TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge • Hacker News Board

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#11

Post by bsder » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:32 AM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #4

LatteLazy wrote: post #2

Careful 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.

> True, but where do you see demand dropping off?

Likely December.

Right now, because everyone is fearful of shortages, they've overbought or are in the process of overbuying.

At some point, everyone is going to realize that, in the US, carrying inventory has tax implications, and everybody is going to try to dump a bunch of inventory back into the system that they really didn't need and aren't prepared to pay taxes on.

Which will be fine for a while--until the middlemen get back up to what they consider useful inventory levels and quit buying. And all the prices will crash.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#12

Post by sschueller » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash.

How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good?

I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#13

Post by orbifold » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

bigdogc wrote: post #5

How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.

The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per seat each, there is no way around them if you want to actually tape out the chip. An experienced backend engineer needs 3-4 months to take a design from Verilog to a file that can be send to a Foundry. You also need access to a PDK from a manufacturer like TSMC and probably will have to license some of the digital-analog components (PLL, IO-Pads) from someone. Manufacturing itself is fairly expensive as well, we taped out via europractice ( https://europractice-ic.com/schedules-prices/), you pay about 12k per square millimetre in TSMC 65nm. Even older processes are more affordable, but you have to keep in mind that each of them requires at least some customisation and access to blocks specific to the process (memories for instance).

On the design and verification side the story is slightly better, verilator (https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator) for instance is an excellent tool that lets you simulate system-verilog code with high performance. It has seen wide industry adoption in the last years and now a couple of companies like Google, SiFive, etc. are investing in open source tooling for hardware. You can go a long way to building your design without having to pay for expensive licenses. The downside is that most of the interface type components (PCI-Express, DDR4, etc.) are prohibitively complicated to build yourself, so you will need to rely on external IP at some point.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#14

Post by qbasic_forever » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #10

qbasic_forever wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Modern semiconductors were invented in America, literally why we call it Silicon Valley. We used to have the best fabs in the world but 80's and 90's corporate American business culture decided it was better to shut down all that manufacturing and move it overseas for more short-term profit. They're now coming to the hard realization that maybe that was a massive mistake.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#15

Post by orbifold » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #10

qbasic_forever wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The US is heavily investing in that, there are recent DARPA programs (POSH, IDEA, SHIELD, SAHARA, ...) addressing this and continuous government investment in semiconductor technologies.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#16

Post by kwere » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #10

qbasic_forever wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

having skilled peoples at every org level capable to do the job is the most difficult part. Any gov could spend Trillions and still get little in return

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#17

Post by Gibbon1 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

qbasic_forever wrote: post #14

staticassertion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Modern semiconductors were invented in America, literally why we call it Silicon Valley. We used to have the best fabs in the world but 80's and 90's corporate American business culture decided it was better to shut down all that manufacturing and move it overseas for more short-term profit. They're now coming to the hard realization that maybe that was a massive mistake.

20 years ago I had the line, American businessman and political leaders are stupid. Because they think they own those factories in China and the far east.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#18

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #12

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

It's technically possible for sure, but I would be surprised if the total cost of such a process was worth it compared to buying new chips in bulk.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#19

Post by xxs » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #12

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

>How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good?

Those things have one big APU (with weak CPU cores), some VRM and memory, GDDR5 + useless DDR3. I'd discount the APU as it'd need someone to make OS support for with the blessing of Sony/Microsoft. That leaves the chips of GDDR5, which can be used by low end GPUs - I don't think they'd ever recoup and investment and likely cheap manual labor of preheat + hot air is the easier option. No idea if anyone would get a license from AMD or NVidia for such GPU.

Edit: the capacitors would have the best value but well... I cant see anyone relying on old caps for anything but repair.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#20

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

bigdogc wrote: post #5

How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.

Manufacturing you'd need billions and the support of your government. But a design business? There's quite a lot of those around.

Bare minimum estimates, working backwards:

- $? for marketing and distribution, physical inventory costs

- $100k/y for one field engineer (FAE)

- $250k for first successful manufacturing run

- $250k for first full mask run with bugs

- $100k bringup boards, test equipment, engineering time fixing it

- $25k shuttle run for initial testing. This will find at least one bug.

- $100-200k outsourced layout: this is boring, specialised, and low value-add, so get someone else to do it

- $500k/y misc software and testing staff or consultants

- $100-500k/y each: 3-5 senior design engineers. For best results, these are people you already know and are spinning out of their job at Big Boring Semi Co

- optional $100k really big FPGA + software + custom boards

- $250k/y software licenses from Cadence or Synopsys, unless you're very brave and want to try the open source flow

- IP licenses. Not just obvious things like ARM cores, but analogue or semi-analogue IP like high-speed transcievers.