polluted with toxic heavy metals from mining and industry. Plus since conventional oil peaked in 2018, why would we bother to do this, since all of these contraptions are utterly dependent on oil, coal, and gasoline to be constructed for every step of their life cycle? By the time even a small fraction of our vehicle fleet could be electrified, since it lasts ten to forty years (diesel trucks), and new vehicles are unaffordable for 90% of Americans, the oil age will long be gone and we will have wasted precious time and energy on mining when we could have been insulating homes, conserving energy, and converting industrial agriculture to organic..
In 2011, nine of the REE were used in cars. Some EV car motors use REE elements neodymium, terbium, or dysprosium in their magnet motor. Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum (Gorman 2009). Other EVs use induction motors with copper coils.
Cars using internal combustion engines also use precious and rare earth metals in their catalytic converter: palladium, rhodium, cerium, and/or platinum and the gasoline they burn oil was refined using rare earths, such as lanthanum and cerium, and critical elements like cobalt.
In addition, these applications use rare earth elements, i.e. metal alloys or production process, so cars may also have these as well: Aluminum and steel, ceramics, computer chips, electronics, LCD screen, light-emitting diodes.
If an electric car uses electricity & electric grid or GPS, then these REE and critical elements were indirectly used: Wind turbines (up to 150 kg neodymium & praseodymium per MW), Solar panels (indium, gallium), Photovoltaic cells (Germanium, silicon metal), Steel production (fluorspar, vanadium, Ytterbium), Nuclear power (Europium, Gadolinium, Cerium, Yttrium, Samarium, Erbium, Beryllium, Niodymium), Satellites (Niobium), Semi-conductors (gallium, Holmium), Semi-conductors (gallium, Holmium), Fiber optics (Germanium, Erbium Europium, Terbium, Yttrium), Electronics and electricity (Tungsten) and more.
Already, and increasingly, China controls REE from mining to final production of high-tech goods, and is likely to export REE less and less as they use them for their own high-value products. Until some point of oil decline that is…
Preface. Computer chip fabrication plants need to run continuously for weeks to accomplish the thousands of steps needed to make microchips. A half-hour power outage at Samsung’s Pyeongtaek chip plant caused losses of over $43 million dollars (Reuters 2019).
Chip production requires massive amounts of water, but reservoirs in Taiwan are critically low and authorities have already cut supplies to agriculture to support industrial and residential use. Taiwan’s tech manufacturers fear their output is under threat from the island’s worst drought in decades, risking more turmoil for global supply chains already strained by shortages of semiconductors and other key components (Ting-Fang and Li 2021).
An electric grid depending on intermittent power like wind and solar will be up and down too much to make chips, which takes hundreds of steps over several days. If a grid can come up and down that is — blackstarting is not easy and outages can damage transformers.
As oil declines, at some point the energy to mine the materials and to make the precision machines that make the chips, chemicals, etching and other machines will end. But until then, appreciate what you have a lot more!
Alex commented below about a post at here. Felix Moreno predicts that because oil peaked in 2019. peak memory and peak data will arrive in 2021, or optimistically as late as 2024. If true there’ll be problems storing data and at some point society will lose the ability to hold onto archived files, starting with individuals but that will affect governments and companies. And much more…
The crowning achievement of our civilization is the ability to make microchips. It is by far the most complex object ever made by mankind. Probably second in complexity to the microchip is the $10 billion dollar clean room they’re made within. And third, the motherboard inside computers. Everything else pales in comparison. Nearly any electronic device you can think of depends on a microchip to function. Even toasters. Somewhere along the line, even complex objects that don’t have one, like batteries, were made with equipment that used chips.
Only 5 companies can afford to make the best microprocessors: a supply chain threat
The costs and risks involved in building new fabs have already driven many makers of logic chips (processor or controller chips) towards a “fabless” chip model, where they outsource much of their production to chip “foundries” in the Far East (Nuttall).
High capital costs require fabs to keep their production lines running at full capacity to pay back the money sunk into them. “The most expensive thing on the planet is a half-empty fab,” says Brian Krzanich, general manager of Intel’s manufacturing and supply chain. Consequently, only the highest-volume processor manufacturers–such as Samsung and Intel are still sole owners and operators of state-of-the-art plants. As the elements on a chip become smaller, designing processors is getting tougher costing a lot more — R&D costs are rapidly increasing. In 2009, around $30 billion, or 17 percent of revenue, went to R&D across the industry–a 40 percent increase over 1999 (Mims).
Back when 130 nm chips were made, there were 20 companies, but now there are only 5 companies making the cutting edge 20/22 nm. Below you can see the declining number of companies as the size got smaller and cost significantly more to make (Benini):
20/22 nm: Globalfoundries, Intel, Samsung, ST Microelectronics, TSMC
Only 3 companies still make internal hard disk drives
Seagate Technology, Toshiba, and Western Digital. Once there were 200 companies.
One company, ASML, makes most of the lithography equipment for the semiconductor industry
ASML is a lithography equipment manufacturer for the semiconductor industry, without which chip manufacturers cannot make computer chips for the computer and telecom industries. ASML is nearly a monopoly company in the semiconductor lithography market with 74% of the market share. Traditional lithography has reached the limits and smaller chips can only be made using extreme ultraviolet lithography [EUV]. ASML enjoys a monopolistic position in EUV as it is the only company that is developing EUV equipment to produce these smaller computer chips. The capital required is so huge that ASML’s main customers such as Intel (INTC) are participating in a customer co-investment program (SeekingAlpha).
Benini says that Moore’s Law is about to hit a brick wall because of:
Market volume wall: only the largest volume products will be manufactured with the most advanced technology (above)
Thermal wall: transistor count still increases exponentially but we can no longer power the entire chip (voltages, cooling do not scale)
Memory wall: larger data sets and limited bandwidth at high power cost for accessing external memory
Financial fragility
In a (civil) war, fabrication plants are a likely target. Given how expensive they are, could a company survive the destruction of one or two of their plants given that their revenues now are often less than the cost of building a new fab plant (i.e. TSMC $14 billion, Globalfoundry $3.5 billion)?
Overview of how Chips are made
The main steps are oxidation layering, photoresist coating, patterning, etching, layering, doping (diffusion and ion implantation), depositing interconnection metals, testing, and packaging. Each step can have dozens to hundreds of steps, with every process requiring astonishingly pure air, water, and chemicals. Even the tiniest particle can contaminate the wafer and the microchip will have to be thrown out.
