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How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755693
Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips (fossi-foundation.org)
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…
There are plenty of designs where just $10k will get you an ASIC built in some university... It won't be anything like leading edge silicon though, but for some products that's all you need.
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?
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 d…
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 70s started the trend of financializing (is that the word?) everything, that meant that at every step of every productive process someone packaged it into a tradable "paper", which got packaged with other paper from other productive processes and then re-sold and repackaged again and again to the market as proxies of the value from those productive processes.
Holding paper assets turned out to be much more lucrative than the actual production for most companies, not to mention far far easier than competing in the market with products and innovation, so naturally it slowly began to chip away at the quality of the production in favor of holding paper that represented production. Outsourcing became possible and they noticed it didn't matter to the ones buying the paper assets who actually did the work, so it skyrocketed.
Financialization required an immeasurable amount of debt, they began extending credit to anyone so they could buy said paper, and then turned around and made the debt itself financial paper.
That got us the stock market booms of the 80s, the 90s, the dot com, the financial crisis, and of course their busts.
Now we are at the end, and the signal? companies are adding bitcoin to their balance sheets. The cycle of finacialization is complete, paper is no longer required and you don't even have to outsource your production, not that you have it anyways, as all you need to post profits and pretend you are a good CEO is buy crypto and hodl.
Production for a 'modern' business is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Governments can try to buy their way into any market but it is useless; most businesses have no real capacity to compete delivering cutting edge products with actual real "bare-metal" profitable businesses because they can only make profits "on paper".
(sorry if finacialization is not how it's written)
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.
2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway.
3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current demand situation. And No, it is not TSMC's fault. You should ask how every single Fabless Semiconductor company has failed with their demand, supply chain analysis and projection. Although one could argue it is not their fault either, since their client gave wrong projection. The only company that is not affected is possibly Apple.
4. There has been mounting pressure from investors, politicians and MSM media on Intel IDM 2.0, and supply problems. This announcement feels more like addressing those concerns.
5. Remember both Samsung and Intel are expanding capacity. And even GF and many other smaller players. It took DRAM and NAND three years to catch up with demand ( and then over supply ). Which in hindsight is pretty damn impressive. Although during the ~2016 - 2019 everyone felt awful.
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.
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?
He may well be right, but concerns about supply chain security might make it worthwhile for countries to subsidise capacity that would not otherwise be economically viable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It massively depends what you want to build... There are plenty of designs where just $10k will get you an ASIC built in some university... It won't be anything like leading edge silicon though, but for some products that's all you need.
With a few micron university process? Yes, can you commercialise it? No.
I believe 180nm has for long been the limit of how "commercially viable" is defined even for stuff like analogue, and discrete logic ICs.