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TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer man

by ipnon 5y ago

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

openandshut 5y ago
>still in the middle of the computer revolution Are you implying it will end? Either Moore's law leveling off or an externality (unrest/war/climate change) that ends it?
tester34 5y ago
Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry
- artemonster 5y ago
  ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable macros, works only with ~3 vendor simulators (all 3 would do different stuff on big designs and you are locked almost forever). When you simulate you designs, most of external components would be either encrypted blackboxes or be calling "magic" functions (called system tasks) that are absultely opaque to you and do some global side-effects. All of this multiplied by the fact that every statement is executed in parallel in your huge design and evolves in time. Oh, did I mention how crappy the actual tools are? Think of 90's era with outdated and moronic UI/UX, some poorely integrated quasi-TCL interpreter for configuration & ability to crash that tool in <3 clicks. Ah, you will be paying 15kUSD/year per license, thank you very much. You will be needing lots of them (> 50).
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?
    - Heliosmaster 5y ago
      Yes there is. But moving at enterprise speeds. Python considered "new" and young. Codebases are 30 to 40 years old
    - artemonster 5y ago
      there are some developments, but mostly you would get new additional tool on top of existing stack, rather than a new stack. Problem 1. patents. in early FOSS days people got momentum to push hard for corporations to give up compiler patents and other obvious nonsense and let GCC flourish. same situation is here in hardware, the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence. Problem 2. features. there are a lot of features that you need to push out a working chip into an existence. open source tools or alternatives are SO far behind that they cannot be used or can be used only on something really small. Problem 3. verification. there are no (VIABLE! that python coco stuff doesnt count!) open-source alternatives to UVM (uvm as a library is open source, but there are either no simulators that can run it). If we had some of the older verificaion languages to go open source (like specman, vera), maybe we had a chance.
      - adwn 5y ago
        > the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence. Doesn't that apply to basically every kind of software? How's it different for HDL simulation software?
        artemonster 5y ago
        the point is that for FOSS there was an active movement that forced IBM and old megacorps to forfeit such "nonsense" patents. So if you roll out a brand new c++ compiler you may have some buffs with intel if you try to go to their turf about some propreitary x64 specific optimizations, but, say, IBM wouldnt sue you because you dared to create "a program/method of transforming source code into machine code" that violated 250 patents from their portfolio.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Pure sarcasm, but no :) > Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry The most groundbreaking things all tech must be about are cat video websites, and internet companies :D People completely forget that were Morris Chang (the previous CEO of TSMC,) not been polite, and ethical to a fault, the industry would've still be dominated by monster big semis, manufacturing every chip around, and who would've milked all big chip users like internet companies to death. I can't imagine Panasonic, Toshiba, Motorola, or AMD of old not scheming to squeezing their clients to the last cent, and strategizing to prevent clients from gaining negotiating power. TSMC's benevolent stance in comparison to that would be almost bordering on charity.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I've worked on hard science problems and while it's more bleeding edge it's all very, very slow moving. You're not shipping anything in less than a year, max. And that's OK. It's just very glacial and you go VERY deep into the topic.
grlass 5y ago
Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" <https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-became-chipmakings-biggest-monopoly https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam...>
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  You forget Imec in Belgium, which does a lot of the R&D in semiconductors. I suspect lot of the production facilities would want to be near them. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-13/u-s-and-china-fix-their-sights-on-world-s-top-chip-research-center https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-13/u-s-and-c...
- bschne 5y ago
  Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?
  - rosetremiere 5y ago
    Look at the «Whitworth three plate method». As far as I understand, it should allow a «gain» in precision.
  - nudgeee 5y ago
    On a very high level, a good place to start is on Metrology — the science of measurement [0]. Test, measurement and calibration equipment for new technologies (think 5G/UWB, mmWave, even up to CERN LHC) can be right on the cutting edge of technology. Companies who specialize in these areas tend to have large budgets on research and commercialization. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology

by ipnon 5y ago

openandshut 5y ago

>still in the middle of the computer revolution Are you implying it will end? Either Moore's law leveling off or an externality (unrest/war/climate change) that ends it?