The fabrication building semiconductors are made in is also amazing. It’s made of materials that shed as few particles as possible, and the flooring and machinery must be built to prevent even the slightest vibrations from a truck going by or the chips will be damaged. Temperatures and humidity must stay within very narrow limits.
There are hundreds of thousands of kinds of equipment, chemicals, metals, minerals, and complex heating, cooling, building systems. All of them are potential victims of supply chain failures.
As the world becomes less complex on the down-slope of the fossil fuel energy curve, it will get harder to keep the air, water, chemicals, and silicone as pure as they are now. The more impurities or particles there are, the more chips will fail at the end-of-the-line. I personally experienced these frustrations when I worked at a neuroanatomy lab in Puerto Rico that moved from Urbana, Illinois. Suddenly we couldn’t get histology to work. The water and air weren’t pure enough, and this was worsened by not being able to come and go all hours of the day and night since the area was so unsafe.
At this point there are enough facilities and suppliers in about 9 countries that can back each other up after earthquakes (Taiwan & Japan), tsunamis (Japan), floods (Thailand), and other natural disasters, lessening supply chain worries.
But this is changing. According to Quartz, only four companies, Intel, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC), and GlobalFoundries, are able to make advanced microchips. In the relentless pursuit of Moore’s law, only a few companies remain with the money and knowledge to stay up-to-date. Smaller suppliers of the big 4 that couldn’t afford to do the research to reach the next level of complexity in EUV lithography, 3D-IC chip packages and 450mm wafers are going out of business as well.
The biggest threat to chip production in the future are world-wide financial crashes, electric grid outages, and oil shortages resulting in disruption of supply chains, which will eventually affect facilities in more and more of the countries that are still making chips.
Everything depends on semiconductors. Financial and business transactions, logistics, shopping, corporations and small businesses, shipping, trucks, trains, autos, and so on. No microchips, no Civilization As We Know It.
As you can tell from my booklist, for me the greatest tragedy will be the loss of most of the knowledge gained during this short Age of Enlightenment, and then it’s back to superstition and fear of the Unknown. More and more of what we know is only being stored electronically. Librarians have written me to say their university or library is trying to put everything online. Whatever is electronic will all be lost when we’re no longer able to make semiconductors. We’ll also lose what’s on paper or microfilm since those don’t last more than a few centuries. I discuss this at greater length in Peak Resources and the Preservation of Knowledge. Carl Sagan best expresses the sadness I feel in “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” and anthropological works like Chagnon’s “Noble Savages”.
The physics and calculus
You really need to see the diagrams, calculus, problems, and discussions of the physics involved to truly appreciate the complexity. The list of processes below doesn’t begin to capture how amazing, brilliant, and unappreciated this enterprise is! Try scrolling a bit through one or more of these textbooks to get an inkling of what I mean:
A Detailed Look at the process of making Microchips from an 800 page textbook
Hwaiyu Gent. Semiconductor Manufacturing Handbook. Wafer Processing Technologies. Nanotechnology and MEMs. Fab yield, operations, and facilities. 2005.
Here are just a few devices that depend on microchips: medical equipment of all kinds, manufacturing equipment, Vehicles, Cameras & Video Equipment, Cellular Phones, Copy Machines, Printers, Hearing Aids, Sewing Machines, stereos, radios, televisions, VCRs, air conditioner, thermostat, microwave, washing machine, security system, routers, ATMs, clock radios, coffee makers, ovens, etc.
Now and then I note the chemicals or minerals used in the process to give you an idea of the complexity.
A Brief description of some of Intel’s Fab facilities (Andrews)
400,000 square feet of cleanrooms a quarter-mile on a side.
clean rooms constructed with custom pre-cleaned construction materials.
Cement consumption is so high that Intel builds cement plants on their construction site
Chip fab energy consumption is 55-65 megawatts in one case. I
The largest land-based crane in the world was used to pick up and place massive roof trusses that weigh approximately 300 tons each.
The crane is so large it had to be delivered on trucks to the site in pieces by 250 trucks
24,000 tons of steel rebar
21,000 tons of structural steel. And to make room for the fab,
875,000 cubic yards of dirt had excavated to make room for the fab plant
10.5 million man hours will be required to complete the project.
Basic equipment can cost over $40,000,000 for a lithography machine, and over $50,000,000 for steppers
Software. In 1995 a chip that went into a stand-alone product and required 100,000 lines of code, in 2002: a typical chip for a networked programmable product required a million lines of code (Fiddler)
How Silicon Wafers are made
Silicon wafers are the platform for microprocessors used in transistors, power and RF devices, dynamic random access memories (dram), and microprocessors. There are many ways to make them. The more complex microprocessors require much more processing and materials often layering is done with diamonds, Si-Ge, and other materials, like a complex submarine sandwich that might include gallium arsenide, indium phosphide and antimonide, Si-Ge.
Arc furnace: reduce quartz in quartzite by carbon into metallurgical grade silicon purified with halogenation and fractional distillation processes. HCl SiHCl SiCl4 H2 AlCl3 BCl3 FeCl3
Reactor: Decompose Trichloro silane into silicon and HCL. molybdenum
Quartz crucible. Within a chamber having a controlled atmosphere to grow the silicon crystals using very careful temperature control
Annealing. Wafers placed in an atmosphere of argon or hydrogen to remove oxygen, etc.
Slice: multiwire saws slice and then grinders, lapping, and polishing machines produce wafers
Interconnects/wiring systems
These provide power, grounding for various systems on the chip. Copper, TaN, TiN, TiSiN, TiW
Make interconnect (with copper): A mold is coated with liner and seed layers, then copper is electrochemically poured in, with excess removed in a polishing step, and finally the surface is capped with a dielectric material to protect the copper often with a plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition.
