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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
by 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 agoAs of recently, Samsung has the closest capabilities to TSMC and Intel has fallen to third.
- lliamander 6y agoIs Samsung 8nm better than Intel 10nm?
- Miraste 6y agoNo, 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.
- varispeed 6y agoThat's fascinating. Do you know more about the patents? I don't have any example at hand, but often I saw when browsing patents in the space I am interested in, that the patented solutions are kind of obvious when you dig deeper into something and the engineers who patented them just got there first. This is very frustrating, because then you need to spend time on finding different way, sometimes more difficult to achieve the same goal. It's like someone learned about numbers and then found that 2x2=4 and patented it, and then you cannot use this equation but instead you have to do like 1+1+2=4 if that makes sense. So my point is - if there is similar situation with these patents, then that kind of explains why there is no real competition.
- nl 6y agoPatents in chip processes are often electo-chemical in nature, which are "obvious" in the sense people know what they want to do, but the exact process for doing it takes years to develop and refine. This is why chip "yields" change over time - the process is slowly tweaked (maybe the temperature get changed 0.001 degree or something) to improve yield. Chip manufactures use a mix of patents and trade secrets to protect their advantages.
- varispeed 6y ago> in the sense people know what they want to do, but the exact process for doing it takes years to develop and refine. That is what makes me dislike the idea of patents - if two or more teams working in silos on developing and refining the process would have gotten similar results, then the process should not be patentable.