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Wonder if the Taiwanese govt at some point will step in and block these onshoring measures as a matter of national security. If countries are less reliant on manufacturing within Taiwan, its one less reason to stand up to Beijing's one China principle.
TSMC buy the fab equipment ASML based in the Netherlands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be pedantic, I think it does matter there, but the cost / benefit tradeoff is in favor of the 10 year old processes. And it can vary too, mass produced / generic chips can be more cost efficient if they can make more of them on a single wafer.
> the cost / benefit tradeoff is in favor of the 10 year old processes. I thought a big part of the reason why that's the case in general is because the old fabs that house those old processes have already been depreciated - customers basically only pay for maintenance and the of raw materials. But that doesn't really apply to brand new fabs.
This smells of government-subsidized terrible ideas. German energy costs, land costs, lack of water, crazy high taxes, and anti-business governments. OTOH Netherlands would make a much better option in almost every angle. And add having ASML engineers around the corner.
Germany has around Dresden one of two regions in Europe with a large cluster of chip industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony
ASML buys key equipment in Germany: optics from Zeiss and lasers from Trumpf for EUV lithography.
Intel builds up chip production in Magdeburg, Infineon in Dresden, Wolfspeed in Saarland, Bosch in Dresden and Reutlingen and now TSMC in Dresden.
This smells of government-subsidized terrible ideas. German energy costs, land costs, lack of water, crazy high taxes, and anti-business governments. OTOH Netherlands would make a much better option in almost every angle. And add having ASML engineers around the corner.
As a dumb American, can you help explain how energy costs, land costs, and water supply can be that significantly different across an open border?
There are a bunch of regulations on how companies can operate in the economic block, but it's still a bunch of sovereign countries there.
Wonder if the Taiwanese govt at some point will step in and block these onshoring measures as a matter of national security. If countries are less reliant on manufacturing within Taiwan, its one less reason to stand up to Beijing's one China principle.
Yes, they depend on ASML, but ASML itself was dependent on IP from TSMC engineers. TSMC already announced that they will stop applying for subsidies from the Chip Act[] in the US recently because the US keeps changing what confidential data needs to be shared with the US.
They seem to be at least slowly understanding that this is a dangerous game.
And for the people that keep talking about ASML you might well want to remember that not long ago the leadership was mocking China's capability to build their own domenstic supply chain only to flipflop shortly after saying that it would be foolish to abandon the Chinese market likely indicating that they might be concerned that their domestic supply chain might end show up faster than expected.
Taiwanese media last year was plastered with news about how the US hollowed out the Japanese semiconductor industry with its agreement in 1986 and how that will be potentially the fate of Taiwan.
But the sibling comments are correct about the potential blowback, let's not forget that the US has been talking about bombing TSMC themselves[]. I guess that probably explains why they just announced a delay to the construction of the Arizona fab.
[] https://www.koreatechtoday.com/south-koreas-semiconductor-ex...
[] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/7/27/samsungs-profit-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They won't use that technology to produce mobile phones or GPUs. There are plenty of application were structure size, performance and/or power draw doesn't really matter. E.g. Automotive / Industrial applications
That's exactly the issue, isn't it? The Chips Act was marketed as an attempt to bring back "cutting-edge chips" to Europe, and to promote research and innovation. In the end it turns out to just be a huge government subsidy for a bog-standard fab which is at least a decade behind what TSMC is building in Taiwan. Great for automotive companies who want to strengthen their supply lines, but pretty pointless when it com…
This smells of government-subsidized terrible ideas. German energy costs, land costs, lack of water, crazy high taxes, and anti-business governments. OTOH Netherlands would make a much better option in almost every angle. And add having ASML engineers around the corner.
I wouldn't build factories in a country that's going to sink.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
3nm has already hit mass production. Considering this fab won't be ready for at least another two years, 2nm will have hit mass production already. 22nm dates back to 2012, and TSMC has been doing 14nm FinFET mass production since 2014. So yeah, a decade behind cutting-edge can indeed be called "old" when the entire point of the Chips Act was to catch up with Asia and become a center for innovation.
Considering the sheer magnitude of the cost of building out a bleeding edge fab, wouldn't it make sense to start with a somewhat older (but still incredibly useful) process node, develop domain expertise and then iterate? Going from 0 to 2nm is sure to yield little more than a boondoggle. Catching up is going to be a decade long process - if not longer. But you do have to start somewhere. Plus, the only vendor of EUV…
Besides, there are already plenty of fabs in Europe at these nodes at companies like GlobalFoundries. Getting another one isn't going to be very useful in trying to catch up, especially when it is one from just before a huge paradigm shift. It's not going to teach them anything about EUV, so they would be trying to catch up from 7-8 nodes behind without even using the technology needed to reach the cutting-edge.
This smells of government-subsidized terrible ideas. German energy costs, land costs, lack of water, crazy high taxes, and anti-business governments. OTOH Netherlands would make a much better option in almost every angle. And add having ASML engineers around the corner.
As a dumb American, can you help explain how energy costs, land costs, and water supply can be that significantly different across an open border?
Energy prices are currently high b/c a lot is produced by gas powered plants, but as Germany peaked renewables at 82% lately, and new renewables are very cheap (there are solar plants popping up everywhere here), energy should not be a problem (chip production is not aluminium or fertilizer production).
The main reason TSMC builds there is that there are already lots of chip makers and knowledgeable staff to hire (and state subsidies, which if correctly used can be a good thing, Bavaria made the transition from an agricultural country to a high tech country with state subsidies, money transfers from the richer states in Germany to Bavaria - of course if used badly are just lost without effect).