Apply Silicide: Because as devices shrink to the submicron level, circuit performance has encountered problems that can slow it down, and this is solved by applying silicides, which ideally have low resistivity, easily form thin films, withstand chemicals and high temperatures, adhere well to other layers, is smooth, and much more. titanium, cobalt, nickel, platinum, tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum and other metals. There are many possible compositions of silicides, each with their strengths and weaknesses. TiSi2 CoSi2 NiSi Pd2Si PtSi Wsi2 MoSi2
Deposit a film of metal on a silicon substrate and bind by annealing.
sputter clean silicon wafer with Ar ions
the metal is sputter deposited
anneal in a 100% N2 ambient
wet etch
Another annealing cycle from 700 to 850 degrees C (depending on metal). Now they’re ready for contact dielectric deposition and 1st level metal-interconnect processing
Plasma process control
An intricate and central feature of making semiconductor devices. Plasma chambers etch or deposit thin films of material. Etching needs a high-density plasma that generates ions which remove atoms of material. Deposition is similar except coating is the objective.
Optical Emmission Spectroscopy(OES): uses an optical sensor(CCD image sensor and optical filter) to detect the oxide-etch endpoint and measure the spectral emission from the plasma
Dry etch process: 2 types: chemical and physical, which combine to form 4 plasma processes: sputtering or physical, chemical, ion-energy-driven, and ion-enhanced-inhibitor etching. Chemical etch is done in high-pressure conditions.
Vacuum technology: Essential in many processes that need a controlled environment to deposit thin films so that the atmospheric gas molecules don’t interfere.
Vacuum creating components: Flanges with demountable seals to connect to vacuum vessel, valves to control the flow of gas in and out, feed-throughs allow for mechanical motion, radiation, or fluids in and out of vacuum vessels to manipulate objects inside the vacuum
The intermediate steps between design and wafer, the stencils used to print images onto the semiconductor material.
Data Prep: Design data is conditioned to generate instructions for the pattern generator to use to print the mask features, then converted to a file format acceptable to the pattern generation tool. Enormous computer resources are needed for this complex step. As chips shrink, exponentially larger pattern files are required to cope. The generated files are so large that transferring them from the design center to the photomask vendor taxes networks.
Pattern Generation: The design data are printed on resist-coated photoblank with electron beam (ebeam) systems in a high vacuum that take 10 to 18 hours, or with laser-beamed systems using deep ultraviolet lasers in 5 to 9 hours. Atlas laser systems split the laser into 32 separate beams that are raster scanned across the mask with a 24-facet rotating cylindrical mirror.
Postexposure Bake: After patterning, this step removes standing waves formed from reflections of the substrate surface since these can degrade the resist image leading to poor uniformity
Develop process: The exposed resist is removed by solvents, and surfactants improve the wetting of the resist, then developers are added with puddle processes left on top for a while and then rinsed off, or sprayed on. tetramethylammonium hydroxide
Etch process: After the exposed resist is removed, the underlying chrome is etched with wet processes using powerful acids or dry etch methods that use gases such as chlorine in a plasma induced by radio frequency energy
Resist removal and cleaning: After the pattern is etched into the chrome of the photomask, unexposed resist is removed with strong acids
Inspections: Quality assurance to make sure mask features were printed at the proper size, defect inspections
Final Cleaning and pellicle mounting: Strong acids to clean, then a pellicle (rectangular anodized metal frame with optically transparent film on it) over the printable field to protect it from contamination at the wafer fabrication plant.
Final shipment: The photomask is read to be shipped to the wafer lab
Some statistics: File sizes for design data ranged from 1.5 to 76 GM. Data preparation times averaged 6.5 hours of CPU time with a max of 360 hours.
Wafer processing with Microlithography
Fabrication processes of an integrated circuit fall into 3 categories: film deposition, patterning, and semiconductor doping. Conductors and insulators are used to connect and isolate transistors. Doping allows the conductivity of the silicon to vary with voltage. fundamental to all of these processes is lithography which forms 3D relief images on the substrate where the pattern can be transferred to. The patterns are written with a photoresist lithography and etch transfer step usually up to 30 times to build the millions of transistors and many wires. Each pattern printed is aligned to the previous pattern and slowly the conductors, insulators, and doped regions are built up to form the final device.
Lithography: “This accounts for about 30% of the cost of manufacturing, and it’s often the technical limitation on reducing the size of the chip even further. Optical lithography is a photographic process which exposes the photoresist (a light sensitive polymer) and developed to form 3D images on the substrate.
Substrate Preparation improves adhesion of photoresist material to substrate by cleaning, baking at 600 C or using chemicals to get rid of water, and adding an adhesion promotor.
Photoresist Coating. Spin coating: the photoresist is made liquid, poured on, then spun on a turntable at high speed. This has to be very carefully controlled to get the right thickness and uniformity which varies depending on the substrate material.
Postapply Bake: Dry the photoresist after the spin coat process by removing excess solvent using a hot, high-mass metal plate in a vacuum
Alignment & Exposure: Scanning projection printing uses a slit of light from the mask onto the wafer after it’s been aligned properly (very complicated)
Postexposure bake: To remove standing wave ridges
Development: Once exposed, the photoresist must be developed with tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide poured on a rotating wafer or sprayed on
Ion Implantation
Dozens of ion implantation steps are usually required that very precisely plant the right amount of dopants (ions) at just the right spot. p-tpye dopant boron (B+, FB2_,), n-type phosphorus, arsenic, other dpoants are indium, antimony, germanium etc
Beamline architectures: 3 types of tools all have implanter beamlines that start with an ion source and extraction optics that inject an appropriately shaped beam of ions into subsequent elements of the beamline. Implanter beamlines also need a mass analysis devise to provide momentum dispersion and transverse focusing of the ion beams. There are high-current beamlines, high-energy beamlines, and medium current beamlines.
Multi-wafer & single wafer. High-current and energy architectures use a multi-wafer batch processing chamber where many wafers can be implanted at once using a spinning disk at 1000 rpm of the wafers across a fixed-spot beam. Single wafer processing just ipmlants a single wafer.
Thermal Annealing: Postimplant thermal annealing repairs the crystalline structure of the wafer from the damage created during implantation and electrical activation of the new dopant ions. This is done usually with isothermal lamp or hot-walled furnaces
Wet Etching: The etch process transfers a pattern from a mask layer to the underlying layer by using a chemical etchant, and the rest is intact because it’s protected by the mask layer below. Wet chemical etching reacts with the substrate to produce soluble products that can be washed off. Dry etching uses plasma gas to etch both chemically and physically.
HF-based etching chemistry Hydrofluoric acid (HF)-based etching are the most commonly used wet etchants.
