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Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#61

Post by jpgvm »

marricks wrote: post #43
tiernano wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 separate shifts iirc. But don't Intel run 24/7 too? Or is that just for prod? I remember some plant (not Intel, a memory plant) had an issue and lost power for a few hours and lost a shite load of memory wafers and took a couple days to come back into prod.

Intel certainly do run machines 24/7 but perhaps those R&D engineers/PhD's don't, so maybe only the techie's running the machines have full coverage...?

Essentially yeah. R&D at Intel/AMD/NVidia is 9-5 work.

TSMC and SMIC are different beasts entirely. They push way harder on the gas and never let up.

A lot of ex-TSMC are at SMIC now. They aren't doing cutting edge nodes for now but expect crazy things out of SMIC in 5-10 years.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#62

Post by jpgvm »

heisenbit wrote: post #41
Nokinside wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business school type leadership rarely works in high tech. Important decisions are technological decisions. It's easier to pick senior engineers from the industry and give them business education than vice versa. There is also special field called industrial engineering that trains people to manage and lead industrial processes.

Rarely work in growing healthy tech. But one or two generations later…

That is how they stop growing in the first place. Bean counters is how you get Intel instead of TSMC.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#63

Post by hexane360 »

hnfong wrote: post #55
elteto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of an aside, but your comment made me realize how much we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. We (laymen) have no idea about the incredible complexity behind manufacturing a single CPU chip.

> we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. It's been like that for a while. That's why we need everyone else to function as a society. I've watched a couple blacksmithing videos on youtube but I still don't really know how smelting iron works, and I wouldn't be able to produce a steel if my life depended on it. That's literally 2500+ year old tech.

What's even crazier is it's 2500+ year old tech that we turned into science in a period of about a hundred years (1860s-1960s).

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#64

Post by yccs27 »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #44
psychphysic wrote: post #11

Taiwan has invested in it like it was it's military. And it worked, they got to the point that the US would defend them from a Chinese invention.

The US has been an ally of Taiwan since before the CCP existed.

"Being an ally" and "Ready to defend against China" are very different qualities.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#65

Post by jpgvm »

diceduckmonk wrote: post #38
User23 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this is due to those bad ideas mainly being spread in English.

That theory fails to account for Japan's failed semiconductor industry.

Japan got destroyed by the Plaza Accord.

Also their industry still survived despite the massive bubble popping etc. Instead of making fabs they build most of the important tooling and chemicals in semi-conductor manufacturing. Namely the photo resists and the specialised tooling for inspecting and repairing masks, including the insane EUV masks.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#67

Post by nunuvit »

deepnotderp wrote: post #48
chasil wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recent interview with Shang-Yi Chiang, former Vice President of R&D at TSMC (also held positions at TI, HP, and SMIC) had insightful commentary on the speed of bringing up a new node. "We all take two years to develop one generation, how come you guys can do it in one or one-and-a-half year?" And they asked if some of your customer transfer technology to you or what not? And I told him, "No," I told him that, "That…

This is a made up explanation because: 1) All RnD fabs move wafers 24/7 2) Intel has consistently been the leader in process technology for 20+ years. Why did this “3x shift advantage” deliver gains only in the past 5 years?

> my R&D engineer works three shifts and you only work one shift

> All RnD fabs move wafers 24/7

Are you talking about the same thing? It's one thing to let an experiment run overnight with three technician shifts. It's another thing to have three research shifts.

It could also be a metaphor for doing more research than the competition on how to best use the same equipment, so I wouldn't get too hung up on it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#68

Post by pen2l »

phkahler wrote: post #22
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important thing to understand is that at the level of chip manufacturing, you’re doing advanced materials science. These aren’t just abstract logic gates and structures built out of them, such as SRAMs. At the manufacturing level, the logic gates are nano-scale 3D structures made of different materials and in different shapes. For example, at this scale, the shape of the transistor gates has a big effect on perfo…

I like you 3d printing reference. You can have 2 people with the same printer trying to print the same part. What else goes into getting a good part? Proper bed leveling, bed heating, choice of material, part cooler, nozzle temperature, feed rate, speed, acceleration, layer thickness, infill pattern, and many other settings and choices. And that's just an off the shelf printer melting plastic...

This might be pedantic nit-picking, but: I think bed leveling/heating, nozzle temperature, choice of material, etc. are parameters that the printer manufacturer should have optimized (and, IME, good ones do). I think the end user's chief responsibility is slicing (infill patterns, layer thickness, etc. as you noted), indeed it is in this sense the end user can be said to be in the same position as Intel/Samsung, not so much the hardware maintenance but knowing the slicing tricks for getting complicated geometry to come out just right.

For example, when you're making a cube, the sharp ends are places where bad things happen. When making sharp movements, the nozzle will tend to leave ugly trails and in other times cause warping. So here you can do a trick to save yourself: mouse-ears (extra material around the important edge, so that the bad artifacts happen instead on additionally-created non-core-geometry). At ground level, you use brims.

Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#69

Post by flipper88 »

lmpdev wrote: post #24

Don't underestimate the psychological effects underlying vendors' convergence on TSMC It's like an extreme version of "nobody got fired for going with IBM" Decision makers, even and sometimes especially in groups are not always rational. There are many cognitive biases that might make going against TSMC too difficult to justify Also historically they have been the only option for __nm manufacturing, although transist…

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Re: Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?

#70

Post by elteto »

qorrect wrote: post #60
elteto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of an aside, but your comment made me realize how much we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. We (laymen) have no idea about the incredible complexity behind manufacturing a single CPU chip.

I think you are really overshooting. Most people don't even know where their water comes from. Most people that drive do not know how a combustion engine works. Even people watching TV are only vaguely aware it's a series of static images chained together to make it look like its moving.

Wait, how am I overshooting? Reading your comment it seems like we are both in agreement. Or did I read you wrong?
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