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Do we know that such advanced chip manufacturing was developed just in Taiwan? It would seem that European countries have great education and economy and yet we

Do we know that such advanced chip manufacturing was developed just in Taiwan? It would seem that European countries have great education and economy and yet we cannot see any innovation in this space? Is there any Fab in Europe that could challenge TSMC? Anything in the US? What is so special about Taiwan that it was possible there despite all nuances coming from its political and geographical situation?

Nokinside 6y ago
ASML (European company) is the only manufacturer of EUV lithography machines. Each machine costs $100 - $255 million. ASML ships 35 this year and 45-50 in 2021.
- foobarian 6y ago
  I was never quite clear on what's happening here. So what did TSMC actually do then - just buy the machines and run them? What stops any other actors from doing the same?
  - cure 6y ago
    The key insight here is that it's not "just" buy the machines and run them. Operational experience is likely extremely important to operate at the level TSMC is at.
    - Out_of_Characte 6y ago
      This, the foundries cost billions of dollars to construct, the machines are 'just' an expensive specialised cog in the entire machine
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    US actions for one thing. See the history of how the US has blocked China's acquisition of those machines by simply applying pressure (not even threat of sanctions) on Europeans. Also even you got your hands on them, you need a sufficient expertise and huge investments to build a fab. If you are part of the US block, then it's too expensive, if not, you can't buy, so you have to develop them yourself, which takes a lot of money and more importantly time. Even with all those money poured into this area, China plans to become self-sufficient on the chip front not earlier than 2030.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    There is no "just" any more than programming is "just" buying a bunch of computers and hiring staff to run them. TSMC define their processes in great detail: the exact timings of photolithographic processes, the exact composition of the chemical processes, all the little material handling details, wafer sawing, packaging, wire-bonding, testing and so on. They also define standard cell libraries, the little blocks of rectangles that make up the gates. Given the way patterning geometry works, if you want your chip to actually work you realistically need to use their libraries. For major customers there will be a certain amount of tech support, especially on a new process; inevitably the first few wafers through will have terrible yields and it's to the benefit of both parties to work out why. A factory - any factory - is not just the set of capital equipment that makes it up, but the collection of staff that run it, including their often unwritten expertise on how the process works in ways that may differ from the theory.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Do you know what kind of software is used to design these chips? I understand you can do prototyping in Verilog and then somehow translate or make use of these predefined cells. Then how those cells are placed on the die? Is that automated or semi-manual like when doing PCB design? I play with FPGA, but I just keep wondering what it would take to design my own chip.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        There is an open toolchain, but most companies go with either Cadence or Synopsis. Key steps: floorplan, place and route, layout. It's automatic with manual tuning and fix-up; just as PCB autoroute isn't perfect. Getting timing closure can require a lot of work; picking the right size of cells to drive the length of wire and fan-out is a serious problem.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If buying machines is the easy part then you would expect TSMC to be leading the market because it can just double its manufacturing capacity based on existing processes, meanwhile competitors would have to start from scratch.
bilbo0s 6y ago
It's possible everywhere. It wasn't practical from an economic perspective. I believe the author's position is that previously, one of the only considerations was, "how much will it cost." Or, "Does it make sense for us to invest in X fab?" Now there are other considerations beyond the economic and I'm certain you will begin to see not only fabs, but the full chain, in the EU and China. Probably sooner rather than later. What does that mean for the different economic blocks? What does that mean for tech in general? What does that mean for global security? Do we, (the US), have sufficient creativity to wargame all that out and get an idea of the future? Etc I think that's what the article is about.
- solotronics 6y ago
  Taiwan did everything they could to lead chip fab so the US would find them geopolitically valuable. It's not a coincidence this scenario came about.
  - disown 6y ago
    I think you have it backwards. We found taiwan to be geopolitically valuable so we helped them "lead chip fab". We have to keep taiwan, korea, japan, etc happy to keep them from aligning with china. Like we have to keep germany/ukraine/etc happy to keep them from aligning with russia. Of course these countries want to keep the US, China, Russia, etc "interested" to give them more goodies - tech/markets/access/etc. The more suitors, the greater the competition, the more plentiful the gifts. Vietnam is doing this right now with china and the US and getting investment/political favors/market access/etc from both.
fuoqi 6y ago
