#yield economics

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A stainless sorting tray in a bright fab with dies being separated into two visibly uneven piles, a smaller pile of accepted dies and a much larger pile of rejects, a robotic picker caught mid-placement over the smaller pile

SMIC's Real Constraint Isn't the Node. It's the Yield.

Coverage of China's chip industry usually frames the gap with the West as a performance-gap story. The sharper, less-told version is a yield story — and the number behind it is startling.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 10, 2026 · 4 min read

A yield-sort tray in a bright lab divided into two zones, one holding several small working chiplets and the other holding a single large die marked as defective, the two zones' total silicon area visibly comparable

AI Hardware & Semiconductors

The Yield Math That Explains Why Chips Stopped Getting Monolithically Bigger

A larger single die should, in principle, be faster. It is also exponentially more likely to contain a fatal defect. This briefing works through the actual yield arithmetic behind the industry's shift to chiplets.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 10, 2026 · 4 min read

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