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TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

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Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#111

Post by axaxs »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #74
sremani wrote: post #66

Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan. You have earned a friend for life. For the doubters, this is just the beginning of Re-industrilization of America.

> Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan. They've operated in the US for a while now. From the press release: "In the United States, TSMC currently operates a fab in Camas, Washington and design centers in both Austin, Texas and San Jose, California. The Arizona facility would be TSMC’s second manufacturing site in the United States." > You have earned a friend for life. What a bizarre comment. If they leave, are…

> What a bizarre comment. If they leave, are they your enemy for life then?

I'm not sure that's fair. There's a lot of room between friend and enemy, here. When breaking up in a relationship under typical circumstances, the other person doesn't normally become an enemy, unless a person is not well adjusted mentally.

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#112

Post by remarkEon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
remarkEon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China, and this move makes that statement less likely to be taken seriously. Which is good.

> PRC considers Taiwan as part of broader China And I believe Staten Island to be my sovereign dominion. Xi’s views are of limited relevance. Taiwan is a sovereign country boasting a military alliance with America. Moving production home is good. But safeguarding global assets in Taiwan from Beijing pulling a Falklands is also savvy.

Xi's views are of limited relevance to you and me, perhaps, but they are not of limited relevance to how PRC operates. Of course they're relevant, and then by extension that makes them relevant for how global politics plays out.

>Taiwan is a sovereign country boasting a military alliance with America.

Yep, this is certainly true, and part of maintaining that military alliance will be further entangling things like high tech manufacturing.

>But safeguarding global assets in Taiwan from Beijing pulling a Falklands is also savvy.

I actually don't know as much as I should about the Falkland Islands War, other than the UK took a decent amount of losses surprisingly. I think PRC actually invading Taiwan is extremely unlikely, given the terrain and weather aspects of how that war would go, but doing something like launching some missiles is definitely within the realm of possibility.

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#113

Post by ogre_codes »

troughway wrote: post #73

Bringing back manufacturing and other things of industrial nature from China isn't just good strategic planning in a time of uncertainty. It is also a gesture of good faith because supporting a dictatorship that actively imprisons over a million people in concentration camps and uses them for organ harvesting should, at the very least, be punished economically. There is no finding equal ground or compromise with thos…

> It is also a gesture of good faith because supporting a dictatorship that actively imprisons over a million people in concentration camps and uses them for organ harvesting should, at the very least, be punished economically.

The US isn't China bad, but it hasn't exactly been stellar on the human rights front lately either.

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#114

Post by arcticbull »

wtallis wrote: post #110
arcticbull wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fabs aren't really a realm of competition with China. Leading fabs are in Germany (GlobalFoundaries in Dresden), Taiwan (TSMC's primary fabs), South Korea (Samsung) and even the US (GlobalFoundaries) and Singapore (GlobalFoundaries).

GlobalFoundries isn't really "leading"; they got out of that race a while ago and are now focusing all their R&D on niche fabrication technologies that aren't in competition for building CPUs, GPUs, or smartphone SoCs. And you didn't mention Intel, which is the only serious competition to TSMC when it comes to advanced fab technology for those kinds of chips.

Yeah, I didn't mention Intel, I know they have fabs domestically but they're also moving to TSMC after 10nm [1] so I figured they were getting out of the game.

Good call-out re: GF.

[1] https://wccftech.com/intel-abandoning-10nm-after-dg1-plannin...

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#117

Post by fermienrico »

arcticbull wrote: post #106
sremani wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand, but fabs are realm of competition with China and their 2025 plan. I am big fanboy of Robert Lighthizer, and with Phase 1 effectively ripped we are going to see a lot of moving things. May not happen immediately, first it will be slow then sudden.

Fabs aren't really a realm of competition with China. Leading fabs are in Germany (GlobalFoundaries in Dresden), Taiwan (TSMC's primary fabs), South Korea (Samsung) and even the US (GlobalFoundaries) and Singapore (GlobalFoundaries).

Having worked in the semiconductor industry, manufacturing specifically, I can attest that this is a false statement - US technology in semiconductor manufacturing is not simply from running the fabs, but building fabrication equiment that fabs purchase to process and package wafers. The US (Teredyn, Applied Materials, Entegris, KLA Tencor, Lam Research), Netherlands (ASML) and Japan (Daifuku, Hitachi, TEL, Advantest) are the top leaders of the semiconductor equipment [1]. The ones I just listed account for over 90% of the semiconductor equipment.

