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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

#111

Post by MangoCoffee »

kyrra wrote: post #80
Kliment wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots…

Just in time delivery has its downfalls when vendors have issues, but this is a known trade-off to that model. If a company keeps inventory on hand, then they have the worry of owning excess parts that they can never use and is a sink cost later. So these companies can lose money with either, it just depends on the circumstances that cause it. I'd be interested to learn more about the order cancellation you were sayi…

>fabs were doing to non car manufacturers

fabless design house sign wafer agreement with Fab like TSMC. I'm guessing they didn't sign the agreement thus cancel their slot.

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

#112

Post by dalyons »

ethbr0 wrote: post #97
foobarian wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look at the stockpile sizes. Unless Russia gets involved it would not be a balanced situation at all.

Seriously. We're talking about horrible things, here. But if it came to a nuclear exchange, China has ~300, and the US and Russia ~6,000 each. Total yield numbers are harder to come by(?), so those are +/- considering tactical-scale inventory. Historically, this was because China's nuclear doctrine was to limit their stockpile to a minimal deterrent. Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd suppo…

> Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's freedom

What? That doesn’t make sense. If the US triggered nuke slinging over Taiwan the Taiwanese would be ash, not free.

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

#113

Post by addaon »

baybal2 wrote: post #95
alberth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024" I wish the industry would standardize on using "transistors per square millimetre" as the metric for their node size instead of "nm".

Even that is not exactly the same. Cells, or logic gates per mm° is too rather ambiguous, as different implementations of same logic families do things differently, and the metric gets even wronger for different logic families. The best I believe will be a whole cell library metric using some lowest common denominator blocks like registers, adders, bus pieces etc

Honestly, SRAM bits per square mm seems like a perfectly fine metric for me. While I recognize that the memory-to-logic density varies, sometimes significantly, between processes, (a) SRAM cells are optimized to within an inch of their lives ("within a nm of their lives"?), including often being revised in minor process updates, so accurately reflect the capabilities of the process; (b) many chips, including the ones I personally tend to be interested in (processors, etc) are SRAM-heavy, and get more so each generation; (c) it's a single number with some connection to reality, which is better than both a single number with limited connection to reality ("process"), or a whole suite of numbers that require deep interpretation (cell library metrics).

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

#114

Post by MangoCoffee »

hyko wrote: post #62
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…

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

>The government would be better off just building a fab themselves

OP: >years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs

OP said "sabotage of domestic fabs". what the govrt. lay out is what happened when all else failed thus going door to door to collect semis.

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

#115

Post by icefo »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
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…

Do you know how it is to work on software in this industry ? Be it for the tools or embedded software programming or in VHDL / verilog.

I'm still in university and I've always liked hardware and low level related stuff but I've heard bad things about software in hardware companies like Qualcomm.

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

#116

Post by ethbr0 »

dalyons wrote: post #112
ethbr0 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. We're talking about horrible things, here. But if it came to a nuclear exchange, China has ~300, and the US and Russia ~6,000 each. Total yield numbers are harder to come by(?), so those are +/- considering tactical-scale inventory. Historically, this was because China's nuclear doctrine was to limit their stockpile to a minimal deterrent. Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd suppo…

> Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's freedom What? That doesn’t make sense. If the US triggered nuke slinging over Taiwan the Taiwanese would be ash, not free.

Why would China nuke Taiwan?

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

#117

Post by mbreese »

Tade0 wrote: post #68
hyko wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first reaction to this plan is that it’s for the birds. The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. The raw materials aren’t that hard to get hold of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this situation…

IIRC the US navy is currently using XBox controllers: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military... Of course this is a far cry from ripping a SoC from a smartphone and putting it into e.g a bomber drone, but I assume there's much more being done - just not published.

One of the reasons cited for using XBox controllers was the availability. If one breaks, you can find them at any port. Very apropos in this context...

I have a vision that on a submarine there is a cable box, not unlike the one that most of us probably have, filled with random cables with connectors we haven't used in years. And somewhere in that tangled mess is a spare XBox controller. I can imagine some poor Seaman trying to untangle a the controller cord so that they can use a periscope. I'm sure the Navy is far more organized, but it's funny to think about.

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

#118

Post by swalsh »

Xorlev wrote: post #102
baybal2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large. If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing, that's a $100,000 car you can't sell. Car industry haphazardly buying out last stocks of ICs will not help them work around that "one missing chip" problem, and production lines are potentially stuck for many more months. The panic was undue, well, or best say of no use. The are screwed, but its of no…

And now STM32 are really tough to find for hobby electronics when one used to find them everywhere, and cheap.

I was looking yesterday, the STM32 chip used in the typically $5 blue pill now goes for $16 a piece.

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

#119

Post by amelius »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #7
bigdogc wrote: post #5

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

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.

Yes, but the question was about a design business, not start a new fab.

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

#120

Post by MangoCoffee »

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?

China big fund 2014 yield nothing. SMIC still have to poach TSMC engineers to get them to 14nm. we'll see how China big fund II going to do.

U.S. govrt is dumping money into semis by asking TSMC and Samsung to open fab in US and Intel is gunning for US govrt's money by going IDM 2.0.

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