tester34 5y ago

Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry

artemonster 5y ago
ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable macros, works only with ~3 vendor simulators (all 3 would do different stuff on big designs and you are locked almost forever). When you simulate you designs, most of external components would be either encrypted blackboxes or be calling "magic" functions (called system tasks) that are absultely opaque to you and do some global side-effects. All of this multiplied by the fact that every statement is executed in parallel in your huge design and evolves in time. Oh, did I mention how crappy the actual tools are? Think of 90's era with outdated and moronic UI/UX, some poorely integrated quasi-TCL interpreter for configuration & ability to crash that tool in <3 clicks. Ah, you will be paying 15kUSD/year per license, thank you very much. You will be needing lots of them (> 50).
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?
  - Heliosmaster 5y ago
    Yes there is. But moving at enterprise speeds. Python considered "new" and young. Codebases are 30 to 40 years old
  - artemonster 5y ago
    there are some developments, but mostly you would get new additional tool on top of existing stack, rather than a new stack. Problem 1. patents. in early FOSS days people got momentum to push hard for corporations to give up compiler patents and other obvious nonsense and let GCC flourish. same situation is here in hardware, the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence. Problem 2. features. there are a lot of features that you need to push out a working chip into an existence. open source tools or alternatives are SO far behind that they cannot be used or can be used only on something really small. Problem 3. verification. there are no (VIABLE! that python coco stuff doesnt count!) open-source alternatives to UVM (uvm as a library is open source, but there are either no simulators that can run it). If we had some of the older verificaion languages to go open source (like specman, vera), maybe we had a chance.
    - adwn 5y ago
      > the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence. Doesn't that apply to basically every kind of software? How's it different for HDL simulation software?
      - artemonster 5y ago
        the point is that for FOSS there was an active movement that forced IBM and old megacorps to forfeit such "nonsense" patents. So if you roll out a brand new c++ compiler you may have some buffs with intel if you try to go to their turf about some propreitary x64 specific optimizations, but, say, IBM wouldnt sue you because you dared to create "a program/method of transforming source code into machine code" that violated 250 patents from their portfolio.
baybal2 5y ago
Pure sarcasm, but no :) > Overall semiconducting industry seems to be way more exciting than boring computer industry The most groundbreaking things all tech must be about are cat video websites, and internet companies :D People completely forget that were Morris Chang (the previous CEO of TSMC,) not been polite, and ethical to a fault, the industry would've still be dominated by monster big semis, manufacturing every chip around, and who would've milked all big chip users like internet companies to death. I can't imagine Panasonic, Toshiba, Motorola, or AMD of old not scheming to squeezing their clients to the last cent, and strategizing to prevent clients from gaining negotiating power. TSMC's benevolent stance in comparison to that would be almost bordering on charity.
thehappypm 5y ago
I've worked on hard science problems and while it's more bleeding edge it's all very, very slow moving. You're not shipping anything in less than a year, max. And that's OK. It's just very glacial and you go VERY deep into the topic.

grlass 5y ago

Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" <https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-became-chipmakings-biggest-monopoly https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam...>

NicoJuicy 5y ago
You forget Imec in Belgium, which does a lot of the R&D in semiconductors. I suspect lot of the production facilities would want to be near them. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-13/u-s-and-china-fix-their-sights-on-world-s-top-chip-research-center https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-13/u-s-and-c...
bschne 5y ago
Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?
- rosetremiere 5y ago
  Look at the «Whitworth three plate method». As far as I understand, it should allow a «gain» in precision.
- nudgeee 5y ago
  On a very high level, a good place to start is on Metrology — the science of measurement [0]. Test, measurement and calibration equipment for new technologies (think 5G/UWB, mmWave, even up to CERN LHC) can be right on the cutting edge of technology. Companies who specialize in these areas tend to have large budgets on research and commercialization. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrology