Live data from Hacker News

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

asia.nikkei.com

21–30 of 260 posts

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

#21

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.

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

This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise.

The US defence department, colloquially known as the pentagon, ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what will happen if US will be hit with a worst case scenario, years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs, massive industry wide cyberattack, or something happening to Taiwan.

One of comissioned think tanks recommended that exact methods of military going door-to-door to gather old gaming console, smartphones, and PCs for conversion to use in munitions, and military equipment.

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

#22
post #5

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

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

A decade ago, it would've taken you $1m in China for a 50/50 shot at it.

If your first tapeout works, you will make money, if not... you wasted $1m.

$1m looks like pocket change to most American tech people now, but the fabless trains has long since departed.

You will need a sum with few more zeroes, to get a jumpstart in the industry now.

There was 4-3 years long extreme consolidation push in the industry, with big swallowing dozens producers of commodity products. It is very reminiscent how the demise of American oil industry happened when the industry gone from thousands of oil producers, to less than 10 in one decade. Everybody bets now that there will be 10-15 or so mega-fabless running the industry in coming decade.

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

#23
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

oh I bet many are going to find the opportunity provided by the equipment gives them a lot of flexibility with work but also to communicate with friends and family. Many had never considered using zoom, their ipads, and other means, to keep in touch. The visual aspect may finally lead to where people will desire phones calls are both audio and visual.

maybe the video phone will become an actual reality instead of something most people only see on TV and in movies

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

#24

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.

[flagged]

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

#25
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.…

> 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.

Unless you talk about countries where people simply don't pay for software no matter what.

Some companies are just fine with 10 years old pirated Virtuosos in places like China.

It was a big surprise to me that even software which probably has less than 100 licensees globally is still getting warezed.

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

#26
The expected price reductions will have been part of the financial modelling for products. Big customers of TSMC is Apple which traditionally build the best products with the best inputs and then sells them for quite some time benefiting from lower input costs.

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

#27

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.

What would you put them in? Everyone wants the latest and greatest Playstation or Xbox with the fastest chips.

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

#28

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.

Completely pie-in-the-sky. Chips aren't fungible.

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

#29
post #19

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 lab…

You can buy a motherboard with the xbone apu in China and run windows 10 on it. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-a...

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

#30

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.

Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.
Post reply on HN