Metal Etching Used on aluminum (al), copper, gold, nickel, platinum, chromium, and titanium. cyanide solutions, phosphoric acid, ammonia
Wet etching for compound semiconductor: Oxidize substrate surface and remove soluble reaction products.
Wet Etching Equipment: Immersion processors (wet benches). Wafers are immersed, then rinsed, often with physical agitation from ultrasonic agitation, nitrogen bubbling through the solution, or mechanically. Rinse tanks : 1) quick-dump with top spray, 2) cascade overflow with hot water, 3) Spin rinse dry. Drying equipment: 1) hot nitrogen, vacuum, slow pull, or isopropyl alcohol vapor drying
Environmental and health issues: Some of the most hazardous chemicals are used in the wet etching process, such as hydrogen peroxides. Strong acids and oxidizers are often mixed and heated generating fumes that can spread highly corrosive droplets. Cynaide solutions for gold can turn into the deadly gas HCN.
Plasma Etching. Plasma is the only way to etch micron-sized features and faithfully transfer submicron patterns and has replaced wet etching in making semiconductors. The 4 basic ways plasma etching is used are: 1) sputtering ions strike the substrate and eject materials at low pressure, 2) chemical etching where neutrals in the plasma react with substrate materials to form volatile products, 3) ion-enhanced etching where ions strike the substrate surface, enhance chemical reactivity, and improve desorption of volatile products, 4) sidewall inhibitor etching
Plasma etching systems: This equipment varies depending on what frequencies, pressures, external power sources, load size, and vicinity of the substrate to the plasma source is desired.
Silicon etching: done with F-, Cl-, and Br-based chemistries using ion-driven anisotropy or inhibitor-assisted anisotropy.
Dielectric materials and metal etching: Other materials besides silicon need to be etched when making IC devices.
MEMS device plasma etching: Microelectromechanical systems device makers don’t use transistors as the basic building blocks like IC devices, nor are the relatively uniform. MEMS can be tens to hundreds of micrometers deep.
Multiplex etching: Time Division Multiplex etching alternates plasma deposition with etching steps.
Chapter 38 the fabrication plant.
I am going to skip ahead to give you an idea of what the building is like where all these processes are going on.
The temperature must stay between 68.4 and 71.4 degrees Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity between 44.1% and 45.9% or the equipment doesn’t function properly. It becomes misaligned, impacts repeatability of the developed process, and reduces output. This is a huge building to keep within such a narrow range, and some areas require even narrower ranges of between 69.9 and 70.1, which increases costs up to 50%.
Table 38.5 Generic cleanroom ISO class 3 criteria specifications.
Air change rate. 600 times per hour
Airflow. Unidirectional
Air filtration. Terminal (UPLA) filters 99.99995% efficience at .012 um
Air handlers. Rooftop makeup AHUs, recirculating indoor units
Air pressure. Pressure differential + .005” w.g. versus reference corridor
Temperature. 70 degrees Fahrenheit +/- 2%, no more than 3% variation in 4 hours
Humidity. 45% relative humidity +/ 1/2%, no more than 3% variation in 4 hours
Exhausts. Scrubbed acid, abated solvents, general, and heat exhausts
Vibration and noise. NC-50, < 300 uin/s peak to peak, 0-15 Hz
Magnetic flux. .5 G maximum
Electrostatic charge. 1 mJ x 10-7 m2 maximum
Energy. 1,200,000 BTU per square foot per year (operating 23 hours a day, 365 days)
Form, function. 60,000 ft2 floor. Bay and chase, subbasement, mec. Floor, office
Particulate. Particles per cubic food, .3 u in size <1 .12 u in size < 35
Process piping. DI water-virgin PVDF, ultrapure gases, ultrapure chemicals-seamless 316L electropolished tubing stainless steel
Mechanical only construction:
makeup AHUs with ductwork
recirculating AHUs
cooling: refrigerant coir. Air cooled with piping
Heating: steam. Zone reheat-electric
Humidification: steam with piping
Exhaust systems with ductwork
Process piping
Fan-filter units with grid
Cooling: chillers with cooling towers
Heating: hot water. Zone reheat-hot water
Humidification: adiabatic
Section titles of the clean room design and construction chapter:
Airflow Layouts and Patterns: unidirectional airflow, turbulent airflow, air changes. Recirculating air units. Controls. Electrical. Structural. Air-balancing dampers. Return-air path. Differentuial-pressurization limitations.
At this point I am only 20% of the way through this 800-page book. I can’t take it anymore! I’ve checked it out twice and must return it, and if I check it out again, and again, and again to finish this post, I’ll wonder whatever happened to my life, it will almost be over…
So below is an outline of some of the chapters I didn’t cover on manufacturing, and then you’ll just have to get the book to see the other dozens of missing chapters.
Chapter 12. Etching of GaAs and Related Materials
Front Etch of GaAs
Backside Etch of GaAs
Etching of InP Materials
Etching of GaN Materials
ENDPOINT DETECTION IN PLASMA ETCHING
Pressure change, Bias change, Mass spectrometry, laser interferometry and reflectance, optical emission spectroscopy
Chapter 13: Physical Vapor Deposition
VACUUM EVAPORATION
Evaporator equipment: resistive heater or electron beam
LAYERS DEPOSITED USING EVAPORATOIN AND THEIR PROPERTIES
Metals, alloys, multilayer, chemical compounds, reactive evaporation
SPUTTERING
Stage 1: creation of ions through collision of inert gas atoms (Ar) with electrons and acceleration of ions toward a target, Stage 2: removing of target atoms by impact of ions with target, Stage 3: transport of free target atoms to the substrate, Stage 4: Condensation of target atoms on the substrate
In this step, reactive gases pass over the silicon wafer and are adsorbed onto the surface where the reaction forms a film. By-products leave as gases and pumped away. Reactions are activated heating or radio frequency energy through plasma.
Components/Equipment:
Chamber
Pumps
Wafer Handling
Gas Delivery System
Radio Frequency system
PRECOATING AND CLEANING with fluorine containing molecules such as NF3, CF4, and C2F6, which react with the cvd film deposited on the chamber walls and forms volatile compounds that are then pumped away.
Epitaxy refers to the growth of a crystal on top of a host crystal in an orderly way. The three most common modes are 1) layer-by-layer growth 2) Nucleation Growth 3) layer-by-layer followed by nucleation growth
Growth techniques and equipment
Molecular Beam Epitaxy
Silicon Epitaxy for Advanced CMOS technology: overview of Silicon Epitaxy
Epitaxy Parametric
Thickness. Resistivity. Surface defects. Bulk Metals. Flatness and Nanotopography.