High-end chip manufacturing is effectively a natural monopoly. You need huge initial investments, after which cost of production is too small to make creation of competing fabs a good investment idea (unless politics get involved). TSMC was the first company who found the right business model for this space and it was done when the global economy was relatively open, so it was in the right place and time to achieve a global monopoly. > It would seem that European countries have great education and economy and yet we cannot see any innovation in this space? Some of the important hardware for chip manufacturing is developed and produced in Europe.
- pm90 6y ago
  > (unless politics get involved) I don't understand why the US Government can tolerate losing the edge in this area to other nations. Maybe its because TSMC is based in Taiwan, which is an American Ally? It seems like one would want to retain these skills even if they may not be profitable. Are there military contractors dedicated to manufacturing microchips?
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    > I don't understand why the US Government can tolerate losing the edge in this area to other nations Because the US is a Capitalist state. It serves first and foremost the interests of large corporations and capital holders operating in the US. As (some of) those have become less interested in nationalism and are multi-national - including a few that are not US-based to begin with - the incentive for maintaining "national edge"s wanes.
  - magicsmoke 6y ago
    Military equipment is built using older technology nodes because of how long military projects take to complete and military equipment having to be certified as radiation hardened. There are still plenty of US fabs working at above 50nm that can provide semiconductors sufficient for military equipment and the latest technology nodes are largely used for commercial products. While the US government has done plenty work on military strategy and keeping the military supplied it hasn't had an economic strategy since winning the cold war other than keep its hands off and hope for the best.
gvb 6y ago
There is nothing inherently special about Taiwan for chip manufacturing. Theoretically, Europe and the US can (and do, to some extent) challenge TSMC and China aspires to do so too. The fundamental problem is that it is extraordinarily expensive to build a state of the art chip fab and it is extraordinarily difficult to make start of the art chips (process technology in the 7nm node range). The technology is heavily patented and, what isn't patented, is tightly controlled as trade secrets by fabs. TSMC[1] started as a contract fab house with competent, but not state of the art, fab capabilities. Over time and with immense investments, they have become a leading (arguably the leading) fab. Intel is on par (arguably) or has fallen slightly behind TSMC in terms of state of the art fab capabilities. Global Foundries[2] (made up of former IBM foundries[3], Motorola foundries, and others, acquired by AMD and subsequently spun out) has fallen behind in terms of state of the art (e.g. 7nm nodes). Europe also has quite a few competent, but not state of the art, foundaries. There are a ton of fabs that were state of the art but have not been upgraded - they are quietly fabbing billions of chips that don't need smaller geometry fab nodes and cannot justify the expense of moving to more state of the art fabs. "Moving" to a new fab node technology requires a significant redesign of the chip and would require requalifying, both of which are very expensive. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries [3] Trivia: IBM paid Global Foundries to acquire their (IBM's) chip foundries.
- Miraste 6y ago
  As of recently, Samsung has the closest capabilities to TSMC and Intel has fallen to third.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Is Samsung 8nm better than Intel 10nm?
    - Miraste 6y ago
      No, but Intel 10nm (still!) isn't stable enough for desktop cpus, much less the massive gpu dies Samsung is making, so personally I don't count it.
sct202 6y ago
One thing that differentiated Taiwan is that a lot of people left the country to study abroad and earn phDs in science or engineering and ended up working in the US tech industry. When the Taiwanese government began to make initiatives to support a local semiconductor industry, they had connections to the industry to be able to make deals with American and European companies--some of which had Taiwanese leaders or founders. Edit: On the note of Europe, Philips was one of TSMC's original investors and customers. Philips also co-founded ASML which other people have mentioned.
solotronics 6y ago
Just look at AMD vs Intel right now for the leading CPUs. AMD pulled ahead of Intel by a margin of 20% IPC. Intel has been having trouble keeping up in their latest process for failure rates etc.
- varispeed 6y ago
  It's interesting that Intel has not gone to TSMC to produce better CPUs while at the same time improving their own fabs. Too much pride?
  - nl 6y ago
    Intel is now (currently) using TSMC for their Xe GPUs: https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intel-tsmc-not-long-term/ https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intel-tsmc-not-long-term/
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Finally they got some sense. Thank you
pjc50 6y ago
There are plenty of European fabs, such as Intel Fab 24 in Ireland and GlobalFoundries Fab 1 in Dresden. ST Micro have at least one as well. I think the unique thing about TSMC is that they're an "unaligned" fab, not part of one of the giant chip companies. They'll take contracts from anyone. This leads to their name getting mentioned a lot by all the fabless semiconductor companies, while Intel, AMD, Samsung etc. turn out billions of chips with zero news coverage. They are the free market in chip manufacture.
- nl 6y ago
  AMD is fabless since they spun out Global Foundries.

