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Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

tomshardware.com

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Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#11

Post by fblp »

m348e912 wrote: post #3
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

How does this make any financial sense?

I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line.

If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#12

Post by snakeyjake »

m348e912 wrote: post #3
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

How does this make any financial sense?

The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.

So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.

Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.

So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#13

Post by SSilver2k2 »

hollow-moe wrote: post #4
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?

I'm making an educated guess but probably the cutting of chips from the wafers, placing them into the appropriate ceramic socket types (DIP, BFGA, SMD etc), soldering the line wires from chip to pin, encasing the chip, etc.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#14

Post by virexene »

hollow-moe wrote: post #4
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?

I think "packaging" here refers to the process of putting the silicon die in its plastic casing and connecting the die's pad to the case's pins, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#15

Post by mechagodzilla »

hollow-moe wrote: post #4
datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?

"Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O from the compute die. That thing is the packaged 'CoWoS' system, where CoWoS==Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, that eventually gets attached to a 'normal' PCB.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#18

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

arcticbull wrote: post #7
m348e912 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this make any financial sense?

Marine shipping is just about the most fuel efficient way of moving things between any two places, by a lot. A 100,000 dwt ship can get 1050 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. It takes about a teaspoon full of fuel to move an iPhone sized device across the pacific when I ran the numbers last.

Interesting. Could you give a brief description of how you got that number? Eg. what factors were considered.

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#19

Post by lysace »

choilive wrote: post #16
lysace wrote: post #10

Made using which process? The article doesn't mention this. https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...

4nm

I thought Taiwan prohibited export of this kind of know-how? What did I miss?

Re: Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

#20

Post by dietr1ch »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #17
lysace wrote: post #10

Made using which process? The article doesn't mention this. https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...

The smallest process they've got up and running right now is 4nm, last I checked

As an outsider that means somewhere in 2nm-10nm as everyone measures different things or have awfully off-standard rulers.
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