Chapter 16: ECD Fundamentals
Basic Process Flow for Copper Damascene Processing,
Fundamental ECD technology (how plating works).
Basic electrochemistry.
Chapter 17: Chemical Mechanical Polishing.
Most common CMP processes: Oxide/Poly Si CMP, Metal CMP,
Removal Rate control.
Within Wafer Uniformity Control
Process consumables
Pad conditioning
Endpoint systems
In Situ metrology
Post-CMP Wafer Cleaning
Dry in-Wet out CMP tools, Dry in-Dry out tool, CMP wafer cleaners, Internal CMP cleaning systems
Common CMP platforms & tools: single head rotational systems, multihead rotational CMP systems, Multiplaten CMP systems, Orbital CMP systems, Linear Drive CMP tools
CMP Process Waste Management: oxide CMP process waste, Metal CMP process waste
Chapter 18: Wet Cleaning
Contaminants.
Theory of Particle Adhesion.
Wet Processing techniques: 1) liquid chemical cleaning, 2) scrubbing, 3) Pressurized Jet Cleaning, 4) Sonic Cleaning
Wet Cleaning Equipment: immersion, placing the wafers in a tank filled with a chemical, spray, using a nozzle to spray the wafers with a chemical, and dispense, directing a stream of appropriate chemical to the wafer
Front End-of-Line processes: Wafer cleans. Post-dry Etch or Ash residue removal. Metal removal. Post-CMP clean. Backside Cleans.
Back End-of-Line cleaning. Post-CMP. Post-etch residue removal. Backside and bevel cleans.
Wet Cleaning Equipment technology.
Batch Tank. Batch Spray. Single Wafer.
Table 41.1 Chemical substances common in Semiconductor manufacturing
Preface. I am gobsmacked by how much energy goes into making beverage cans and potato chips, look at all the steps, each one using energy! Why haven’t we run of oil yet? Especially when you look at everything else out there, cars, roads, bridges, buildings, each of them going through even more energy intensive steps.
One of my ideas to preserve knowledge was to etch books on aluminum cans since they don’t rust and there are so many of them. Books and microfiche only last 500 years at best, and the electric grid will be down long before that. But with conventional oil peaking in 2018 (EIA 2020), there’s not much time left for my aluminum can preservation of knowledge, if it would work that is — the materials scientists I wrote didn’t write back. They probably still think I’m a crackpot!
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins & L. Hunter Lovins. 1999. Natural Capitalism. Earthscan Publications Chapter 3: “Waste Not”, pages 49-50.
A striking case study of the complexity of industrial metabolism is provided by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking, where they trace the origins and pathways of a can of English cola. The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage.
Bauxite is mined in Australia,
trucked to a chemical reduction mill,
each ton of bauxite processed and purified into a half ton of aluminum oxide.
It is then stockpiled,
loaded on a giant ore carrier
and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity.
After a month-long journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months.
The smelter takes two hours to turn each half ton of aluminum oxide into a quarter of a ton of aluminum metal, in ingots ten meters long.
These are cured for two weeks before being shipped to roller mills in Sweden or Germany.
There each ingot is heated to nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit
and rolled down to a thickness of an eighth of an inch.
The resulting sheets are wrapped in ten-ton coils
and transported to a warehouse,
and then to a cold rolling mill in the same or another country,
where they are rolled tenfold thinner, ready for fabrication.
The aluminum is then sent to England,
where sheets are punched and formed into cans,
which are then washed,
dried,
painted with a base coat,
and then painted again with specific product information.
The cans are next lacquered,
flanged (they are still topless),
sprayed inside with a protective coating to prevent the cola from corroding the can,
and inspected.
The cans are palletized,
fork lifted,
and warehoused until needed.
They are then shipped to the bottler,
where they are washed
and cleaned once more,
then filled with water mixed with flavored syrup, phosphorus, caffeine, and carbon dioxide gas.
The sugar is harvested from beet fields in France and undergoes
trucking,
milling,
refining
and shipping.
The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is excavated from deep open-pit mines – a process that also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. Round-the-clock, the mining company uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 100,000 people in order to reduce the phosphate to food-grade quality.
The caffeine is shipped from a chemical manufacturer to the syrup manufacturer in England.
The filled cans are sealed with an aluminum ‘pop-top’ lid at the rate of fifteen hundred cans per minute,
then inserted into cardboard cartons printed with matching color and promotional schemes.
The cartons are made of forest pulp that may have originated anywhere from Sweden or Siberia to the old-growth, virgin forests of British Columbia that are the home of grizzly, wolverines, otters, and eagles.
Palletized again, the cans are shipped to a regional distribution warehouse,
and shortly thereafter to a supermarket where a typical can is purchased within three days.
The consumer buys twelve ounces of the phosphate-tinged, caffeine-impregnated, caramel-flavored sugar water. Drinking the cola takes a few minutes; throwing the can away takes a second. In England, consumers discard 84% of all cans, which means that the overall rate of aluminum waste, after counting production losses, is 88%. The United States still gets three-fifths of its aluminum from virgin ore, at 20 times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.
Every product we consume has a similar hidden history, an unwritten inventory of its materials, resources, and impacts. It also has attendant waste generated by its use and disposal … The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100,000 times its weight; that of a laptop computer, close to 4,000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.
Ryan JC, Durning AT. 2012. Stuff: The secret lives of everyday things. Sightline Institute.
A diesel-powered harvester dug up my potato, which was trucked to a processing plant nearby.
Half the potato’s weight, mostly water, was lost in processing.
The remainder was potato parts, which the processing plant sold as cattle feed.
Processing my potato created two-thirds of a gallon of waste-water. This water contained dissolved organic matter and one-third gram of nitrogen.
The waste-water was sprayed on a field outside the plant. The field was unplanted at the time, and the water sank underground.
Freezing the potato slices required electrical energy, which came from a hydroelectric dam on the Snake River.
Frozen foods often require 10 times more energy to produce than their fresh counterparts. In 1960, 92% of the potatoes Americans ate were fresh; by 1990, Americans ate more frozen potatoes, mostly french fries, than fresh ones. My fries were frozen using hydrofluorocarbon coolants, which have replaced the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that harm the ozone layer. Some coolants escaped from the plant. They rose 10 miles up, into the stratosphere, where they depleted no ozone, but they did trap heat, contributing to the greenhouse effect.