Nokinside 6y ago

ASML (European company) is the only manufacturer of EUV lithography machines. Each machine costs $100 - $255 million. ASML ships 35 this year and 45-50 in 2021.

foobarian 6y ago
I was never quite clear on what's happening here. So what did TSMC actually do then - just buy the machines and run them? What stops any other actors from doing the same?
- cure 6y ago
  The key insight here is that it's not "just" buy the machines and run them. Operational experience is likely extremely important to operate at the level TSMC is at.
  - Out_of_Characte 6y ago
    This, the foundries cost billions of dollars to construct, the machines are 'just' an expensive specialised cog in the entire machine
- fuoqi 6y ago
  US actions for one thing. See the history of how the US has blocked China's acquisition of those machines by simply applying pressure (not even threat of sanctions) on Europeans. Also even you got your hands on them, you need a sufficient expertise and huge investments to build a fab. If you are part of the US block, then it's too expensive, if not, you can't buy, so you have to develop them yourself, which takes a lot of money and more importantly time. Even with all those money poured into this area, China plans to become self-sufficient on the chip front not earlier than 2030.
- pjc50 6y ago
  There is no "just" any more than programming is "just" buying a bunch of computers and hiring staff to run them. TSMC define their processes in great detail: the exact timings of photolithographic processes, the exact composition of the chemical processes, all the little material handling details, wafer sawing, packaging, wire-bonding, testing and so on. They also define standard cell libraries, the little blocks of rectangles that make up the gates. Given the way patterning geometry works, if you want your chip to actually work you realistically need to use their libraries. For major customers there will be a certain amount of tech support, especially on a new process; inevitably the first few wafers through will have terrible yields and it's to the benefit of both parties to work out why. A factory - any factory - is not just the set of capital equipment that makes it up, but the collection of staff that run it, including their often unwritten expertise on how the process works in ways that may differ from the theory.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Do you know what kind of software is used to design these chips? I understand you can do prototyping in Verilog and then somehow translate or make use of these predefined cells. Then how those cells are placed on the die? Is that automated or semi-manual like when doing PCB design? I play with FPGA, but I just keep wondering what it would take to design my own chip.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      There is an open toolchain, but most companies go with either Cadence or Synopsis. Key steps: floorplan, place and route, layout. It's automatic with manual tuning and fix-up; just as PCB autoroute isn't perfect. Getting timing closure can require a lot of work; picking the right size of cells to drive the length of wire and fan-out is a serious problem.
- imtringued 6y ago
  If buying machines is the easy part then you would expect TSMC to be leading the market because it can just double its manufacturing capacity based on existing processes, meanwhile competitors would have to start from scratch.

bilbo0s 6y ago

It's possible everywhere. It wasn't practical from an economic perspective. I believe the author's position is that previously, one of the only considerations was, "how much will it cost." Or, "Does it make sense for us to invest in X fab?" Now there are other considerations beyond the economic and I'm certain you will begin to see not only fabs, but the full chain, in the EU and China. Probably sooner rather than later. What does that mean for the different economic blocks? What does that mean for tech in general? What does that mean for global security? Do we, (the US), have sufficient creativity to wargame all that out and get an idea of the future? Etc I think that's what the article is about.

solotronics 6y ago
Taiwan did everything they could to lead chip fab so the US would find them geopolitically valuable. It's not a coincidence this scenario came about.
- disown 6y ago
  I think you have it backwards. We found taiwan to be geopolitically valuable so we helped them "lead chip fab". We have to keep taiwan, korea, japan, etc happy to keep them from aligning with china. Like we have to keep germany/ukraine/etc happy to keep them from aligning with russia. Of course these countries want to keep the US, China, Russia, etc "interested" to give them more goodies - tech/markets/access/etc. The more suitors, the greater the competition, the more plentiful the gifts. Vietnam is doing this right now with china and the US and getting investment/political favors/market access/etc from both.

fuoqi 6y ago

High-end chip manufacturing is effectively a natural monopoly. You need huge initial investments, after which cost of production is too small to make creation of competing fabs a good investment idea (unless politics get involved). TSMC was the first company who found the right business model for this space and it was done when the global economy was relatively open, so it was in the right place and time to achieve a global monopoly. > It would seem that European countries have great education and economy and yet we cannot see any innovation in this space? Some of the important hardware for chip manufacturing is developed and produced in Europe.