Most of the deep tech in a fab is the equipment. The rest of the stuff is a giant box that's super clean and maintains that clealiness.

All of these Fabs[2] buy their equipment from the aforementioned companies.

Here is what an example supply chain looks like:

NVidia(US) has the IP and "soft" tech, they use software tooling(US) to make layouts, then contracts out the manufacturing to TSMC(Taiwan) who then buys their equipment from KLA/AMAT/LAM/TEL/ASML. TSMC(Taiwan) processes the wafers which are packaged at OSATS(OSATS are a collection of many companies[3]). The final product such as a graphics card is then further made accessible by writing insanely deep software driver stack (CUDA drivers for example) that are all developed by NVIDIA(US). For CPUs, there would be ISA and other "soft" tech involved which is Intel(US), AMD (US), ARM(UK, owned by Softbank(Japan)), Qualcomm, Broadcom, Microchip and Apple (all US, its a long list). I didn't even touch storage/memory. In addition to US, a lot of software and hardware talent and manufacturing comes from the EU, Germany in particular. I used to get on the call with a German company in the late morning and the Germans would be working their ass off at 9pm in Germany. We had an amazing team. It is not uncommon to pay $20k for a motor made in germany.

Somewhere in the middle to low end of the supply chain (motors, wires, connectors, may be even steel, copper, precious metals, chemicals) probably has Chinese involvement. You can imagine how a graphics card's supply chain gets very complex and deep.

Back to the central point - Semiconductor is a massive industry with complex supply chain. Depends on the level we are talking about. Also Global Foundries is not considered as among top dogs when it comes to semicon tech, although that's also debatable.

Edit: added tooling

[1] Source of the data (2011, old but still relevant): https://www.vlsiresearch.com/public/cms_pdf_upload/706001v1....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_device_manufacturer

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#118

Post by wtallis »

arcticbull wrote: post #114
wtallis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GlobalFoundries isn't really "leading"; they got out of that race a while ago and are now focusing all their R&D on niche fabrication technologies that aren't in competition for building CPUs, GPUs, or smartphone SoCs. And you didn't mention Intel, which is the only serious competition to TSMC when it comes to advanced fab technology for those kinds of chips.

Yeah, I didn't mention Intel, I know they have fabs domestically but they're also moving to TSMC after 10nm [1] so I figured they were getting out of the game. Good call-out re: GF. [1] https://wccftech.com/intel-abandoning-10nm-after-dg1-plannin...

That's a bullshit rumor from a bullshit site that you're misinterpreting anyways. Intel might plausibly use outside fabs for their new discrete GPU product line, but they are absolutely not getting out of the fab game in any meaningful way. They are capacity-constrained at the moment and don't really have room to make big GPUs in-house without subtracting from their manufacturing capacity for their well-established CPU product line.

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#119

Post by blahblah12 »

arcticbull wrote: post #114
wtallis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GlobalFoundries isn't really "leading"; they got out of that race a while ago and are now focusing all their R&D on niche fabrication technologies that aren't in competition for building CPUs, GPUs, or smartphone SoCs. And you didn't mention Intel, which is the only serious competition to TSMC when it comes to advanced fab technology for those kinds of chips.

Yeah, I didn't mention Intel, I know they have fabs domestically but they're also moving to TSMC after 10nm [1] so I figured they were getting out of the game. Good call-out re: GF. [1] https://wccftech.com/intel-abandoning-10nm-after-dg1-plannin...

That’s definitely not verified. I’ve read that rumor multiple times and each time, it hasn’t happened.

Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

#120

Post by streamingvac »

sremani wrote: post #66

Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan. You have earned a friend for life. For the doubters, this is just the beginning of Re-industrilization of America.

Thank you TSMC. Thank you for standing with us American. We will defend your democratic free island against the evil Chinese government across the isle.

Thank you president Trump. You stood up against China when most of the corporate media (Disney/abc, Amazon/Washington post, AT&T/cnn) and Democrats hates you for it. Before the coronavirus event. Now you bring back critical tech capability as well as factory jobs and knowledge.

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