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How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, h

How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... the most expensive fab is 33 Giga$. TSMC is 17G$. pennies on the dollar in our 1-3Trillion infrastructure bill. Make america fab again. EDIT: it appears this is in the 2T infrastructure bill. https://www.eetimes.com/biden-ups-ante-to-50-billion-for-chips-act/ https://www.eetimes.com/biden-ups-ante-to-50-billion-for-chi...

Kye 5y ago
Isn't TSMC working on expanding into the US?
- datameta 5y ago
  They are indeed, in Arizona. First they are going to have employees train on-site in Taiwan (will get housing for themselves and their families for duration).
  - api 5y ago
    This makes it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes.
    - datameta 5y ago
      I thought similarly - this is true if we can have lossless knowledge transfer. I imagine we would have to put what is learned into practice before translating it into distributed knowledge for a US fab workforce.
      - zsmi 5y ago
        The US does produce ~10% of the global chip supply today, and much of the equipment used in the world's factories, and a very significant portion of the software needed, is made in the U.S.A. This is an economic issue. Not a knowledge gap.
    - baybal2 5y ago
      > it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes. Given that they will return
- cronix 5y ago
  Yes, but from what I understand, it won't be the most advanced plant making the smallest feature sizes, so it's not like Apple is going to be utilizing that plant (maybe for ancillary chips, but not main processor). Understandably, TSMC keeps a tight reign on their top-tier production methods, which is their reason for being #1. It's also 3 years away from opening in AZ (2024). Then they have to fine tune the equipment and processes over x runs. New plants tend to have low yields until those processes are smoothed out and perfected. You don't just set up a plant and start churning out chips with 98% success rate at 5nm once the factory is built. It probably takes 5-6 years from construction start to churning out quality chips in numbers that are actually profitable.
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    And the machines they’re going to be running take years to build. And they have to be built custom for each site. Not just for each site, but also each location within the site. Just moving a machine a couple of feet can cause massive delays as they have to effectively rebuild the machine for the new location. ASML has engineers who go out and spend months or a year or more, just taking various measurements of the location inside the building at the site where the machine will be operating. Then those engineers go back to Eindhoven to oversee the building of that machine from the ground up, and run through proving cycles. Then the whole thing has to be taken apart and shipped and then rebuilt at the site. And then there are months afterwards as the team does further work and testing before they can finally use that machine for production purposes. The Saturn V rocket was much easier to build and move. Nothing the rocket industry has can compare to the difficulty of building and moving these machines. Disclaimer: I worked as a consultant at ASML for several months, helping them to rebuild their Unix infrastructure systems that they used to support the engineers who did all that design and build work.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      Seems like long term the human race is going to lose this ability if something serious is not done to reduce the complexity of building these things. This pandemic has shown that everything is super fragile and with Climate Change on the horizon I cannot believe they decided to build this damn thing in Arizona of all places. Maybe the collapse people were right and we should be working on CollapseOS [1]: https://collapseos.org/ https://collapseos.org/
phreeza 5y ago
I assume that is if you already have the know-how. Starting from (almost) scratch would require more upfront work, right?
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  The US isn't starting from scratch. And presumably the total cost includes all the R&D cycles. TSMC was started by a Texas Instruments employee. But, if we assume they were, just double the cost as a sign-on bonus for all the engineers and poach away. This is problem that can be solved with money, and not a lot of it in the grand scheme of things.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    You vastly underestimate the institutional knowledge necessary to operate state of the art fabs. Intel has been at the forefront of the field for decades, and even they are stumbling vs the current challenges. TSMC was founded over 3 decades ago. That it was founded by a TI employee says nothing about the situation today. The US is subsidizing a TSMC plant here, which should help the situation, as it'll give us access to their engineers and cross pollination. But it's still tiny compared to the need if we want to move the majority of our chip imports to domestic.
    - jvanderbot 5y ago
      I agree that I'm underestimating the startup cost. That's inevitable, I think. I can only counter by saying that I think we're also underestimating the benefits of being self-sustaining at the scale of TSMC, especially with the changing political landscape re: China.
