7 ms·

TSMC’s Speciality Technologies

109 points by Klyonova 5y ago

tux1968 5y ago
This seems like a more gentle way to say that innovation in the sector is slowing a bit. Which would account for why "mature" nodes will be producing more revenue than the latest developments coming online.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  It's not just the nodes AFAIK. There's huge demand for EUV machines but they are lower margin products for the company that makes them. I don't really understand this business, or any business really, so don't take my word for it
  - baybal2 5y ago
    I have no digits, but it seems that at least bruteforcing the volumes is in ways with how much chips Apple + AMD + Qualcomm ship. EUV productivity is a big problem. Currently machines are stopped every few shifts for cleaning tin from mirrors. Even without that, light sources never managed to live to the original power output promise. There are few known ways to produce EUV light besides tin plasma. One is in using some plasmonic quantum processes, I can't even fathom how to describe, to produce microwatts of EUV. The other is a free electron laser to produce potentially kilowatts of it non-stop. The later approach requires to build the whole fab around a synchrotron, a commitment currently nobody can take even with current surreal capex numbers.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Maybe we should rebuild the Large Hadron Collider as the core of a silicon fab/s
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Particle pipes for semi fabs (a la oil pipelines) would be a cool bit of retrofuturist-y world building
    - namibj 5y ago
      Oh they could do the latter, they just need to trust it's gonna work.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      There is such a facility, not far away from me. Though not that much free space around it anymore. https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon=9.83101&layers=B000 https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon...
    - craigjb 5y ago
      Equipment for ion implantation already includes mini accelerators [1] [2]. The semiconductor equipment industry in general has many machines that feel like they came out of a physics lab into a semi fab. For example, plasma dry-etching or deep-reactive ion etching. EUV litho is just one of many very interesting problems--currently the bottleneck so it's talked about a lot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation [2] https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energy-ion-implantation/ https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energ... edit: add link to cool ion implanter machine pics
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > There's huge demand for EUV machines but they are lower margin products for the company that makes them. ASML, a Dutch company, is at the core of TSMCs success. But the machines are only one part of the ecosystem... the buildings to house them are incredibly expensive because you need the cleanest of clean rooms you can get, and then you need expert staff to operate these, and since there isn't much of a domestic chip industry any more in the Western countries, that knowledge has long ago moved off to Taiwan and South Korea. And on top of that, Western wages are extremely high and environmental regulations are extremely strict after half of Silicon Valley became a superfund site from all the stuff that leeched into the soil from decades of chipmaking.
    - craigjb 5y ago
      You also need hundreds of other machines from Applied Materials, KLA Tencor, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, etc. Then, years of process development R&D: what temperature do we bake this layer at, how long, what profile, what atmosphere in the tool… Every process step has a large parameter set to optimize. Creating a process is a painstaking many many variable optimization slog. Just wanted to add that since I see people only mention ASML often here. They are very important, but there is so much more to TSMC’s success.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  "Innovation" in the sector always came at tremendous cost. The startup cost for the foundry for a new node has been increasing every generation (requires more wafers and time to amortize over), and the cost per wafer (on a production basis, not including the amortized development cost) has been increasing over time as well (and you're going to be competing with AMD, Nvidia, and Apple for fab space... those are deep pockets to fight against). And finally, the (per customer) development cost at each node is becoming more expensive as well. All of this means theres tremendous value in exploiting mature processes. And it's going to continue to be this way for quite a long time based on all the trendlines and projections that the big players put out.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  28 nm was a turning point in cost per transistor. Previously, unit cost of transistors declined with gate lengths, but smaller finfet nodes and EUV add enough complexity that cost per transistor is actually rising on more advanced nodes. The good thing about this is that capacity in "cutting-edge" fans will be lower and lower every year as more products find a "home" node that balances price and performance.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    I'm not sure where that idea came from. The last we saw was that N5 was slightly more expensive than N7, but at the time that info came out nobody but Apple could run N5 except for super expensive proto runs that even then were under tight competition. And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. Everything else is cheaper for gate count as you go down in gate size, and we should expect N5 to drop in price to under N7. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-revealed-300mm-wafer-at-5nm-is-nearly-dollar17000 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale... Maybe this idea came from the industry not fully internalizing the consolidation in the space and how much competition for wafers affects the initial price of a new node?
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  These processes are explicitly not about logic parts like CPUs or GPUs, but analog/power/mixed-signal parts, which don't benefit from smaller node sizes. Many of these parts are made on 0.12/0.18 µm or even bigger nodes because anything smaller is pointless. > Generally, TSMC’s speciality technologies portfolio includes MEMS, CMOS Image Sensor, Embedded NVM, RF, Analog, High Voltage, and BCD-Power processes.
- aceoperations00 5y ago
  I disagree. A lot of the upcoming requirements of transistors just do not need small transistor nodes. For example, for RF applications, power handling needs simply require larger gate lengths. There is no way you can use a 7nm finfet to realize some RF applications. Innovation in semiconductors takes many forms, not just pushing to lower transistor nodes.
Nelson548 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this amazing blog this is useful. https://www.rapidfs.biz/ https://www.rapidfs.biz/
sydthrowaway 5y ago
What's impressive is that TSMC chugs along doing great work with little submarine marketing on tech Twitter or HN. Same for ASML. No filler blogs about some new framework here.
- baybal2 5y ago
  I doubt they do this. Why do they need it? As if somebody doesn't know who the real kingmaker of the industrial world is. If the world will be left without modern semi manufacturing, it will rm -rf half of the NASDAQ by default. I feel it's the Silicon Valley itself which needs to acknowledge how insignificant they are in the bigger picture of things. If I were some big "tech" company head like of Facebook, Amazon, Google, I would've at least gave a look how much the microchip supply chain can trip their companies. Tan Hock Eng has over the last 5 years bought almost every major network gear chipmaker, and is now holding the entirety of the "cloud" industry under gunpoint for example. The "cloud" guys might be now spending more money on switches than on CPUs. Now imagine, somebody else will rollup something equally critical.
  - DSingularity 5y ago
    More money on switches?! Are you serious or exaggerating?
    - baybal2 5y ago
      Broadcom has a stranglehold on both chips for the top of the rack, and multi-terabit ones. Intel makes very timid inroads into high end switching chips with Tofino, and that's it.
      - kingosticks 5y ago
        Broadcom have been busy but there's still choice: https://elegantnetwork.github.io/posts/A-Summary-of-Network-ASICs/ https://elegantnetwork.github.io/posts/A-Summary-of-Network-...

