81–90 of 149 posts
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.
Are you saying that once the US has moved TSMC over to the US then the US will stop caring about Taiwan?
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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...
Ya this analogy really clicked with me. To really torture the analogy, Apple or any other TSMC customers hands them an .obj of their chip, and TSMC acts as the slicer and converts that into the GCode that ASML’s “printers” understand. And just like how some slicers have better overhang and infill algorithms TSMC has their own secret sauce for telling the ASML machines what to “print”. Does that expansion of the analo…
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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?
Intel, and the US, had an enormous head start. Gordon Moore started at Shockley, which was founded in 1955. William Shockley was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for inventing the solid state transistor. Moore then went to go help found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, which invented the CMOS process. Intel was founded in 1968. TSMC wasn't founded until 1987.
In 1968 when Intel was founded, Taiwan was a poor country with little capital. Its GDP per capita was around $300. Taiwan's GDP per capita in 1987 was $5,300 in today's money. The US's was almost four times higher at $20,000.
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.
Frankly, the whole idea that the US is only defending Taiwan because of TSMC is ridiculous.
Losing access to cutting edge nodes will screw some businesses over but it hardly the end of the world.
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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...?
Considering the overall investment goes into dozens of billions, it seems a little hard to believe they wouldn't source worldwide talent to make it 24/7 as well. Also they probably source top talent. I'm always skeptical of those "we just work a little harder" explanations.
This can be pipelined and parallelized to some extent, but then you have to convince enough PhD level employees to do night shifts, because each process step is basically a miniature physics or chemistry experiment that has to be monitored and tuned constantly (at this stage).
It's one thing to make one perfect transistor, it's a totally different ballgame to make 10 billion perfect devices with better than 90% tool uptime, and an essential component of closing that gap is brute force experimentation.
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I think that one of the greatest advantages that Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese companies have is that most of them seem to be somewhat immune to Harvard Business School ideas, and Jack Welch was never worshipped as he was in the West. Keeping the bean counters under leash is good for building long-term value.
That theory fails to account for Japan's failed semiconductor industry.
If TSMC wasn't around, I think it could be argued that China would have tried to take over/invaded long before now. So if you are the government of Taiwan, helping TSMC out is in your best interest.
So are you saying that the US is actively trying to get invaded by moving TSMC out of Taiwan?
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.
Are you saying that once the US has moved TSMC over to the US then the US will stop caring about Taiwan?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Why did this “3x shift advantage” deliver gains only in the past 5 years? Intel, and the US, had an enormous head start. Gordon Moore started at Shockley, which was founded in 1955. William Shockley was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 for inventing the solid state transistor. Moore then went to go help found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, which invented the CMOS process. Intel was founded in 1968. TSMC wasn't fou…
At the end of this agreement, UMC had better technology at higher yields than RCA.
This technology transfer had a profound impact upon Taiwan.
"Taiwan managed to persuade RCA to agree in 1976 to transfer semiconductor technology."
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.
Are you saying that once the US has moved TSMC over to the US then the US will stop caring about Taiwan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
China is surprisingly confined in its waters. Strange as it seems with all that coast line, China (and thus a huge chunk of world trade) has to transit confined sea pathways before it can reach oceans.
Conversely, should China ever gain control over Taiwan, that fact and the implied retreat of Western navies (US primarily) from those waters would make China's Navy the guarantor of the global (trade) order in its most important economic region. Today, it is the US Navy that fills that role.
Geography remains hugely important in shaping history. Per some views, the very rise of Europe was primarily due to navigational advances. Technologies that allowed circumventing strategic geographical realities that had stood for thousands of years: the land corridors of Asia and the Mediterranian sea & ports.