pm90 6y ago
> (unless politics get involved) I don't understand why the US Government can tolerate losing the edge in this area to other nations. Maybe its because TSMC is based in Taiwan, which is an American Ally? It seems like one would want to retain these skills even if they may not be profitable. Are there military contractors dedicated to manufacturing microchips?
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > I don't understand why the US Government can tolerate losing the edge in this area to other nations Because the US is a Capitalist state. It serves first and foremost the interests of large corporations and capital holders operating in the US. As (some of) those have become less interested in nationalism and are multi-national - including a few that are not US-based to begin with - the incentive for maintaining "national edge"s wanes.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  Military equipment is built using older technology nodes because of how long military projects take to complete and military equipment having to be certified as radiation hardened. There are still plenty of US fabs working at above 50nm that can provide semiconductors sufficient for military equipment and the latest technology nodes are largely used for commercial products. While the US government has done plenty work on military strategy and keeping the military supplied it hasn't had an economic strategy since winning the cold war other than keep its hands off and hope for the best.

gvb 6y ago

There is nothing inherently special about Taiwan for chip manufacturing. Theoretically, Europe and the US can (and do, to some extent) challenge TSMC and China aspires to do so too. The fundamental problem is that it is extraordinarily expensive to build a state of the art chip fab and it is extraordinarily difficult to make start of the art chips (process technology in the 7nm node range). The technology is heavily patented and, what isn't patented, is tightly controlled as trade secrets by fabs. TSMC[1] started as a contract fab house with competent, but not state of the art, fab capabilities. Over time and with immense investments, they have become a leading (arguably the leading) fab. Intel is on par (arguably) or has fallen slightly behind TSMC in terms of state of the art fab capabilities. Global Foundries[2] (made up of former IBM foundries[3], Motorola foundries, and others, acquired by AMD and subsequently spun out) has fallen behind in terms of state of the art (e.g. 7nm nodes). Europe also has quite a few competent, but not state of the art, foundaries. There are a ton of fabs that were state of the art but have not been upgraded - they are quietly fabbing billions of chips that don't need smaller geometry fab nodes and cannot justify the expense of moving to more state of the art fabs. "Moving" to a new fab node technology requires a significant redesign of the chip and would require requalifying, both of which are very expensive. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries [3] Trivia: IBM paid Global Foundries to acquire their (IBM's) chip foundries.

Miraste 6y ago
As of recently, Samsung has the closest capabilities to TSMC and Intel has fallen to third.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Is Samsung 8nm better than Intel 10nm?
  - Miraste 6y ago
    No, but Intel 10nm (still!) isn't stable enough for desktop cpus, much less the massive gpu dies Samsung is making, so personally I don't count it.

sct202 6y ago

One thing that differentiated Taiwan is that a lot of people left the country to study abroad and earn phDs in science or engineering and ended up working in the US tech industry. When the Taiwanese government began to make initiatives to support a local semiconductor industry, they had connections to the industry to be able to make deals with American and European companies--some of which had Taiwanese leaders or founders. Edit: On the note of Europe, Philips was one of TSMC's original investors and customers. Philips also co-founded ASML which other people have mentioned.

solotronics 6y ago

Just look at AMD vs Intel right now for the leading CPUs. AMD pulled ahead of Intel by a margin of 20% IPC. Intel has been having trouble keeping up in their latest process for failure rates etc.

varispeed 6y ago
It's interesting that Intel has not gone to TSMC to produce better CPUs while at the same time improving their own fabs. Too much pride?
- nl 6y ago
  Intel is now (currently) using TSMC for their Xe GPUs: https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intel-tsmc-not-long-term/ https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intel-tsmc-not-long-term/
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Finally they got some sense. Thank you

pjc50 6y ago

There are plenty of European fabs, such as Intel Fab 24 in Ireland and GlobalFoundries Fab 1 in Dresden. ST Micro have at least one as well. I think the unique thing about TSMC is that they're an "unaligned" fab, not part of one of the giant chip companies. They'll take contracts from anyone. This leads to their name getting mentioned a lot by all the fabless semiconductor companies, while Intel, AMD, Samsung etc. turn out billions of chips with zero news coverage. They are the free market in chip manufacture.

nl 6y ago
AMD is fabless since they spun out Global Foundries.