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Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

taipeitimes.com

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Re: Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

#13
post #2

New backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor fabbers. If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year straight.

Newer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has 10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead silicon (due to process issues).

We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very real, and exceedingly costly to attempt to work around. AMD's strategy of using 14nm chiplets for components that don't scale down well (eg: analog interfaces, DRAM, etc) is likely to become much more common.

Re: Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

#14
post #9
post #4

TSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government. TSMC should stop the supply.

Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner. If you were TSMC or the Taiwan government - why would you risk that relationship?

Because the main reason Taiwan is not part of communist China is it has military protection from US?

Re: Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

#15
post #9
post #4

TSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government. TSMC should stop the supply.

Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner. If you were TSMC or the Taiwan government - why would you risk that relationship?

> Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner.

That's true for most neighboring Asian countries. But I'm also guessing that most fabless customers are American. Sure, there are Chinese fabless chipmakers such as HiSilicon (Huawei), Tsinghua Unigroup, but nowhere as big as Apple, Qualcomm, or AMD.

Re: Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

#17
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just curious why you think a Taiwanese company should stop selling to a Chinese company based on statement/policy of a foreign country? It is obviously in their best financial interest to sell to Huawei. Why should they stop?

Because all this "national security" is really about trade not national security. Trump declared national security on steel, cars and pretty much any important industry that US didn't lead.

Incorrect. While the Trump administration is more enthusiastic about aggressive intervention in commerce in general, the recent sanctions are the culmination of over a decade of bad behavior by Huawei, recognized by many countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei

Re: Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

#19
post #2

New backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor fabbers. If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year straight.

Newer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has 10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead silicon (due to process issues). We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very real, and…

Global Foundries has a 12nm for most of the new AMD CPUs.[1] I’ve heard the difference between processes at different companies is just marketing talk but I’ll let someone knowledgeable chime in.

[1]https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B

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