109 points by Klyonova 5y ago

tux1968 5y ago

This seems like a more gentle way to say that innovation in the sector is slowing a bit. Which would account for why "mature" nodes will be producing more revenue than the latest developments coming online.

beebeepka 5y ago
It's not just the nodes AFAIK. There's huge demand for EUV machines but they are lower margin products for the company that makes them. I don't really understand this business, or any business really, so don't take my word for it
- baybal2 5y ago
  I have no digits, but it seems that at least bruteforcing the volumes is in ways with how much chips Apple + AMD + Qualcomm ship. EUV productivity is a big problem. Currently machines are stopped every few shifts for cleaning tin from mirrors. Even without that, light sources never managed to live to the original power output promise. There are few known ways to produce EUV light besides tin plasma. One is in using some plasmonic quantum processes, I can't even fathom how to describe, to produce microwatts of EUV. The other is a free electron laser to produce potentially kilowatts of it non-stop. The later approach requires to build the whole fab around a synchrotron, a commitment currently nobody can take even with current surreal capex numbers.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Maybe we should rebuild the Large Hadron Collider as the core of a silicon fab/s
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Particle pipes for semi fabs (a la oil pipelines) would be a cool bit of retrofuturist-y world building
  - namibj 5y ago
    Oh they could do the latter, they just need to trust it's gonna work.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    There is such a facility, not far away from me. Though not that much free space around it anymore. https://www.xfel.eu/ https://www.xfel.eu/ https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon=9.83101&layers=B000 https://openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=53.58825&lon...
  - craigjb 5y ago
    Equipment for ion implantation already includes mini accelerators [1] [2]. The semiconductor equipment industry in general has many machines that feel like they came out of a physics lab into a semi fab. For example, plasma dry-etching or deep-reactive ion etching. EUV litho is just one of many very interesting problems--currently the bottleneck so it's talked about a lot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_implantation [2] https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energy-ion-implantation/ https://www.axcelis.com/products/purion-xe-series-high-energ... edit: add link to cool ion implanter machine pics
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > There's huge demand for EUV machines but they are lower margin products for the company that makes them. ASML, a Dutch company, is at the core of TSMCs success. But the machines are only one part of the ecosystem... the buildings to house them are incredibly expensive because you need the cleanest of clean rooms you can get, and then you need expert staff to operate these, and since there isn't much of a domestic chip industry any more in the Western countries, that knowledge has long ago moved off to Taiwan and South Korea. And on top of that, Western wages are extremely high and environmental regulations are extremely strict after half of Silicon Valley became a superfund site from all the stuff that leeched into the soil from decades of chipmaking.
  - craigjb 5y ago
    You also need hundreds of other machines from Applied Materials, KLA Tencor, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, etc. Then, years of process development R&D: what temperature do we bake this layer at, how long, what profile, what atmosphere in the tool… Every process step has a large parameter set to optimize. Creating a process is a painstaking many many variable optimization slog. Just wanted to add that since I see people only mention ASML often here. They are very important, but there is so much more to TSMC’s success.
icegreentea2 5y ago
