Comment by fblp
I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line.
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
Wait, wait. In the context of semiconductor manufacturing packaging does not mean what you think it means. It is not putting the product in a paper box.
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...