TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant • Hacker News Board

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#41

Post by bschne » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

grlass wrote: post #27

ipnon wrote: post #5

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >

Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise.

Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions?

Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#42

Post by spaniard89277 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #29

tester34 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry

ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable…

Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#43

Post by Heliosmaster » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #29

tester34 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry

ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable…

Or working with a 40M Loc codebase started in the 80s with 50% code duplication. Because it's so mission critical that nobody really touches existing code. Or that everything needs to be rubber-stamped by a ton of people and even a rename takes months to make it in the codebase. Oh well. That's probably every enterprise

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#44

Post by lispm » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

sichtlinkair wrote: post #26

hans1729 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is positioned excellently for chip production, why would you consider that a bad investment?

Genuinely curious why Germany's position is excellent for chip production?

Because it has one of the two largest clusters for that industry in Europe: Dresden/Saxony. The other one is Grenoble, France.

https://www.dw.com/en/bosch-is-the-new-star-in-silicon-saxon...

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#45

Post by fxtentacle » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014.

Also, there has been a growing amount of research activity into chip design in Germany lately, driven in no small part by CERN's needs.

For example https://ohwr.org/project/white-rabbit/wikis/home used by the Control and Timing System at CERN and GSI

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#46

Post by Heliosmaster » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

bildung wrote: post #28

odiroot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be as harsh, but indeed that decision is a bit weird. They cannot really count on cheap labour, or "friendly" economic incentives. And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast. One great thing about Germany is the central location within EU with good logistics overall. Not sure it matters for semiconductor manufacturing.

I wouldn't say Teslas Brandenburg factory shows a problem with red tape per se, but it does show that ignoring it won't save you time in Germany. Also, salaries usually only account for low single digit percentages of opex in high tech production, so ready availabilty of the needed specialists is probably more important.

For those companies involved in semiconductor industry, where machines cost 100M usd EACH... People are just a rounding error. Should we hire 100 more? 1000 more? Whatever

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#47

Post by zorked » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #25

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German engineering gave us BER

What does the (mis)management of a public infrastructure project have to do with Germany's attractiveness as a base for manufacturing?

Everything?

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#48

Post by NicoJuicy » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

This is a good move for TSMC. A lot of action happens through ASML ( Netherlands) and IMEC ( Belgium).

Germany is relatively close to both.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#49

Post by lispm » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

grlass wrote: post #27

ipnon wrote: post #5

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >

and ASML works together with Trumpf (lasers) and Zeiss (optics).

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#50

Post by bildung » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

sichtlinkair wrote: post #26

hans1729 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is positioned excellently for chip production, why would you consider that a bad investment?

Genuinely curious why Germany's position is excellent for chip production?

There are already quite a few plants (Globalfoundries, Bosch, Infineon, TI, Osram, ...) so the qualified work force is there.

Germany is also pretty heavy on high tech production, so there's a big existing supplier network.

Key suppliers like ASML are nearby (Both the Netherlands and Germany are part of the Schengen Agreement, so logistics-wise almost as open as cross-state transports within the US).