TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
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Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#2Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#3This reminds me of Moore's Second Law, namely that the cost of maintaining Moore's Law will itself follow an exponential growth curve. You figure there will come a date where any attempt to maintain Moore's Law will become so expensive that there's no way it can avoid slowing down drastically. At which point the semiconductor industry will behave like other heavy industries and improves at a much more modest rate.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#4Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...
True, but where do you see demand dropping off? I would actually assume demand will go up even more, since the economy was slowed down due to the pandemic.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#5How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#6Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...
I don’t think the shortage will be over in the next 2-3 years at the least. This is a huge problem that the media only briefly covers. Biden just announced 25b to semiconductors bc homeland security knows we have major flaws in the supply chain.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#7How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
To build chips similar to what TSMC produces (i.e. some of the most cutting-edge fab tech in the world)? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Decades of experience. Growing silicon crystals and turning them into transistors barely bigger than a few dozen atoms is immensely difficult. And then turning that into a process you can repeat with precision and churn out at high yield is another enormous hurdle.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#8How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
Equipment = billions.
A bunch of talented people with experience who can use the equipment productively = priceless. Probably can't be bought, otherwise some countries would already have done it.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#9Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's shortages...
True, but where do you see demand dropping off? I would actually assume demand will go up even more, since the economy was slowed down due to the pandemic.
I think the changes pushed people to invest in new devices, etc, for a per-user lifestyle, while going back to restaurants, meeting rooms, etc, there's an excess of second hand inventory.
Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
#10How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
To build chips similar to what TSMC produces (i.e. some of the most cutting-edge fab tech in the world)? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Decades of experience. Growing silicon crystals and turning them into transistors barely bigger than a few dozen atoms is immensely difficult. And then turning that into a process you can repeat with precision and churn out at high yield is another enormous hurdle.
Serious question as someone totally naive on this. A few hundred billion dollars seems like an extremely good deal to lead this area of technology - why don't we see funding for this at a government level? I mean, we now have a 2 trillion dollar infrastructure plan.
Is there an impediment I'm not aware of? Or maybe it's not as good of a deal as I think?