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

asia.nikkei.com

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

#31

Post by iopq »

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.

Huh?

Samsung and TSMC are home-grown in their respective countries and Intel still makes chips. Together, they make the majority of the world's chips.

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

#32

Post by throwaway4good »

From the article:

"However, Liu said that it is "economically unrealistic" for all countries to "onshore" additional chip production, warning that this could lead to more unprofitable capacity."

Well. The world is clearly not listening to that. So the question is how the business of chip manufactoring will look in 2 or 3 years?

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

#33

Post by alexgray1415 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #30
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.

Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.

Get out!

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

#34

Post by iopq »

bsder wrote: post #11
carlmr wrote: 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.

> 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…

For TSMC there's very little risk

This is because a newly competitive AMD takes up a ton of wafers. They can't make them fast enough, and in 2022 they are releasing a completely new platform with DDR 5 on 5nm, and presumably new GPU line.

This should again clobber Intel 10nm products. Even if there's no chip shortage, the customers of TSMC are very healthy (AMD, Apple, other phone manufacturers).

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

#35

Post by nindalf »

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?

> why don't we see funding for this at a government level

Because America fell asleep at the wheel while Taiwan did not. TSMC and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers benefited from a government that saw the need to be a part of high value manufacturing. Meanwhile America of the 90s and 2000s assumed that it would be the most powerful country in perpetuity and so it wouldn't matter where something was being produced as long as they could pay for it.

The events of the 2010s has shown the flaws of this thinking. It is now possible for American firms to be cut off completely from semiconductor manufacturing, similar to how Huawei was cut off. There is now support from the American government to restore semiconductor manufacturing. They are footing a part of the bill for TSMC's new plant. I'm sure Intel's lobbyists are skilled enough to get part of their new plants paid for as well. China is doing the same - the state has deployed all it's resources behind SMIC to ensure that what happened to Huawei never happens again.

It's more complicated than this though. You don't just need semiconductor fabs, you also need rare earth metals, almost all of which is mined and refined in China. America is attempting to reshore this too (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/31/g...)

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

#36

Post by rcxdude »

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.

The story is not anywhere near that straightforward for semiconduction fabrication. A huge portion of that fabrication, for example, just moved out of california to other places in the US. Also there's been a general consolodation of fabrication plants over time as more and more advanced nodes put the price of a plant up by orders of magnitudes. There just isn't enough money for the same number of fabs at the bleeding edge. Also, intel are still US based manufacturing and they have only quite recently been toppled from the throne of most advanced process. They have simply lost to the advancement of overseas tech companies (generally it seems because they made a bad bet on their strategy for further shrinks to their process), nothing to do with US companies outsourcing overseas.

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

#37

Post by rcxdude »

bsder wrote: post #11
carlmr wrote: 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.

> 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…

Who's keeping inventory? Certainly for consumer channels there's basically no inventory to be had.

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

#38

Post by throwaway4good »

alexgray1415 wrote: post #33
throwaway4good wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.

Get out!

Serious answer: Reusing old components makes no sense as the changes in technology are too big (say from a PS3 which has 45nm chip to a 7nm PS5 cpu). However you can keep using your playstation for longer as the new one will be more expensive or harder to get.

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

#39

Post by londons_explore »

postingawayonhn wrote: post #27
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.

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

If latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation collapse), we'd do just fine with existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries.

With clever software, you can eek much more real world use out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful computations for someone else who needs more computing power.

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

#40

Post by povik »

inglor_cz wrote: post #8
bigdogc wrote: post #5

How 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.

The question is about design of chips, not manufacturing. That is quite the difference in the market that has developed.
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