A refrigerated 18-wheeler brought my fries to Seattle. They were fried in corn oil from Nebraska, sprinkled with salt mined in Louisiana, and served with ketchup made in Pittsburgh of Florida tomatoes. My ketchup came in four annoyingly small aluminum and plastic pouches from Ohio.
Preface. This is a book review of Joel Brenner’s “America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare”.
The ransom cyber attack on the colonial pipeline forced the shutdown of a vital pipeline delivering half the gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel traveling from the Gulf Coast to the Northeastern U.S., causing panic as thousands of fueling stations ran out of fuel (Kraus 2021).
So consider what will happen after a cyber attack in the Great Game to get control of the last oil and other resources. Perhaps better than a nuclear war, eh.
Brenner J (2011) America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare. Penguin Press.
After reading this book you’ll wonder what secrets haven’t been stolen, what infrastructure doesn’t have hidden time bombs waiting to go off, and if there are any corporations, government organizations, or military departments that haven’t lost data to cyber attacks and cyber criminals.
Brenner makes the case that so many industrial and military secrets are being stolen that our prosperity and security are threatened. We’ve probably lost half a million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars from all the technological secrets stolen that we spent years developing.
The problem with cyber attacks is that when a system is infected with malicious code, it can be impossible to remove. The code can evade detection by opening electronic “trapdoors” allowing hackers to bypass the system’s security. If a trapdoor is closed, the code opens another door. And even if you manage to find the code, you have no way of knowing who did it, so how so how can you put anyone in jail or stop them from continuing to attack, and steal personal data, intellectual property, and national defense secrets?
Worse yet is the kind of cyber warfare Brenner calls the “Criminal-Terrorist symbiosis”. The only difference between terrorists and nation-states is the latter have more expertise right now, but that is likely to change. As China’s Dr. Shen Weiguang wrote, “Every computer has the potential to be an effective fighting unit; and every ordinary citizen may write a computer program for waging war.” Thanks to the 2010 Wikileaks list of world-wide critical infrastructure, terrorists know exactly what targets to attack.
Who’s stealing information?
Freelance hackers, Russian mobsters, and other countries – especially China, Iran, France, Israel plus another 108 foreign intelligence services.
The FBI has discovered that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in China has 30,000 cyber-spies, who can draw on 150,000 private sector computer experts for help in stealing “American military and technological secrets and cause mischief in government and financial services”.
Corporations conduct industrial espionage against one other. Oracle won a $1.3 billion lawsuit against German company SAP for getting into their systems and stealing their software code.
Employees steal information to sell.
Ford lost a great deal of design documents for engines, transmissions, and so on when a product engineer sold them to his new employer, Beijing Automotive Company.
An employee at Goldman Sachs stole secret algorithms used to automate their securities trading.
Engineers at Goodyear Tire & Rubber stole trade secrets to sell to a Chinese tire maker.
Dow Chemical, General Motors, and DuPont all had intellectual property stolen
Why is it so easy?
The internet wasn’t built to be secure — it was built to be used by educational and government institutions to share information. It was never meant to be the backbone of commerce and military communications.
How do they do it?
Criminal hackers can park in a van with powerful antennas. For many years, retail stores used wireless networks that transmitted un-encrypted data, which could easily be read with “sniffer” programs that grabbed credit and debit card data.
Thieves can get your personal data by getting you to click on attachments or other links that load malware, which then searches through your files looking for any that might have passwords to your banking and brokerage accounts. These files are packaged and sent back to the hackers.
Anyone who loads P2P software to get free music, movies, and other free stuff is just asking to be robbed, because now all your files are visible to cyber-criminals. Examples of such software are LimeWire, Kazaa, BearShare, and FastTrack.
If you use passwords like 12345 or ‘password’, then you’re almost certainly hosting a botnet, which could be doing many things, though most likely what it’s doing is sending millions of spam emails. But the owners can also use your computer to attack companies and governments with denial of service attacks.
Many hackers steal data but have no idea what to do with it. No problem, there are middlemen who pay for credit card data and sell it to cyber-criminals. So much stolen credit card data is available that the price has dropped.
Thieves love getting PIN numbers – which is bad news for you. If a criminal uses your PIN to get cash, it’s up to you to prove the withdrawal was a fraud, which is almost impossible.
Thieves also get your data by churning out 57,000 new fake web addresses every day that they load with computer malware and viruses. They’re hoping you’ll think the site is real and log on to your bank account. They’re also operating within Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. Soon, if not already, they’ll be looting the Cloud.
It’s so easy to hand out free poisoned USB drives at conferences and trade shows, or leave them lying around in places where someone might find them. This is how about 1 in 4 computer worms get into networks.
Executives routinely have their laptops searched and loaded with malware in their hotel rooms in some foreign countries.
Billions of dollars in intellectual property espionage has taken place. The Chinese have been very clever at getting this data. One backdoor method was to sneak into the networks of intellectual property lawyers. They’re privy to business and investment plans, business strategies, technical secrets, and much more.
This was much easier than breaking into a corporate network because lawyers don’t like listening to technical people. They’re impatient to make money, and can’t be bothered with trivial things like requiring passwords on mobile devices that connect to the firm’s servers. U.S. Law firms have been penetrated here and abroad, especially if they have branches in China or Russia.
Military
The first sentence of the book is about twenty terabytes of data stolen from the Pentagon – that’s equal to 20% of what’s in the Library of Congress. It would take a line of trucks 50 miles long to haul this data if it were in print.
The Chinese realized that they could get military secrets by going after military contractors, who get $400 of the $700 annual Pentagon budget. So they’ve broken into computer systems at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These companies don’t just make tanks and airplanes – they make complex subsystems function as a whole, including merging voice, video, and data signals that travel on the same fiber-optic cables, microwave signals, and satellite links.
China has stolen military technology that cost American Taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to develop, such as:
The Quiet Electric Drive propulsion system that makes our naval ships and submarines almost impossible to track and detect.
Information on the next generation of “U.S. Navy destroyers, aircraft carrier electronics, submarine torpedoes, electromagnetic artillery systems, the electronics of our next-generation Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, the F-35, etc.
