8 ms·

A look inside TSMC

116 points by bdon 7y ago

seraphsf 7y ago
https://archive.is/NHfyj https://archive.is/NHfyj
purpleidea 7y ago
lol, nobody who gets a look inside lives to tell the tale :/
dotnetcore 7y ago
TSMC = 80% foreign investment. its hardly Taiwanese at this point...
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese. The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan. The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan. Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it's not like they could disassemble 30 Rock and put it on a boat to Japan. Unsurprisingly they no longer own it. It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. TSMC's assets are in fabs that are difficult to disassemble without great expense. And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country. TSMC is a Taiwanese company. Who gives a fuck what some bookkeeping entries in some computer ledgers say about "foreign investment".
  - vladimirralev 7y ago
    Sooner or later TSMC will build next-gen R&D facilities and fabs. Shareholders will be able to vote for the new locations.
    - draugadrotten 7y ago
      Shareholders of such things are sometimes proxies for the true powers hidden behind. Money is not a democracy. There are national interests at stake here, and then I'm not talking about Taiwan's national interest.
    - sct202 7y ago
      Shareholders typically don't vote on things like that directly, but they can vote for Directors who usually have the power to fire/hire CEO's who then make decisions like new locations.
  - rapsey 7y ago
    > And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country. China has been very aggressively recruiting those engineers to the mainland with high salaries and succeeding.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    If they were to nationalize it tomorrow (say under threat of war from PRC) I don’t think you’d see 80% of the employees walk
  - ant6n 7y ago
    > It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. Is there a source for this story?
    - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
      Is there a source for this story? My 12th grade US history teacher. Circa 1973. I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegations_demolition_scrap_was_sold_to_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegati... The NY Times also touched on it: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: It seems fairly so on the claim that Japan bought the el, dismantled it, and shipped the steel home; it is less dispositive on the question of whether some of the steel either reached Japan or freed up other steel for shipment to Japan when it was dismantled by it's actual civic owners, who had no connection to Japan.
qaq 7y ago
A look inside without a single photo ...
- 0-_-0 7y ago
  5 nm is not visible to the naked eye
sytelus 7y ago
One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.
- barrkel 7y ago
  There's nothing magical about innovation that requires it to be located in the US. Why do you think a foreign company should relocate to the US?
  - sytelus 7y ago
    Transistors, microchips and fabs were all born and thrived in USA. One would think USA would have first mover advantage because this is very very hard to replicate tech but for some reason, fabs got completely eradicated from USA.
    - simonh 7y ago
      There are still plenty of fabs in the USA. The Wikipedia page on the list of fabs puts over a hundred in the US[0]. I remember at one point when Samsung made most of the A Chips for Apple, the fab was actually in Texas though they do have a bunch in South Korea as well. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...
    - Nokinside 7y ago
      Have you ever wondered what's inside a new $20 billion Fab made of that makes it so expensive? Where is that equipment designed, developed and manufactured? There exists extremely high-tech sector called "Semiconductor Capital Equipment Industry". All the instruments and equipment involved in deposition, lithography, etch and clean, inspection, metrology, and prosess control is super expensive. Most of that technology is in the hands of Japanese (Nikon, Canon, Hitachi High-Technologies,Tokyo Electron and too many others to name), ASML Holding is big European player and largest supplier of photolithography systems. American companies involved are Applied Materials (their Semiconductor Systems), Lam Research and KLA-Tencor.
notlukesky 7y ago
“Samsung announced at the Foundry Forum earlier this year that it plans on spending $116 billion over the next decade in an effort to develop the chip production capacity and expertise that will serve the needs of key players in the 5G, automotive, machine learning, blockchain, and high-performance computing markets.” From: https://www.techspot.com/news/83331-samsung-pouring-116-billion-towards-beating-tsmc-race.html https://www.techspot.com/news/83331-samsung-pouring-116-bill...
siscia 7y ago
I really found TSMC inspiring, the level of technology reached is amazing. I only wish an effort from Europe to bring this expertise also in Europe.
- barrkel 7y ago
  Two European companies are mentioned as producing critical hardware for the process.
  - siscia 7y ago
    And I am quite happy. But still there is a huge difference between being a provider of technology and actually using that technology.
    - newswasboring 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I've worked in several semiconductor companies mentioned in this article as hardware guy. Actually it's quite liberating to be the provider of technology. You control the whole market. Specially true for some of the companies which are virtual monopolies (over 95% of the market is owned by them). In EUV side, which is the future (happening now), some vendors are the only option. Fabs can pressure them, of course, but at the end of the day they are the only vendors available. I find it quite funny, on one hand TSMC is one of those "jump? Where and how high" kind of customer but OTOH there is no one else they can turn to. I find this kind of relationship quite funny and unique. I am not aware of any other industry where the vendor has this much power. All because they are the only supplier. Maybe in defense?
      - siscia 7y ago
        Can you share more? I would love to know better this kind of dynamics. Why TSMC or other fabs don't develop the same technology in house? How the technology is protected? Why there are not other competitors? Moreover, what that means from the company point of view? I guess there is not a big push to innovate, isn't it?
taspeotis 7y ago
The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_trend https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...
- Fordec 7y ago
  I can think of a few. Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one. New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea. Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though. Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.
  - temac 7y ago
    Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.
    - Fordec 7y ago
      Risc V doesn't touch on Von Neumann architectures. That could be addressed by tech like Memristors as an example but to put it lightly, they're not ready yet. But the belief that to be a competitive fab house you have to churn out high performance chips is in itself one of the existing unquestioned assumptions of chip manufacture which may not pan out in the longer term. The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cedivad 7y ago
"Balanced on a 5nm point, the world could fall either way."
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kken 7y ago
When I read the title, I was actually hoping for a video tour of one of their fully automated 300mm Fabs. Unfortunately it seems that video material of cutting edge fabs on the web is scarce, and what is available does not really show the fab as a whole, but only details instead. Well, I guess everybody is afraid of giving away IP... Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoOAOOMjHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoOAOOMjHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASEMAMCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASEMAMCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VIgU1hPok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VIgU1hPok Research labs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_PCQAJzHj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_PCQAJzHj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttD7JOwpNXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttD7JOwpNXo
perlgeek 7y ago
The article ended right when it promised to get interesting. It set up the stage with the construction of the fab, the market, the international tension -- and then nothing. I would've really loved some insight about what the international influences mean for day to day operation, some technical challenges etc. (Or this would be the perfect setup for a murder mystery. One of the key engineers is found dead, and her ex-boyfriend, US and Chinese spies all could have a hand in it. My fantasy running wild again... :D )

