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Computer Virus Cripples Several Taiwan Semiconductor Plants
- j-pb 8y agoAm I the only one bothered that the largest pure play fab in the world is degraded to an apple supplier. This has consequences far beyond apple.
- dogma1138 8y agoYep, this is a pretty odd way to describe TSMC especially considering that Apple doesn’t even consume a large percentage of capacity. 3rd largest semiconductor company in the world, largest none-affiliated fab, first to roll out a 7nm process node and degraded to an “Apple supplier”, but I guess Bloomberg needs a hook for readers to care.
- dosy 8y agoI think an even better headline would be "World's biggest contract fab shutdown by virus" but I can't change it now. What's a better, concise way to describe TSMC? I think "World's biggest contract fab" can probably be improved on.
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoChip makers who fabricate fabless companies' chips are called 'Foundries'.
- xevb3k 8y agoYes, the connection is weird. Prompted me to look up the numbers though. Apple could buy TSMC for cash, four times over... pretty incredible.
- j-pb 8y agoHoly... this _is_ incredible.
- baybal2 8y agoNo, they can't. Nobody will sell them TSMC, and even if they will, Chinese govt will shut that down.
- EliRivers 8y agoJust to check, are you saying the government of the Peoples Republic of China will shut that down, or the government of the Republic of China?
- chrischen 8y agoTaiwan is the latter. Taiwanese people consider themselves Chinese (both ethnically and nationally).
- EliRivers 8y agoExcept of course for the aboriginal Taiwanese, who viewed Chiang Kai-Shek and company to be occupiers. I would also suggest that saying the people of Taiwan consider themselves to be Chinese, ethnically and nationally, is true but not so helpful, given that the other China is similarly full of people who consider themselves to be Chinese, ethnically and nationally. What you said is true, but missing an awful lot of important distinction.
- chrischen 8y agoWell, better occupy than exterminate like in The US. Even before CKS there were ethnic Chinese that migrated to the island long before.
- greglindahl 8y agoI’ve never heard anyone from Taiwan refer to their government as the “Chinese government”
- chrischen 8y agoWell their passport has “Republic of China” printed on it. They officially have a claim over the physical land of Mainland China but deny mainland Chinese citizenship. For practical purposes most people would refer to it as Taiwan so as not to confuse laymen.
- dogma1138 8y agoApple can buy anyone but it doesn’t matter, TSMC produces nearly 20 million wafers a year, Apple is a dip in the ocean when it comes to their production capacity.
- digi_owl 8y agoTech is Apple and Apple is tech... I have long noticed that Apple "related" news make it to front pages that usually do not carry any tech news at all. My understanding for why this happens is that media outlets are old school Apple strongholds. In large part because the current generation of media people have been educated by a generation that learned their trade by rote on gray scale Macs. Mental inbreeding, basically...
- hedora 8y agoI think all headlines should be written like this. It adds a nice distopia undertone: Water feature near Apple’s new cupertino headquarters set to rise tens of feet over the next century, displacing engineers in low lying areas. Political instability set to double the prices of raw materials used in domestically produced Mac Pros; iPhones largely unaffected. Suspected cancer link discovered with cafeteria subcontractor Monsanto’s Roundup. Rumors suggest Apple will move to in house agricultural production. Monsanto down 5 points.
- janoc 8y agoI was just going to say that. Seriously, wtf - this is as if the Apple hipsters had now their summer ruined and not at all the entire CPU & GPU supply for pretty much everything was jeopardized ...
- jdietrich 8y agoIntel have their own fabs. AMD are primarily a GlobalFoundries customer (GF was spun off from AMD in 2009) but do source some dies from TSMC. Nvidia are primarily a TSMC customer, but Reuters have reported that they have contracted Samsung to produce 14nm dies. Lost production at TSMC is a serious issue, but it's not cataclysmic for the supply chain as a whole.
- daveguy 8y agoThe new 7nm Rome is expected to exclusively use TSMC, but this won't affect that production. Samsung and Nvidia would be the most affected, but apparently most of TSMC's facilities are already back up with the remaining to be up by tomorrow. So less than 2 days lost production probably will not significantly affect anyone. It's a good thing this wasn't a targeted attack with a payload to damage hardware and put them out for weeks or more. That would have serious repercussions.
- axaxs 8y agoAFAIK Qualcomm is going to TSMC for its nexgen, which is far more chips than even Apple gets.
- Scoundreller 8y agoHow can we assume that the other fabs have spare capacity to soak up new ex-TSMC work? Did Samsung boot other customers or products so NVidia could stay afloat? I’m sure NVidia’s margins are high enough to get others to slow down their output. This kind of issue happens in pharmaceuticals all the time: one factory goes down, the others can’t soak up the extra orders, and months down the line we start running out of finished product after the warehouse gets emptied.
- 8y ago
- dang 8y agoWe've taken that bit out of the title.
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoIt's surprising to many, but these tools run primarily on Windows, and, without anti-virus protection because it can interfere with critical timing actions that the tools need to make. The IT systems are locked down like a fortress, but tool technicians can still bring viruses in and transmit when they connect their laptops for diagnostics and maintenance. I can easily see a virus running amok.
- rectang 8y agoWe've seen this before many times. It's an inherent weakness of proprietary software solutions: you're at the mercy of the vendor as far as porting it to a new platform. The weakness becomes more urgent as the platform grows old/unsupported/insecure/etc. It may have been Windows this time, but it could have been DEC or Solaris or what have you. Open Source Software may or may not be easy or economically realistic to port, but at least the users have a say.
