Into the Ultraviolet

Sometime last spring, I was doing dishes, barely listening to a podcast, when I heard an economist say that being in a Taiwanese microchip fbh was like being "up against the face of God." 

Wait, what? You heard it as clearly as I did. A fbh. 

I rewound, listened. Rewound, listened again. Maybe seven times. The economist, it seems, was saying "fab." A Taiwanese fab.

Now I was intrigued. Such a throwaway word to be the face of God. I really expected something grander, maybe Greek. Anyway, I put the string of words "Taiwanese microchip fab" into Google. A fab, it turns out, is a fabricator, a foundry, a factory. That didn't help much. How could a factory, no matter what it makes, be divine? 

Thus began my quest to penetrate the greatest microchip fab in the world—the 12-inch GigaFAB of the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. It's a 12-inch fab because the microchips carved at the factory come from a silicon wafer that's a foot in diameter. Typically, each chip is the size of a thumbnail. And—here's the divine part—each one is embellished with up to a trillion transistors, each one designed by a human and etched onto the silicon with light. 

At some point, as I rapidly tried to imagine a trillion built things of any specs sitting on my thumbnail, I realized that the holy practice taking place inside the fabs was etching on atoms. (Not etching into atoms, which would be chipping away at them; short of fission, that can't be done.) To think of actual art, lithography, being made at atomic scale fired up my imagination. I think it also scared me. So last October I made a pilgrimage to Hsinchu, Taiwan, and entered the GigaFAB to see what I could see. 

The result was my piece about sacred semiconductors on the cover of the May issue of WIRED. Recently, two of my brilliant colleagues at WIRED, Lauren Goode and Michael Calore, had me on their show, Gadget Lab, to discuss the article. If you’re not the listening kind, you can read the transcript below.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Have you ever taken a tour of a chip fab?

Michael Calore: A chip fab?

Lauren Goode: A chip fab.

Michael Calore: You mean like a place where they make tortilla chips?

Lauren Goode: Not exactly. This is a place where the tiny, tiny pieces of silicon inside of our phones are stamped. Everything that we are doing right now, zooming and taping this podcast would cease to exist without this.

Michael Calore: Oh, I see.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Have you ever toured one of those fabs?

Michael Calore: I have not. I understand they are very difficult to get inside of.

Lauren Goode: They are. But one of our WIRED colleagues was able to get inside one recently.

Michael Calore: Please say more.

Lauren Goode: We're going to talk to her about it right now.

Michael Calore: Awesome.

Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab, I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined by longtime WIRED contributor, Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia, it's great to have you on the show.

Virginia Heffernan: Hi, to both of you.

Lauren Goode: Virginia, we brought you onto the podcast this week because you recently got a look inside one of the most important and most secretive tech manufacturers on the planet, that's TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Now, TSMC is a big deal in the tech world, even if they don't have the name recognition of companies like Apple or Google. And that is somewhat intentional, right? Because TSMC has struck deals with some of these giant tech companies precisely because it emphasizes discretion and trust. TSMC makes semiconductors, the little chips that power everything from phones to computers to cars, to weapons. The company is also under a lot of pressure, both in the business world and geopolitically. China, which is just to the mortheast, has long claimed Taiwan its territory, partly because it wants to fold Taiwan's successful industries like semiconductors into its own economy. So tensions between Taiwan and China are high, and TSMC is right in the middle of all of that. Now, Virginia, you saw inside TSMC and you titled your story in WIRED, "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory." It sounds like an interesting experience, to say the least. So why was this something of a religious experience for you?

Virginia Heffernan: Well, first off, the idea for the story came when I was listening to a podcast by Adam Tooze, Ones and Tooze, one of my favorite podcasts. And in passing, he was talking about the geopolitical importance that you alluded to of the fabricators, which everyone just calls the fabs. But he also wanted to add that there's something even more astonishing about these places and the fact that we do these things, he said at nanoscale, means we are up against the face of God. Up against the face of God. He's got the best ever Oxford accent. And the word “fabs” was the one that eluded me, because if we're going to be up against the face of God, I thought I would hear Angkor Wat or the Mona Lisa or whatever before it, but no, it's this word “fabs.” I called a chip manufacturer buddy of mine, and he said, "Yes, that's where they make these things." And he conveyed that the atomic constructions where they quite literally etch on atoms are in fact an almost divine religious experience. And that if there were any chance that I could get into a TSMC fab in particular, that I would find my mind blown, and I did.