A look inside TSMC

116 points by bdon 7y ago

seraphsf 7y ago

https://archive.is/NHfyj https://archive.is/NHfyj

purpleidea 7y ago

lol, nobody who gets a look inside lives to tell the tale :/

dotnetcore 7y ago

TSMC = 80% foreign investment. its hardly Taiwanese at this point...

PhantomGremlin 7y ago
TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese. The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan. The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan. Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it's not like they could disassemble 30 Rock and put it on a boat to Japan. Unsurprisingly they no longer own it. It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. TSMC's assets are in fabs that are difficult to disassemble without great expense. And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country. TSMC is a Taiwanese company. Who gives a fuck what some bookkeeping entries in some computer ledgers say about "foreign investment".
- vladimirralev 7y ago
  Sooner or later TSMC will build next-gen R&D facilities and fabs. Shareholders will be able to vote for the new locations.
  - draugadrotten 7y ago
    Shareholders of such things are sometimes proxies for the true powers hidden behind. Money is not a democracy. There are national interests at stake here, and then I'm not talking about Taiwan's national interest.
  - sct202 7y ago
    Shareholders typically don't vote on things like that directly, but they can vote for Directors who usually have the power to fire/hire CEO's who then make decisions like new locations.
- rapsey 7y ago
  > And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country. China has been very aggressively recruiting those engineers to the mainland with high salaries and succeeding.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  If they were to nationalize it tomorrow (say under threat of war from PRC) I don’t think you’d see 80% of the employees walk
- ant6n 7y ago
  > It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships. Is there a source for this story?
  - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    Is there a source for this story? My 12th grade US history teacher. Circa 1973. I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegations_demolition_scrap_was_sold_to_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRT_Sixth_Avenue_Line#Allegati... The NY Times also touched on it: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/11/nyregion/fyi-811695.html
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > I found a Wikipedia discussion, but it is by no means dispositive: It seems fairly so on the claim that Japan bought the el, dismantled it, and shipped the steel home; it is less dispositive on the question of whether some of the steel either reached Japan or freed up other steel for shipment to Japan when it was dismantled by it's actual civic owners, who had no connection to Japan.

qaq 7y ago

A look inside without a single photo ...

