The Oil Drum

I'm having trouble finding a reference, but I used to work at a memory manufacturer, and if I recall correctly, electrical power alone was well over 10% of manufacturing costs.  

• Silicon for chip manufacture has to be crystaline, which means melting the pure silicon and letting it cool slowly into a 12 inch wide cylinder.  
  
• Memory fabs run 24x7x365 with precise temperature and humidity control, and in very large clean rooms (filtered air).  From a bare wafer to a die that can be packaged into a chip takes months.  A power outage will ruin the batch.
  
• Chip manufacture takes large amounts of water.  The company I worked at spent millions a year recycling water from production.

There are people out there who know a lot more about this than I do (I was a Perl programmer!) but you get the idea.  I do know that cpu manufacturers (Intel, AMD) and other VLSI chip manufacturers use the same basic production methods.  There are a lot of these in your computer.  The cheaper memory and cpus we have now come result (mostly) from figuring out how to get more circuits on an area of silcon, and bigger silicon wafers (up to 12 inches now).  The cost to produce each wafer doesn't change so much.

Writing this down makes me realize just how complex this system of production is.  Increased electrical costs will definitely increase the cost of the electronics.  However, what strikes me as more important is the vulnerablity of the process to social disruption.  If you are running a batch of dies that takes 60 days to complete, and if on the 59th day the electrical grid goes down, or the workers don't show up to work for one shift, you throw away those dies, worth millions of dollars, and start over.  If it happens more that a few times, the company goes under.  No paychecks for the workers and no memory for your xbox 360.

I would rather check the wholesale price for the cheapest computers etc that still are in production to get a lower limit for the manufacturing cost of a computer etc.

Consumer electronics could easily be built to last for 20-30 years and be built with replacable buttons, screens, connectors, etc to make repairs easy.

What might be lost, perhaps only for an uncomfortable decade, is the rapid progress in capacity.

It would be enough with a reasonable fraction of todays electronics production to keep at least todays rich population with computers, internet, TV:s, radios, and MP3-players and more important the gadgets needed in the control systems for the grid, waterworks, home heating, etc.

Brook, I just tried to find a reference, and I also had trouble. Finally found one (see below): looks like energy cost may be as low as 1% of sales revenue, for AMD.

Magnus, your method would also work, though would give some over-estimate for profits (which don't have to scale with costs).

Yes, the continuing availability of infrastructure is a key implication of this line of reasoning, and it's why I've gone into so much detail (and may post a pointer in the next open thread). But don't discount the importance of communications relative to industrial infrastructure. Communications are crucial to government infrastructure, and also to various accountability mechanisms.

On power use: First I found this:
http://ismi.sematech.org/modeling/iem/docs/SilSymp2002.pdf
Figure 1 shows manufacturing cost in $/cm^2, capital investment, and several other curves (transistors per chip, $/transistor, etc) on the same scale. Manufacturing cost is a small fraction of capital investment--and it's a log scale!

According to this:
http://www.micromagazine.com/archive/05/08/reality.html
a modern fab costs $2 to $3 billion; capital expenditures in 2004 were $49 billion; device revenue $220 billion. So 22% of revenues are spent on new construction each year. Hm. If fabs last 3 years, then a fab can produce over 10X its construction cost.

Here's another way to approach it. According to previous cite, 400 fabs produced $220 billion; half a $billion per year apiece. If 10% of that was spent on energy at 5c/kWh, it would buy 10 billion kWh per year per fab, or about a megawatt. OK, maybe a bit small. Or maybe not...

Hah, finally found a reference! AMD uses about a terawatt-hour per year.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/AboutAMD/0,,51_52_531_12132%5E12135,00.html
Net sales in 2004 were $5 billion.
http://www.amd.com/04copdf p. 16
If they pay 5 cents per kWh, that TWh costs only $50 million. That's only 1% of $5 billion.

I know that un-interrupted electrical power is crucial to a fab. But if interruptions are a significant risk, they can build their own power supply. If a fab costs three billion dollars, uses 50 MW, and produces $12 billion per year, surely it wouldn't be hard to just slap that generating capacity onto the project. There's regulation, and the fact that power is still reliable... but 50 MW is what, 10 microturbines?

If there are serious social disruptions, you'll have workers begging you to house them onsite, and relaxation of regulations to allow you to do it. You can put up tents in the parking lot that's going unused because no one can afford to drive to work. :-)

Chris

OK, more numbers...
http://www.future-fab.com/documents.asp?grID=208&d_ID=2304
Look under "energy metrics" and "water metrics"
A square centimeter is supposed to use around 0.5 kWh/cm^2, and 8-10 liters of water.

That's really negligible, considering the number of transistors you get in a square centimeter. Rising energy costs would increase capital costs somewhat, of course. But I just can't see energy being a major limiter of semiconductor production.

For energy use: they've already put a Palm Pilot into a wristwatch. Granted, it's a big wristwatch, and it has to be recharged frequently, but still...

When I remember what we did with 20 MHz 286 computers running DOS, (uphill both ways) it is obvious that there is a vast amount of inefficiency in computers today that doesn't need to be there. Many apps are written in scripting languages that cost an order of magnitude. On top of operating systems that cost another order of magnitude. Probably 99.9% of your computer's cost (mfg and operating) is spent in retroactively saving time for the designers. If energy starts to get expensive enough to affect computers, we'll easily give back at least one of those orders of magnitude.

Somewhere in Google, someone is probably already studying how to run their algorithms on FPGA's instead of CPU's, for a 90-99% energy savings...

Chris