- analognoise 8y agoSoftware doesn't exist in a vacuum, it needs support and maintenance, which somebody has to pay for. Can we stop repeating this as a strength of OSS? It definitely is not. "Users" have a problem they want solved, they don't really want that problem and to learn how to patch software.
- mort96 8y agoIf the "user" is the world's largest independent foundry, I'm sure they could find someone to patch the software they're using.
- rectang 8y agoWith OSS, it is at least possible for a new vendor to step in with competing support and maintenance if the old vendor is failing. It may also be possible for customers to participate in supporting and maintaining the software to varying degrees, for example by hiring the core maintainers; whether that is realistic depends on the size and complexity of the software, the tech culture of the customer, etc.
- 0x0 8y agoSo it is possible to get malicious code execution on the fabs that build the next generation of processors for our devices. What are the chances that a sophisticaled stuxnet-like attack inserting backdoors in the CPU design will follow?
- ttul 8y agoI would say it’s more likely that back doors have been injected via gold old traditional espionage, which could be aided by sophisticated malware (say, to gain access to source code repositories).
- kingosticks 8y agoIt would be much easier to do this at an earlier stage - before the design is handed off to the foundry. Modifying masks for even trivial changes is very difficult and that's assuming knowledge of the circuit (which your malicious code probably won't have). Plus I imagine the verification tools would spot the difference, flagging it as an imperfection which would then attract scrutiny. I think this is extremely unlikely.
- 0x0 8y agoWell, stuxnet was written with knowledge of a very specific SCADA setup. Not so farfetched to think a targeted trojan would be written with knowledge of the circuit.
- toast0 8y agoEditing circuits is hard enough with complete information. If the intent is to add an exciting extra feature, that seems rather difficult to do via malware. If you're trying to just sabotage a bit, that's more likely -- maybe expose for slightly less time and things are less reliable, etc. Like others said though, it's probably easier to mess with the designs before they go to the Fab.
- phendrenad2 8y ago
- JudasGoat 8y agoNow if the headline had said "AMD's chipmaker crippled by virus", I would have suspected Intel of industrial sabotage. Of course less people would read that title I'm guessing.
- nv-vn 8y agoThere is honestly no way Intel would be stupid enough to do that. I hope.
- rasz 8y agoDefinitely not Intel, but remember those CTS Labs clowns engineering media campaign touting fake cpu flaws? https://wccftech.com/report-alleges-amd-ryzen-epyc-cpus-suffer-13-fatal-security-flaws/ https://wccftech.com/report-alleges-amd-ryzen-epyc-cpus-suff... Wonder who shorted AMD/Nvidia recently
- earenndil 8y ago1. tsmc does a ton of fabbing, including, but not limited to, amd 2. intel aren't that stupuid
- Keyframe 8y agoIn other news: "Computer Virus Cripples Nvidia Chipmaker TSMC Plants"
- georgeburdell 8y agoFor those of you thinking that TSMC only gets set back by the time it took to recover the equipment from the virus (1-2 days), realize that there are some critical steps in the manufacturing process that require completion within X time or the wafer is trash. Also realize that wafers take several weeks of fab processing, and this may be a substantial hit to their output for a while. They might even need to rob wafer capacity from smaller companies to placate the tier 1 customers like Apple.
- oh_sigh 8y agoWhat trashes the wafers? Is it some intra-wafer chemical reaction? Atmospheric interactions?
- avs733 8y agoSo first, to put a term to what the grand parent is describing, they are generally referred to as 'queue times' referencing the wafers waiting in a queue. Effectively it is an atmospheric interaction, most commonly with oxygen but also light, hydrogen sulfide (from agricultural production - land is cheaper in the countryside), and other sources of contamination. Most wafer processing - especially depositions of materials like metals - are done in a vacuum. if you deposit a metal (lets assume aluminum) in a vacuum you effectively get a pure aluminum layer. Pure aluminum is highly reactive with oxygen As soon as that layer is exposed air it oxidizes - same thing as rust. You know this as the dull surface finish that raw/bare aluminum gets if left out or when you purchase it. It's what happens very quickly after you machine aluminum - the shiny surface goes away. That is the aluminum oxidizing. Aluminum oxide has different electrical properties than pure aluminum, different enough to fundamentally affect the function of the transistor devices being constructed. If I have a 2" thick piece of aluminum that layer, maybe only a few microns (assume 5) thick after 24 hours, is basically inconsequential. It represents 0.01% of the thickness of the piece. It is error but not much more in the electrical properties of the piece. However, if semiconductor layer is much thinner... maybe 10microns thick...the effect of the oxidation on the electrical properties is much much higher and pushes it outside the tolerances the device can have and still function. And because the deposition layers aren't just surfaces, but penetrate to fill trenches in the devices they are basically impossible to remove at most steps.
- theshadowknows 8y agoBets on whether Intel is behind this?
- ohiovr 8y agoWhat is the motivation of the crime?
- discordance 8y agoPossible bad actors and motivations: - Competing fabs - Competitors to Apple - China (nationalist sentiment or something to do with the recent IP theft court cases)
- rootVIII 8y agoBig $$$ in corporate espi0nage and sab0tage
- jplayer01 8y agoWell, rip prices for whatever they're manufacturing.