They have built radar systems stolen from us, only better, since they know how our radar works, when they built their own systems they modified them in ways we can’t penetrate.
Government: The GAO says that the number of malicious software attacks on government computers is up 650% since 2006
Banks
Most of the time, banks hide theft from their systems so that people don’t lose confidence and start a run on the bank. Here are a few scams that did manage to make the news:
Heartland Payment Systems (processes bank card payments for merchants). In 2009 130 million credit and debit card numbers and data were stolen. Their stock price went from $15 to $3.78 per share.
Royal Bank of Scotland payroll system 2008: information stolen on ATM cards. Cards created and used at 139 ATMs and $9 million stolen within 30 minutes in the USA, Canada, Russia, and China. It’s one of the largest bank robberies in history.
Infrastructure
Brenner states that losing control of infrastructure systems “would create widespread disruption and loss, and bring our society to a standstill”.
We are totally vulnerable – all of our industrial, military, banking, financial, satellite, air traffic control systems, dams, electric grid, oil and gas infrastructure, Nuclear Power plants, stock exchanges, sewage, water delivery systems, railroad signaling systems, telecommunications, and business systems are electronic and connected to the internet. Worse yet, essential infrastructure isn’t isolated electronically like it should be – having the electric grid and other essential infrastructure connected to the internet is crazy and dangerous, but regulatory agencies are powerless to force corporations to protect themselves.
Lives are at stake, many millions of people could die if electric grids, water delivery systems, telecommunications, the financial system, and so on were brought down for long. These targets would certainly be brought down in a war, but might even be attacked during a diplomatic standoff like the one Brenner envisions in Chapter 7 between China and the USA.
Businesses could be attacked in many ways. Production lines can be shut down. Goods can be sent to the wrong destination. HVAC could be turned off. And the cyberthieves could delete the log entries of their entry into business systems and leave no footprints or DNA like regular burglars.
CEO’s and other top executives could be kidnapped or killed if their calendars can be tapped into.
Companies are also vulnerable to extortion or the electric grid will be brought down, as has already happened in India, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, China, and France.
We also have too many single points of failure, where the entire system comes down if just one part fails. All cyber-attackers would need to do is disable one electric substation, one financial exchange, and so on. An example of this (not done by hackers) was when the 1998 Galaxy IV communications satellite failed and up to 90% of pagers in the United States stopped working. Hospitals couldn’t reach doctors; credit cards didn’t work at gas stations, and so on.
Industrial control systems are run by SCADA systems that supervise and control components scattered over many places. SCADA is constantly checking on temperature, pressure, inputs, outputs, and other variables to make changes faster than a person could. These systems were never designed to be connected to the internet. Only a few are encrypted. It was assumed a person would use them at the local facility in question.
By putting these systems on the internet, the entire economic security of our nation is put at risk. Some of it can even be accessed with Bluetooth wireless technology, which is highly insecure. This vulnerability isn’t necessary.
Industries say they need to keep their facilities hooked up to the internet so they can patch their software with the latest fixes. But they don’t systematically patch their systems, and if they did, that could be dangerous, the patch could crash or slow the industrial system down. Usually patches have d to be tested before a company dares to apply it.
Brenner says that the real reason our infrastructure is at risk is because companies don’t want to spend the money to make their systems secure. A survey by McAfee, “In the Crossfire, Critical infrastructure in the age of Cyber War” surveyed oil and gas, electricity, sewage, and telecom companies about why they weren’t protecting their systems. They said they wouldn’t be held liable and expected a government bailout, ratepayers, customers, or insurance to pay for any cyberattacks.
Electric Grid
This system is so vulnerable to physical and cyber-attack that I thank every day the electric grid is still up. I’m in awe that the operators can balance the electric load from so many intermittent sources of power, like wind, and all the hundreds of other providers and keep electricity within the narrow bandwidth it must stay in or blow up the system.
If cyber-attackers or terrorists attacked the large generators that supply large cities, it would take us two to five years to replace them. That’s because nearly all North American industrial electric generators are made overseas, and the biggest, most important ones come mainly from China, and some from India. Can you imagine living for 2 years without electricity? And even longer if the cyberattack came from China – they’re not going to be in any rush to fulfill that order!
There are more than 1,800 owners and operators in the North American bulk-power system. There are 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, thousands of generation plants, and millions of digital controls. This is regulated by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC. Naturally NERC wanted to know which, if any of these assets are being protected. So NERC contacted the industry and asked them to identify the assets that “if destroyed, degraded, or otherwise rendered unavailable would affect the reliability or operability of the Bulk Electric System”. Since there’s no definition of what’s critical, the results were disappointing to put it mildly. 73% of respondents said they didn’t have any critical cyber assets.
That’s because engineers are trained to think about the odds of equipment failing, but they don’t have a clue about the risks of malicious cyberattacks. Nor can NERC force utilities to do anything, because each utility can do whatever they want, NERC has no teeth. Congress has allowed owners and operators to control whatever standards they feel like applying to themselves.
What needs to happen is for the electric grid to have systems that can recover quickly because of redundant systems. Thanks to the deregulation of the electricity, no one is responsible for the physical infrastructure of the grid, and it’s falling apart. It used to be triple-plated, or triply redundant, now it’s a bare bones single plated skeleton. I’ve got an Electric Grid Overview at energyskeptic that explains this in detail.
President Obama has said that “We know cyberintruders have probed our electrical grid and in other countries cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.”
Senior intelligence officials believe the Russians and Chinese are already inside parts of the electric grid in the USA, and have left behind software that could be turned on and used to destroy the grid if we went to war. Meanwhile, Iran and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are trying to do this as well.
Electric grid attacks:
Brazil had blackouts affecting 3 million people and took down world’s largest iron ore producer, costing that company $7 million dollars.
Australia: extremists with the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba tried to bring the grid down in 2003 (the group that committed mass murders in Mumbai 2008)
If an insider could be bribed or hired, the odds of a successful attack would be quite high. A disgruntled employee could help ID critical systems, let cyberattackers through internet and real physical doorways, and send details of how security works at a given facility.
Oil and Gas. Disastrous economic and environmental harm could be done by sabotaging oil and gas infrastructure.
Oil rig blowout preventers could be attacked and other components of offshore drilling equipment and create another Gulf Oil spill or worse.