0-_-0 7y ago
5 nm is not visible to the naked eye

sytelus 7y ago

One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.

barrkel 7y ago
There's nothing magical about innovation that requires it to be located in the US. Why do you think a foreign company should relocate to the US?
- sytelus 7y ago
  Transistors, microchips and fabs were all born and thrived in USA. One would think USA would have first mover advantage because this is very very hard to replicate tech but for some reason, fabs got completely eradicated from USA.
  - simonh 7y ago
    There are still plenty of fabs in the USA. The Wikipedia page on the list of fabs puts over a hundred in the US[0]. I remember at one point when Samsung made most of the A Chips for Apple, the fab was actually in Texas though they do have a bunch in South Korea as well. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...
  - Nokinside 7y ago
    Have you ever wondered what's inside a new $20 billion Fab made of that makes it so expensive? Where is that equipment designed, developed and manufactured? There exists extremely high-tech sector called "Semiconductor Capital Equipment Industry". All the instruments and equipment involved in deposition, lithography, etch and clean, inspection, metrology, and prosess control is super expensive. Most of that technology is in the hands of Japanese (Nikon, Canon, Hitachi High-Technologies,Tokyo Electron and too many others to name), ASML Holding is big European player and largest supplier of photolithography systems. American companies involved are Applied Materials (their Semiconductor Systems), Lam Research and KLA-Tencor.

notlukesky 7y ago

“Samsung announced at the Foundry Forum earlier this year that it plans on spending $116 billion over the next decade in an effort to develop the chip production capacity and expertise that will serve the needs of key players in the 5G, automotive, machine learning, blockchain, and high-performance computing markets.” From: https://www.techspot.com/news/83331-samsung-pouring-116-billion-towards-beating-tsmc-race.html https://www.techspot.com/news/83331-samsung-pouring-116-bill...

siscia 7y ago

I really found TSMC inspiring, the level of technology reached is amazing. I only wish an effort from Europe to bring this expertise also in Europe.

barrkel 7y ago
Two European companies are mentioned as producing critical hardware for the process.
- siscia 7y ago
  And I am quite happy. But still there is a huge difference between being a provider of technology and actually using that technology.
  - newswasboring 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I've worked in several semiconductor companies mentioned in this article as hardware guy. Actually it's quite liberating to be the provider of technology. You control the whole market. Specially true for some of the companies which are virtual monopolies (over 95% of the market is owned by them). In EUV side, which is the future (happening now), some vendors are the only option. Fabs can pressure them, of course, but at the end of the day they are the only vendors available. I find it quite funny, on one hand TSMC is one of those "jump? Where and how high" kind of customer but OTOH there is no one else they can turn to. I find this kind of relationship quite funny and unique. I am not aware of any other industry where the vendor has this much power. All because they are the only supplier. Maybe in defense?
    - siscia 7y ago
      Can you share more? I would love to know better this kind of dynamics. Why TSMC or other fabs don't develop the same technology in house? How the technology is protected? Why there are not other competitors? Moreover, what that means from the company point of view? I guess there is not a big push to innovate, isn't it?

taspeotis 7y ago

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_trend https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

Fordec 7y ago
I can think of a few. Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one. New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea. Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though. Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.
- temac 7y ago
  Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.
  - Fordec 7y ago
    Risc V doesn't touch on Von Neumann architectures. That could be addressed by tech like Memristors as an example but to put it lightly, they're not ready yet. But the belief that to be a competitive fab house you have to churn out high performance chips is in itself one of the existing unquestioned assumptions of chip manufacture which may not pan out in the longer term. The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cedivad 7y ago

"Balanced on a 5nm point, the world could fall either way."

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kken 7y ago

When I read the title, I was actually hoping for a video tour of one of their fully automated 300mm Fabs. Unfortunately it seems that video material of cutting edge fabs on the web is scarce, and what is available does not really show the fab as a whole, but only details instead. Well, I guess everybody is afraid of giving away IP... Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoOAOOMjHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoOAOOMjHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASEMAMCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASEMAMCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VIgU1hPok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VIgU1hPok Research labs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_PCQAJzHj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_PCQAJzHj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttD7JOwpNXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttD7JOwpNXo

perlgeek 7y ago

The article ended right when it promised to get interesting. It set up the stage with the construction of the fab, the market, the international tension -- and then nothing. I would've really loved some insight about what the international influences mean for day to day operation, some technical challenges etc. (Or this would be the perfect setup for a murder mystery. One of the key engineers is found dead, and her ex-boyfriend, US and Chinese spies all could have a hand in it. My fantasy running wild again... :D )