Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A look inside TSMC

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 68 posts

Re: A look inside TSMC

#41

Post by baybal2 »

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.

Indeed, running a public company in Taiwan is known not to be a pleasant thing.

Taiwan government is very activist when it comes to henpecking corporations on "governance standards." Boards of a lot of important companies are de-facto micromanaged by the state.

A stark contrast to the US, where laxity on that front is negated by mindbogglingly complex securities regulations.

For US, you can still play your game, just pay enough for lawyers. For Taiwan, not so much. Choose your poison.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#42

Post by amelius »

Nokinside wrote: post #31
sytelus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

Yes absolutely, but why not protect these innovations by operating these machines completely under our own supervision?

It's a lot easier to duplicate a production chain if you have full access to the machines (which come with extensive training). And you can even copy the process on a machine-by-machine basis, which makes it much simpler.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#43

Post by tpmx »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #24
gumby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intel doesn’t have a fab in Penang, it only has a testing assembly site there. It has one fab in the PRC doing flash memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_... No non-PRC company is fearless enough to build a new fab in the PRC with anything that aren’t comfortable with being copied by mainland companies.

Most of my old Intel CPUs (80s/90s) are "made in Malaysia". So I guess they did in the past.

Edit: here's some PR: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/intel-marks-40-years-i...

Re: A look inside TSMC

#44

Post by Fordec »

taspeotis wrote: post #19

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

I can think of a few.

Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one.

New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea.

Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though.

Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#45

Post by icegreentea2 »

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.

As a sibling comment points out, there is still significant fab capacity in the US.

There are a LOT of things to untangle. The first thing is the difference between leading edge fabrication, and everything else. If you look at this wiki list of active fabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...), you'll see lots of plants still building stuff at 45nm+, and a large chunk building in 22-45nm.

There are only 3 main leading edge manufacturers', TSMC, Intel, and Samsung (I'm discounting Global Foundry since they publicly announced they're not chasing smaller process nodes). All of them concentration their fabs in their home country. Intel has some fabs in Ireland (I don't really know why..), Israel (Intel's Israel team is top-notch and a real contributor to Intel's success, so I guess that makes sense), and one in China (cause that's the world we live in). All of Intel's leading edge plants (10 and 7nm) are in the USA.

Of the non-leading edge plants, you'll also find that the majority of companies also concentrate their fabs in their home country, with American companies being a bit more dispersed. I would evaluate that the majority of fabs reside in a company's home country. I wager a bunch of the greater American dispersion comes from mergers/acquisitions. There's been a lot consolidation in the chip industry (at every level and vertical) in the last few decades.

I think what you're seeing isn't so much companies moving their fabs off shore. What you have is that most companies are no longer willing to invest their own R&D into pushing fabrication processes, so they stop building new fab plants, and instead look for a fabrication house to buy from. And today there's really only one choice, TSMC, which happens to be Taiwanese.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#46

Post by magicsmoke »

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.

I've been reading Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry lately, and there's a whole bit in there about TSMC.

TSMC was the first company to be a "pure-play" company that did no design work and only manufactured orders. This was back in the days when the guys at Intel and IBM had the attitude that to be a real player in the industry, you had to have your own fab. But there was an increasing amount of fabless design houses in the US that would piggyback off the excess fab capacity that Intel/IBM had after they were done with their own chips, and TSMC targeted that demand by tables companies for manufacturing capacity directly.

The takeaways I got was fabs moved away from the US because TSMC and the like figured out an innovative business model that let them focus on a single part of the supply chain that provided substantial cost savings for all these new fabless companies in the US. Meanwhile, the old established players like Intel/IBM with fab experience weren't willing to hop on this new segment and kept their fab capacity mainly for making their own designs. Although TSMC started in a high capital low return segment, as opposed to fabless that could produce and capture most of the value in a chip design, the IP itself, TSMC eventually became so good at what they do and process nodes became so expensive to develop that no other US companies had the incentive to enter this segment from scratch and lose money for years before catching up with TSMC for frankly not very high returns. The only US company keeping up with TSMC is Intel, and that's because they've been manufacturing from the start and have enough volume to make investing in a fab and spreading that fixed expenditure over all their chips worth it.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#47

Post by temac »

Fordec wrote: post #44
taspeotis wrote: post #19

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

I can think of a few. Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one. New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions…

Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#48

Post by hapless »

tpmx wrote: post #43
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel doesn’t have a fab in Penang, it only has a testing assembly site there. It has one fab in the PRC doing flash memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_... No non-PRC company is fearless enough to build a new fab in the PRC with anything that aren’t comfortable with being copied by mainland companies.

Most of my old Intel CPUs (80s/90s) are "made in Malaysia". So I guess they did in the past. Edit: here's some PR: https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/intel-marks-40-years-i...

The processor package was made in Malaysia at the Penang assembly plant.

The chip inside that package was fabbed elsewhere, most probably the USA.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#49

Post by tpmx »

amelius wrote: post #42
Nokinside wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technolog…

Yes absolutely, but why not protect these innovations by operating these machines completely under our own supervision? It's a lot easier to duplicate a production chain if you have full access to the machines (which come with extensive training). And you can even copy the process on a machine-by-machine basis, which makes it much simpler.

1) You do realize a large amount of people here aren't american?

2) Many (including myself) believe that a tightly coupled international trade is the by far most efficient way we have of avoiding violent conflict between countries.

Re: A look inside TSMC

#50

Post by amelius »

tpmx wrote: post #49
amelius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes absolutely, but why not protect these innovations by operating these machines completely under our own supervision? It's a lot easier to duplicate a production chain if you have full access to the machines (which come with extensive training). And you can even copy the process on a machine-by-machine basis, which makes it much simpler.

1) You do realize a large amount of people here aren't american? 2) Many (including myself) believe that a tightly coupled international trade is the by far most efficient way we have of avoiding violent conflict between countries.

I wasn't arguing from the perspective of myself and the people here, but from the viewpoint of those actually owning the technology.
Post reply on HN