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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

#51

Post by swiley »

londons_explore wrote: post #39
postingawayonhn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to be clever (unless you're talking about video games), just not completely reckless.

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

#52

Post by swiley »

bigdogc wrote: post #5

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

It depends pretty heavily on the semiconductors you want to produce, if you want to replicate the technology of the early 60s people have done that in their kitchen (see cooking with Jerry for an example.)

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

#53

Post by LatteLazy »

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.

Moores law rules this out.

A PS3 only has 256mb of ram, so you need to get it out of the case, remove it from the board, check it still works, package it up and sell it.

But I can buy 2GB for 5 GBP. Can you do all the aforementioned things for less than that?

I wonder if we could sort and melt down chips as a source of raw semiconductors (I hear rare earth metal mining/refining is very dirty). Maybe that would be economic?

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

#54

Post by kingosticks »

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.

Aren't these BGAs? Safely removing and then also re-balling large non-socketed chips is tricky.

Do they actually have machines for this? I understand that the re-work house we use do it by hand and also spend a chunk of time inspecting the chip once removed since it's very easily damaged. Maybe there are more automated places doing this on a mass scale, we don't do it very often which might explain the general poor results.

This video is pretty cool showing the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo

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

#55

Post by Guthur »

insert_coin wrote: post #45
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?

One word: Financialization. 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 turne…

Doom doom money doom doom. Nonsense.

Top 10 companies

https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl...

Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s millions of people are getting value from, with the possible exception of Facebook :p

As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th most valuable company.

Out of the top 10 you do get some pure play financial companies like Berkshire, Morgan Chase, Visa (maybe).

Cutting edge semi conductor manufacture is arguably some of the most advanced technology and manufacturing we do at scale. It's just plain hard hard. The equipment, the expertise, the lead time to manufacture, it's all big scale problems.

Relatively speaking getting manufacturing of old node sizes would like not be remotely as hard, 32nm maybe even 16nm.

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

#56

Post by throwawayzRUU6f »

nindalf wrote: post #35
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?

> 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…

> need rare earth metals, almost all of which is mined and refined in China

This is usually presented as an ace up the sleeve that China has secured through shrewd strategic thinking. In reality, rare earth metals are neither particularly rare, nor are they expensive, nor are they in high demand.

Rare earth metals are more common than silver or mercury, somewhat rarer than cobalt. The ones with excellent magnetic quantities go for ~$50 per kilo (allegedly only 200g is required per electric car), the ones used for catalysts and alloy making go for as low as $2 per kilo, cheaper than copper.

They're not nearly as much of a constraint as claimed.

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

#57

Post by elsjaako »

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?

I'm not sure if you are referring to the US specifically, but there are governments doing this.

https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-tech-semiconductor-idUSKB...

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

#58

Post by zitterbewegung »

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.

I bought a Tesla T4 on eBay. Many people will buy a set of broken laptops and use the parts to make a fixed one like Like Miami. Louis Rossman constantly has to find donor boards to fix laptops.

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

#59

Post by chefkoch »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #44
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.

Military equipment is often more than a decade old and uses far older electronics.

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

#60

Post by cwhiz »

throwaway4good wrote: post #49
simonh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes sense for China to overinvest in national chip manufactoring due to sanctions. However for the west, of which Taiwan here is a part of, it is very risky. If the west no longer supplies China's chip market, it would need significant less chip manufactoring capacity.

If the west can’t supply China, the west should ban Chinese imports.
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