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Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending
- baybal2 7y agoNew backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor fabbers. If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year straight.
- culturestate 7y agoNot to mention that semiconductor manufacturing (among other advanced mfg verticals) is such an integral part of Taiwan’s economic strategy at this point that it would be shocking if they weren’t making heavy investments, global trends be damned.
- StudentStuff 7y agoNewer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has 10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead silicon (due to process issues). We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very real, and exceedingly costly to attempt to work around. AMD's strategy of using 14nm chiplets for components that don't scale down well (eg: analog interfaces, DRAM, etc) is likely to become much more common.
- wil421 7y agoGlobal Foundries has a 12nm for most of the new AMD CPUs.[1] I’ve heard the difference between processes at different companies is just marketing talk but I’ll let someone knowledgeable chime in. [1]https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B
- Faark 7y agoIt's more about future developments, and GF seems to have given up on that front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17854065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17854065
- tntn 7y agoNote that wikichip redirects 12nm to 14nm. TSMC calls their 14nm node 16/12nm. All the 12,14,16 nm nodes from the various fabs are nearly the same.
- adamzhou 7y agoTSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government. TSMC should stop the supply.
- adinobro 7y agoI'm just curious why you think a Taiwanese company should stop selling to a Chinese company based on statement/policy of a foreign country? It is obviously in their best financial interest to sell to Huawei. Why should they stop?
- TomMarius 7y agoI could understand them wanting TSMC to stop buying from Huawei, but why this?
- thefounder 7y agoBecause all this "national security" is really about trade not national security. Trump declared national security on steel, cars and pretty much any important industry that US didn't lead.
- edraferi 7y agoIncorrect. While the Trump administration is more enthusiastic about aggressive intervention in commerce in general, the recent sanctions are the culmination of over a decade of bad behavior by Huawei, recognized by many countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei
- thefounder 7y agoHow were the mini-vans from Canada a national security threat? As far as technology is concerned US is using its corporations(Apple, Cisco, microsoft etc) for espionage as well so there is nothing new here.
- 7y ago
- kabwj 7y agoSo, from China to China. Hardly an interesting change.
- ShinTakuya 7y agoSaying that is like saying America overtaking Britain was no big deal.
- kabwj 7y agoMore like Cambridge overtaking London.
- gridlockd 7y agoNo, from South Korea to Taiwan. Mainland China is still #3.
- emmelaich 7y agoaside: Taipei Times please get a tls site.
- lallysingh 7y agoThis may have something to do to with making sure mainland doesn't block them.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoThey don't seem to stricly rely on the mainland for connectivity, if you look at https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ Although, after a quick check, my own access route seems to touch on Hong Kong (EU -> US -> Pacific).
- kalleboo 7y agoFrom Japan I'm going straight from Osaka -> Taipei through NTT
- lallysingh 7y agoGood analysis! I was thinking more about being accessible to mainland residents.