In 2009 an employee at pacifric Energy Resources sabotaged the leak-detection system on an oil rig off the California coast (luckily discovered before harm was done)
This sector has the highest infiltration rate, with more than half of companies in this sector with stealth attacks every month.
Sewage systems
In 2000 an angry sewer system operator in Australia got even by driving around and giving radio commands to sewage equipment that made the system fail. Pumps stopped, alarms remained quiet, and pumping stations couldn’t communicate with the main computer. The result was millions of gallons of raw sewage erupting into parks and rivers. If he’d attacked the water supply instead, he’d have killed people
Botnets
In 2010 a gigantic botnet was discovered that had gotten into at least 75,000 computers at 2,500 different companies around the world, such as Marck, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks. This malware was stealing the logins for corporate electronic financial systems.
Credit and Debit card number theft
Below are some of the companies mentioned in the book. The number in parentheses is the number of customer credit and debit card numbers & data stolen:
Best Western hotel group 2008: (8,000,000) Sold to Russian mafia.
BJ’s Wholesale Club (400,000), DSW (1,000,000), Marshalls & T. J. Maxx (45,600,000), Dave & Buster’s, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority
HEI hotels & resorts (i.e. Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, etc.) 2010: credit card data of several thousand guests by altering swipe machines at check-in counters
7-Eleven: $2 million from 2,200 Citibank ATMs and $5 million in fake prepaid iWire cards
Hannaford supermarket chain: (4,200,000)
Energy companies
The ‘bid data’, which as the quantity, value, and location of oil discoveries worldwide was stolen by Cina from Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips. This information costs tens of millions of dollars to get by using expensive exploration equipment and software.
China
On page 67 Brenner describes the history of China, the upshot of which is that “China does not regard Western domination as normal, and it does not suffer from an inferiority complex.” For most of history, China was the top dog. Until the 15th century, they had the world’s highest per capita income and best technology. Their goal is to be the top dog again.
On page 75, Brenner believes that “an armed conflict between the United States and China would likely be a naval confrontation, and naval modernization is one of China’s highest priorities”.
Chapter 7 is how a war scenario between China and the U.S. would turn out in the South China Sea (which is all about oil, that’s one of the few places left where oil reserves might be discovered besides the Arctic). The U.S. is very likely to lose since China could easily launch a cyber war on the U.S. that would take out much or most of our electric grid and do other damage as well, while they can shut down access to their system and prevent retaliation. Chapter 7 has the scenario in detail.
As far back as 1988 the idea of information warfare was presented by Dr. Shen Weiguang at a lecture at Beijing’s National Defense University. Weiguang said that instead of killing or occupying enemy land, victory would come by using the “information space” to destroy the enemy’s military, financial, and telecommunications networks.
This idea really struck home as the Chinese watched the USA smash the Iraqi forces in 1991, when they realized we could do the same to the People’s Liberation Army. Clearly a better way to fight the Americans would be economically by stealing secrets electronically and using cyberwarfare — much less expensive and potentially more destructive than military weapons – rather than direct confrontation. If the military could be paralyzed, their information systems corrupted, and made blind and deaf, the American military would be useless, impotent.
In addition, the Chinese realized they could attack a nation’s currency after watching George Soros attack the currencies of East Asian nations.
The Chinese haven’t even tried to hide how they’d go about using cyberwarfare to their advantage. They’ve made it clear they’d attack a nation’s communication and control nodes so that they couldn’t trust their own systems, which would disrupt decision making, operations, and moral. They’d bring down the electric grid, transportation systems, and financial networks.
The Chinese military understands that nations too fond of war perish and believe that Americans are incapable of realizing that due to their love of technology.
Cyberwarfare
Brenner defines 6 kinds of cyberwarfare:
Electronic propaganda, where each side tries to portray themselves as superior through TV, internet, and radio broadcasts
Massive Denial of Service attacks. Russia used denial of service attacks to shut down the Estonian governmental and financial institutions.
Strategic cyberwar against infrastructure: railways, power grids, air traffic control. Brenner thinks this is unlikely because it would be hard to limit to a single country, and disrupting financial markets would affect everyone.
Electronic sabotage is passing along bad information, computers and microchips that might initially perform well, but eventually fail, or attacking supply chains. Most devices are composed of hundreds of parts that come from all over the world, so counterfeit computer chips, low-quality screws, and other components could disable an enemies products.
Operational cyberwarfare is taking over the enemies communications systems, like the USA did in 2003 in Iraq, tricking their radar systems, and so on.
Criminal-Terrorist symbiosis. The definition is in the introduction above.
Preface. Electricity generating contraptions like wind and solar can’t replace the 50% of oil used in global manufacturing, because they can’t generate the high heat needed, or run battery or catenary electric trucks as I explained in “When Trucks Top Running”. Nor are there enough rare earth metals, lithium, cobalt and others to scale up renewables.
Preface. Below I’ve excerpted some of Ugo Bardi’s “The Universal Mining Machine” (24 January 2008 europe.theoildrum), but I’ve left a great deal out of this excellent article, I encourage you to read all of it if you have time. The biggest problem the world faces is “Peak Diesel”, which is what my book “When Trucks stop running” is about. Bardi points out “that 34% of the energy involved in the US mining industry is in the form of diesel fuel.” Nor are there more minerals to be found: “There is little hope of finding high grade sources of minerals other than those we know already. The planet’s crust has been thoroughly explored and digging deeper is not likely to help, since ores form mainly because of geochemical (especially hydrothermal) processes that operate near the surface.”
This is a book review of Pitron’s “The rare metals war”. To produce the metals and minerals to make a transition to wind, solar, nuclear and so on would be incredibly destructive and polluting. A fifth of China’s arable land is laden with toxic heavy metals from mining and industry. And huge amounts of CO2 are emitted by the fossils used to mine, smelt, fabricate, and transport the metal ores and extracted metals for these short lifespan devices. They’re rebuildable, not renewable once finite fossil fuels decline.
The U.S. and other nations are frightened that China is the sole provider of many essential minerals, and demanding that rare earth and other mines be opened within our own nation so that we can control them. But so what if the Chinese have cornered the market on many essential minerals as well as vertically to make products from them? Why would we destroy our land, water, and air in doing so? No doubt because a few people will make billions of dollars for a very short while, leaving toxic mining tailings and mining pits that will pollute water tables and rivers for tens of millennia of future generations.