"Innovation" in the sector always came at tremendous cost. The startup cost for the foundry for a new node has been increasing every generation (requires more wafers and time to amortize over), and the cost per wafer (on a production basis, not including the amortized development cost) has been increasing over time as well (and you're going to be competing with AMD, Nvidia, and Apple for fab space... those are deep pockets to fight against). And finally, the (per customer) development cost at each node is becoming more expensive as well. All of this means theres tremendous value in exploiting mature processes. And it's going to continue to be this way for quite a long time based on all the trendlines and projections that the big players put out.
pclmulqdq 5y ago
28 nm was a turning point in cost per transistor. Previously, unit cost of transistors declined with gate lengths, but smaller finfet nodes and EUV add enough complexity that cost per transistor is actually rising on more advanced nodes. The good thing about this is that capacity in "cutting-edge" fans will be lower and lower every year as more products find a "home" node that balances price and performance.
- monocasa 5y ago
  I'm not sure where that idea came from. The last we saw was that N5 was slightly more expensive than N7, but at the time that info came out nobody but Apple could run N5 except for super expensive proto runs that even then were under tight competition. And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. Everything else is cheaper for gate count as you go down in gate size, and we should expect N5 to drop in price to under N7. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-revealed-300mm-wafer-at-5nm-is-nearly-dollar17000 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale... Maybe this idea came from the industry not fully internalizing the consolidation in the space and how much competition for wafers affects the initial price of a new node?
formerly_proven 5y ago
These processes are explicitly not about logic parts like CPUs or GPUs, but analog/power/mixed-signal parts, which don't benefit from smaller node sizes. Many of these parts are made on 0.12/0.18 µm or even bigger nodes because anything smaller is pointless. > Generally, TSMC’s speciality technologies portfolio includes MEMS, CMOS Image Sensor, Embedded NVM, RF, Analog, High Voltage, and BCD-Power processes.
aceoperations00 5y ago
I disagree. A lot of the upcoming requirements of transistors just do not need small transistor nodes. For example, for RF applications, power handling needs simply require larger gate lengths. There is no way you can use a 7nm finfet to realize some RF applications. Innovation in semiconductors takes many forms, not just pushing to lower transistor nodes.

Nelson548 5y ago

Thanks for sharing this amazing blog this is useful. https://www.rapidfs.biz/ https://www.rapidfs.biz/

sydthrowaway 5y ago

What's impressive is that TSMC chugs along doing great work with little submarine marketing on tech Twitter or HN. Same for ASML. No filler blogs about some new framework here.

baybal2 5y ago
I doubt they do this. Why do they need it? As if somebody doesn't know who the real kingmaker of the industrial world is. If the world will be left without modern semi manufacturing, it will rm -rf half of the NASDAQ by default. I feel it's the Silicon Valley itself which needs to acknowledge how insignificant they are in the bigger picture of things. If I were some big "tech" company head like of Facebook, Amazon, Google, I would've at least gave a look how much the microchip supply chain can trip their companies. Tan Hock Eng has over the last 5 years bought almost every major network gear chipmaker, and is now holding the entirety of the "cloud" industry under gunpoint for example. The "cloud" guys might be now spending more money on switches than on CPUs. Now imagine, somebody else will rollup something equally critical.
- DSingularity 5y ago
  More money on switches?! Are you serious or exaggerating?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Broadcom has a stranglehold on both chips for the top of the rack, and multi-terabit ones. Intel makes very timid inroads into high end switching chips with Tofino, and that's it.
    - kingosticks 5y ago
      Broadcom have been busy but there's still choice: https://elegantnetwork.github.io/posts/A-Summary-of-Network-ASICs/ https://elegantnetwork.github.io/posts/A-Summary-of-Network-...