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TSMC is killing it. I feel like it would be a strategic investment for the US to take a much larger stake in it and hopefully bring some of that fabrication tal

TSMC is killing it. I feel like it would be a strategic investment for the US to take a much larger stake in it and hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside with Intel waning.

swalsh 6y ago
TSMC is absolutely killing it, but Samsung is catching up too. https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.html https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.h... Still, I think there's a pretty reasonable argument to be made about our dependence on foreign entities for such critical infrastructure. Intel seems to be falling behind pretty quickly.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Wow, 116 billion $ investment. Where this goes? High salaries? Expensive minerals? What makes it as expensive as small country's GDP?
  - bitdizzy 6y ago
    State of the art chip fabs require some of the most advanced technology we've developed, the purest materials we can produce, and the most stringent environments we can maintain.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Exactly. Fabs have air quality restrictions that make surgical rooms look like trash dumpsters, relatively, as far as cleanliness goes.
  - tooltalk 6y ago
    That's over 10 years, or just over $10B in CAPEX and R&D per year. That sounds a lot, but the company routinely spends $20B-$30B in CAPEX every year. In comparison, Samsung's annual marketing budget (advertising, sales promotion and incentive) easily exceeds that amount. That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    EUV patterning, of which TSMC bit the bullet on early, adds another huge cost to an already crazy expensive manufacturing process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUVL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUVL
- sq_ 6y ago
  Hasn’t Samsung been having serious yield issues with their newer processes? I think I remember reading the their 8nm yields were horrible around the time of the RTX 3000 series launch.
stunt 6y ago
The US already has all the most haves. Most of the IPs are US owned (by Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, NXP, Apple, Broadcom, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM etc). It's just the manufacturing capacity and fabrication facilities. Intel holds some shares on European based ASML which is the crucial partner for TSMC. The US could even force both ASML and TSMC to not sell products to Huawei even though Huawei was paying a lot of money. The US can effectively kill TSMC anytime. I don't think mass-scale in-house semiconductor manufacturing is really critical as much as having the tech and the IPs are. Also the US has enough influence on manufacturing, and enough emergency manufacturing capacity already in place. I think public cloud (AWS, GCP, and Azure) is more critical today than mass production semiconductor manufacturing.
- klelatti 6y ago
  ARM isn't yet US owned - at the moment it's still a UK company with a Japansese parent.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  What if China were to take over Taiwan and TSMC and stop selling to US companies? Which doesn't seem all that farfetched after what is happening in hong kong. It doesn't really matters who owns the IP if we're talking about nation states that don't have to play by any certain set of copyright rules. If that happened and the US had to replicate these fabs from scratch that could set computing power in the western world back 5 to 10 years. This seems like a large and growing matter of national security for the US, especially the further behind Intel falls.
  - jdpedrie 6y ago
    This is an important point. TSMC announced earlier this year that they'll be building a foundry in the US[0], but my understanding from what I read at the time is that it's a relative drop in the bucket. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factor...
    - 6y ago
genericone 6y ago
Well there is a 5nm TSMC fab coming to Arizona, maybe thats the needed lead-in. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-investment https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-investmen...
Analemma_ 6y ago
> hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside Taiwan will never let that happen. Having TSMC's expertise stay where it is is a matter of national security for them, since it gives them a bargaining chip to force the US to come to their aid if the worst happens.

TSMC is killing it. I feel like it would be a strategic investment for the US to take a much larger stake in it and hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside with Intel waning.

swalsh 6y ago

TSMC is absolutely killing it, but Samsung is catching up too. https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.html https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.h... Still, I think there's a pretty reasonable argument to be made about our dependence on foreign entities for such critical infrastructure. Intel seems to be falling behind pretty quickly.

mrtksn 6y ago
Wow, 116 billion $ investment. Where this goes? High salaries? Expensive minerals? What makes it as expensive as small country's GDP?
- bitdizzy 6y ago
  State of the art chip fabs require some of the most advanced technology we've developed, the purest materials we can produce, and the most stringent environments we can maintain.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Exactly. Fabs have air quality restrictions that make surgical rooms look like trash dumpsters, relatively, as far as cleanliness goes.
- tooltalk 6y ago
  That's over 10 years, or just over $10B in CAPEX and R&D per year. That sounds a lot, but the company routinely spends $20B-$30B in CAPEX every year. In comparison, Samsung's annual marketing budget (advertising, sales promotion and incentive) easily exceeds that amount. That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.
- StillBored 6y ago
  EUV patterning, of which TSMC bit the bullet on early, adds another huge cost to an already crazy expensive manufacturing process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUVL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUVL
sq_ 6y ago
Hasn’t Samsung been having serious yield issues with their newer processes? I think I remember reading the their 8nm yields were horrible around the time of the RTX 3000 series launch.

stunt 6y ago

The US already has all the most haves. Most of the IPs are US owned (by Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, NXP, Apple, Broadcom, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM etc). It's just the manufacturing capacity and fabrication facilities. Intel holds some shares on European based ASML which is the crucial partner for TSMC. The US could even force both ASML and TSMC to not sell products to Huawei even though Huawei was paying a lot of money. The US can effectively kill TSMC anytime. I don't think mass-scale in-house semiconductor manufacturing is really critical as much as having the tech and the IPs are. Also the US has enough influence on manufacturing, and enough emergency manufacturing capacity already in place. I think public cloud (AWS, GCP, and Azure) is more critical today than mass production semiconductor manufacturing.

klelatti 6y ago
ARM isn't yet US owned - at the moment it's still a UK company with a Japansese parent.
cactus2093 6y ago
What if China were to take over Taiwan and TSMC and stop selling to US companies? Which doesn't seem all that farfetched after what is happening in hong kong. It doesn't really matters who owns the IP if we're talking about nation states that don't have to play by any certain set of copyright rules. If that happened and the US had to replicate these fabs from scratch that could set computing power in the western world back 5 to 10 years. This seems like a large and growing matter of national security for the US, especially the further behind Intel falls.
- jdpedrie 6y ago
  This is an important point. TSMC announced earlier this year that they'll be building a foundry in the US[0], but my understanding from what I read at the time is that it's a relative drop in the bucket. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factor...
  - 6y ago

genericone 6y ago

Well there is a 5nm TSMC fab coming to Arizona, maybe thats the needed lead-in. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-investment https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-investmen...

Analemma_ 6y ago

> hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside Taiwan will never let that happen. Having TSMC's expertise stay where it is is a matter of national security for them, since it gives them a bargaining chip to force the US to come to their aid if the worst happens.