Serving technology enthusiasts for over 25 Years. TechSpot is the place to go for tech advice and analysis you can trust.
WTF?! Reddit user claims that he found a 12nm TSMC chip in a dumpster in China. The wafer was a test, but the discovery sparked jokes that it could be cut into working GPUs. It also served as a reminder about the complexity of chip manufacturing.
AVX512VNNI claims to have discovered the wafer near TSMC Fab 16 in Nanjing. This fab produces 12nm node chip technology, which is still fairly advanced. We’re therefore talking about high-value silicon.
But surely a TSMC company wouldn’t dump their IP in this way for everyone to copy? They didn’t. And there’s an explanation for “blunder.” Later, the same Redditor pointed under the post, that this appears as what’s known “test wafer” to calibrate the machines that pattern circuitry on production wafers.
Phew. This is not as bad as throwing away wafers containing actual chip designs from customers, such as Nvidia’s RTX series GPUs. These would be too valuable to lose. Or, perhaps the explanation is simpler: The Redditor works at one of these foundries and was just making a joke.
Don’t miss our explanation: What is Chip Binding?
But not all chips perform the same, even if they are made from the same wafer. Chip binning is the solution. After dicing, every die is tested and sorted according to factors such as speed, power efficiency and defect count. Only the best-performing dies make it to the top bins and are destined for flagship parts, while the more flawed ones are assigned to the lower bins. In that sense, the wafer incident can be viewed as an extreme case of “binning” — as in straight to the trash. Redditors have been wondering if it is possible to salvage the wafer, and extract the individual dies.
A commenter suggested using a pizza cutter for dicing up the wafer. Another suggested wiring up the whole wafer without slicing it. It turns out that wafer-scale computing is a real technique. They may have a point.
This incident also sparked some good natured roasting of Nvidia for the RTX 50 Series, with one commenter joking “Hey look, someone found the missing ROPs” about some of those GPUs that shipped with missing render output unit.
