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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

#51

Post by lysace »

epicureanideal wrote: post #45
digdigdag wrote: post #35

- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.

> STEM field gap STEM salary gap I suspect the Taiwan workers have on average much lower salaries.

Yes, roughly speaking 1:4 compared to California.

Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.

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

#52

Post by kstrauser »

School-Cotton wrote: post #24
arcticbull wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.

A semi truck carries +- 15 tons of cargo and gets an average of about 6 MPG, so about 90 MPG/ton.

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

#53

Post by eric-hu »

Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: post #18
arcticbull wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those numbers match what comes up with a quick search:

https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo...

That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship.

Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it.

https://youtu.be/G0eMyA388bE

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

#55

Post by eric-hu »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #15
hollow-moe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

This sounds like a complex procedure. Are there currently alternative packaging facilities that could do this work, if Taiwan were locked into kinetic war?

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

#56

Post by bee_rider »

digdigdag wrote: post #35

- Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips. - The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability. Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.

Also a lot of US STEM grads have their skills wasted in unproductive fields, like the ad business.

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

#57

Post by coconut08 »

ttul wrote: post #32
dgfitz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until 2027, yes. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-repo... "TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."

Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".

where did you get that number from

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

#59

Post by Detrytus »

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 ?

Believe it or not, sending them overseas just to be put in a box actually can be cost-effective. Like with those pears: "grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand, sold in UK" https://www.birminghamfoodcouncil.org/2022/01/16/part-i-pear...
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