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4nm
I thought Taiwan prohibited export of this kind of know-how? What did I miss?
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/tsmc-cleared-for-2nm-p...
Funny enough, Fab 21 was announced in May 2020 and completed construction in July 2022, a month before the Chips Act was signed.
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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.
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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
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
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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
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 ?
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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.
I am happily imagining opening a recent Apple device and seeing 74 gates with through holes in green PCBs, with an Apple logo made in soldering lead marking in the corner of the board.
