Didn’t AMD have a big fab in Arizona once?
TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
211–220 of 438 posts
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#212I suspect this is the result of DARPA’s big interposer push and it’s leaking now because of the change in leadership there. Specifically TSMC has breakthrough CoWoS interposers, can’t meet demand, and the military is bottlenecked without a chiplet path made in the USA.
Something like that seems to make sense considering the investment is relatively tiny and that the factory is gonna be about 1/5th the size of the usual TSMC factory.
So it does appear like this is intended for a specific chip for a specific purpose.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan. You have earned a friend for life. Remember when Trump floated withdrawing from NATO? Remember when Trump stopped funding the WHO in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years? America First has no room for friends for life. Only friends for the moment.
> Remember when Trump floated withdrawing from NATO? I remember when Trump took no actions at all toward pulling the US out of NATO, and did nothing other than use it as a rather dumb prop to try to coax NATO allies into meeting their spending obligations. > Remember when Trump stopped funding the WHO in the middle of the worst pandemic of the past 100 years? I remember when the WHO cooperated with China to knowingly…
The US President lies on a daily basis.
And the previous president had already got the Europeans to commit to meeting their obligations over a period of a certain number of years which they were moving towards. Trumps nonsense achieved nothing other than making the Europeans and the rest of the world recognize that the US has become deeply unreliable and move further towards China.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's in TSMC's best interest is the long-term independence and stability of Taiwan. Taking away a strong source of motivation for an administration that's already shown itself to lean toward "stay out of other countries; America First!" as its official foreign policy stance to keep it independent and stable is so short-sighted that it's practically insane.
Counterpoint: If the PRC takes over now, they own the process technology NVIDIA and AMD depend on. They can tell the Americans to go pound sand, good luck on your next supercomputer project, and dedicate all production to Chinese origin designs - with a helping of industrial espionage for a kick start. That’s a pretty powerful incentive for aggression that would be reduced if TSMC’s operations were more distributed.…
Counterpoint: If the PRC takes over now, they own the process technology NVIDIA and AMD depend on. They can tell the Americans to go pound sand, good luck on your next supercomputer project, and dedicate all production to Chinese origin designs - with a helping of industrial espionage for a kick start.
This should terrify the US, which is the ideal. The US needs to go to bat for Taiwan, which won't happen when they have less incentive to.
China is willing to take independent countries for lesser and pettier reasons than semiconductors. Look what they've done to Hong Kong. Taiwan's been a thorn in its side for years. Distribute it around, China will still want to take Taiwan, the US has less of a reason to go to bat for it.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#215This surreal, and this is a bombshell. TSMC is to build a second 5nm plant outside of their strategic roadmap, and has to get money for it out of the blue.
How will it work out with their investors, only god knows.
And this has ultimately to pass by Taiwanese government, if it didn't already.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#216It would make a lot more sense than UBI if the US would chip in part of the salary, ie (cost of American worker - cost of Taiwanese worker), so that this sort of factory would no longer be disincentivized just because of the cost of American labor.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#217This is interesting. Right now TSMC seems to provide Taiwan with guaranteed US protection because they are so far ahead technologically. Apple, AMD, and the defense industry have little alternative if they want a cutting edge node. It's unclear how long they will maintain this dominance. Maybe the long term US-Taiwan ties of factories in the US will make this worth it strategically. I assume that all R&D will remain…
What does the defense industry need a cutting-edge node for? Better drone battery life?
Nvidia just announced its ampere chip Basically a data centre in one rack mount kit. Now the first customer is ... us defend need ai and those Gpu and ai advanced chip all done there.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China. That is not clear.. at all. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- the non-US western allies -- have all known exactly what China's end goal is and have down jack diddly squat to put pressure on them. The only thing preventing China from taking out Taiwan is the United States. Europe and the rest of the world is too cowardly to even do anythi…
You are being downvoted but what happened with Crimea proves your point.
True, although Crimea was pretty much testcase-scale - not many people live there, and its economic value is pretty low. Taiwan is much much more populous, and has a much higher economic value.
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#219How much software depends on Apple, AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm chips? TSMC is an indispensable part of our industry's supply chain. Most of its chips are produced in Taiwan and over 75% are sold to customers in either the USA or (mainland) China, so TSMC understandably tries to remain neutral in trade disputes between the two. Tim Culpan at Bloomberg recently predicted that this neutrality may not hold for long, and TS…
Literally everyone but the hardware manufacturers would be happier if the software didn't depend on those chips. If we can't move the supply chain closer we should at least decouple software from particular hardware manufacturers.
The capital requirements for the creation of a modern high-speed semiconductor fabrication facility, and the corresponding integrated circuit design make ‘open hardware’, or large number of interchangeable competitors unlikely.
How and why should software be decoupled from hardware when there are so few hardware suppliers?
Re: TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Is there a document (or a book) somewhere that details who all these semiconductor equipment manufacturers are, and their history? I'm extremely interested in this space and would love to learn more about it.
I don't know if there is one besides just Wikipedia.