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A look inside TSMC

economist.com

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Re: A look inside TSMC

#31

Post by Nokinside »

sytelus wrote: post #11
barrkel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing magical about innovation that requires it to be located in the US. Why do you think a foreign company should relocate to the US?

Transistors, microchips and fabs were all born and thrived in USA. One would think USA would have first mover advantage because this is very very hard to replicate tech but for some reason, fabs got completely eradicated from USA.

Have you ever wondered what's inside a new $20 billion Fab made of that makes it so expensive? Where is that equipment designed, developed and manufactured?

There exists extremely high-tech sector called "Semiconductor Capital Equipment Industry". All the instruments and equipment involved in deposition, lithography, etch and clean, inspection, metrology, and prosess control is super expensive.

Most of that technology is in the hands of Japanese (Nikon, Canon, Hitachi High-Technologies,Tokyo Electron and too many others to name), ASML Holding is big European player and largest supplier of photolithography systems. American companies involved are Applied Materials (their Semiconductor Systems), Lam Research and KLA-Tencor.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#33

Post by rapsey »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #20
dotnetcore wrote: post #4

TSMC = 80% foreign investment. its hardly Taiwanese at this point...

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese. The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan. The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan. Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it…

> And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country.

China has been very aggressively recruiting those engineers to the mainland with high salaries and succeeding.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#34

Post by w0utert »

siscia wrote: post #29
newswasboring wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I've worked in several semiconductor companies mentioned in this article as hardware guy. Actually it's quite liberating to be the provider of technology. You control the whole market. Specially true for some of the companies which are virtual monopolies (over 95% of the market is owned by them). In EUV side, which is the future (happening now), some vendors are the only option. Fabs can pressure them, of…

Can you share more? I would love to know better this kind of dynamics. Why TSMC or other fabs don't develop the same technology in house? How the technology is protected? Why there are not other competitors? Moreover, what that means from the company point of view? I guess there is not a big push to innovate, isn't it?

Developing a state of the art wafer scanner for EUV lithography would probably take decades, many billions of dollars (not tens but more likely closer to $100B), violate thousands of patents and the end result would 100% be inferior to what the entrenched players (which for EUV lithography is de facto only a single company, ASML) have on offer today, which means it would actually put you at a competitive disadvantage as a foundry, compared to competitors that just buy the state of the art machines. Add to that it already takes huge effort and investment to run a fab, semiconductor manufacturing isn’t a process where you just get some gear, then press a button and wait until the chips roll out. It takes billions and months to years to just switch to a new process node. That’s TSMC’s core business: using the tools to make chips, not make the tools themselves, and that’s already extremely hard. It’s not a coincidence there are basically only 3 big players left that can compete at the most advanced process nodes.

Development on ASML NXE EUV scanners started ~20 years ago and only since very recently are they being used for high volume production. There is literally zero chance anyone would be able to profitably build the same thing from scratch again, at least not unless they find some radically different way to make semiconductors.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#35

Post by w0utert »

sytelus wrote: post #6

One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.

Intel has ~10 fabs in the US. GlobalFoundries has 3

Re: A look inside TSMC

#37

Post by tpmx »

sytelus wrote: post #6

One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.

Employing 48k qualified people (like TSMC did in 2018) isn't cheap anywhere, and it's likely 2-3 times more expensive in the US. Maybe $1.5B/yr in Taiwan and $5B/yr in the US?

Re: A look inside TSMC

#38

Post by booblik »

gumby wrote: post #21
sytelus wrote: post #6

One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.

Typically a process step means a completely new fab. Thus when you Build a new one everything is on the table: cost of land, cost of labor, skill level of labor, distance from HQ... So when intel build new fabs in Penang and later PRC these all went into the decision. The old fabs are still around making older-generation parts.

This is not true, Intel regularly upgrades existing fabs to new processes. For example they upgraded 4 fabs to 22nm back in 2010. This list shows how old some fabs are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...

Re: A look inside TSMC

#40

Post by hobo_mark »

sytelus wrote: post #12
di4na wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Environment protection laws. They all reject quite a lotbof nasty chemicals. We can filter or recycle them but it cost a lot at scale. This is an open secret in EE schools.

I'm doubtful Taiwan has such loose laws that would make up the cost difference.

Maybe, but the biggest coal-fired power plant in the world is there for example (look up Taichung Power Plant) and those things aren't known for being clean.
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