- dan_quixote 5y ago
  This is a huge hurdle. There is actually some chip/silicon fab sites that never left (only scaled down considerably from their peak). A family member has worked at one for many years as an engineer/manager. When he tells me stories about the insane complexity of their process engineering it really hits home. Impurities at the nanometer scale can ruin 10 million dollar batches of silicon. Nasty chemicals are piped everywhere at the plant - the kind that explode if touching oxygen in the atmosphere or acids that dissolve bone before they noticeably affect your skin. Running such a production is difficult.
dave_sullivan 5y ago
Government can't make a website, let alone a chip fab. Talk to Intel and ask them why we've fallen behind. Do any VCs want to fund a direct Intel competitor? I doubt it. Making chips seems to be quite a bit more complicated than making and launching rockets, I don't think even Elon Musk could do it.
- bumby 5y ago
  >Government can't make a website, let alone a chip fab. Tbf, many (most?) government websites are built and maintained by private companies. Remember the ACA website debacle a few years back? The government was mad at the contractor for building a shoddy product. They claimed they would take action against them but I’m not sure anything happened. If the government should be held to task on anything it should be an inability to write good contracts or hold companies feet to the fire. I’ve heard civil servants are unwilling to to the latter because they don’t want to hurt businesses or are afraid of legal protests.
  - wincy 5y ago
    Anecdotal, I know, but the saddest interview I’ve ever done was a state government web developer. I was writing a js on the whiteboard, setting up a problem that started something like var a = 1; a = 2; Before I got any further they blurted out “that’s false! The second line is false” and this was someone who had been writing production code for the government for the last five years. I honestly just felt really bad for them, more than anything.
    - bumby 5y ago
      I wonder how much of this is due to being forced to select lowest bid contractors. I’ve seen some orgs rely on rely bad programmers because they were relatively cheap. Programmers who make changes on the fly in meetings to live production systems or say their test plan is to push it to production and just wait for customers to send in work tickets when they encounter a bug. Or blatantly lie about feasibility because they would prefer to work in an antiquated framework rather than learn a new one. The govt owns some responsibility for lack of technical oversight but I can’t help but think a lot of it is due to business contracting incentives.
dheera 5y ago
Cost isn't the issue, it's that we have incompetent buffoons as presidents these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc That's what a president sounds like.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  It's not just incompetent presidents, it's incompetent politicians at every level.
  - shakezula 5y ago
    That's not a bug, it's a feature. Politicians like MTG and Boebert are part of the system just to cheapen it. The crazier they are, the more off-tilt they are, the better the strategy works, the more it weakens the average Americans faith in the system. This strategy started with Trump, but it's started permeating every level of politics. The more wild they act, the more they can insist that the other side is being just as crazy.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      It started with Reagan. People just didn't realize that it was the boiling frog scenario. It won't end with MTG and Boebert.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  I agree that a president speaking to goals like that would be incredible. But he didn't have almost half the country supporting complete fantastical claims and a decent fraction trying to overturn elections. But look what he did against racism vs Johnson (not that much compared to J.), and they both still pushed the Vietnam war. Kennedy had to work around the edges on entrenched racism to maintain his Democratic majority with southern votes. At least the parties are more honest about their proclivities today.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Well, to be frank, there's precedent for why presidents won't be like Kennedy.
alfalfasprout 5y ago
We're doing it but obviously Taiwan isn't going to give up their smallest die processes (only older processes) since it keeps the US at least unofficially allied with them.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Part of the reason fabs are spread out is capitalism: if you manufacture the part in the country, you don't pay import taxes (e.g., Intel's Ireland fab debacle). Another part is lax environmental laws. Hillsboro Oregon is embroiled in a suit with Intel where Intel dumped 100x the fluorine into the air that they claimed when D1X was first pitched. Don't need to worry about that stuff in Asia (for now). Also, lead time. The x-ray litho machines take years to build and test. There are only two companies that make Intel's testers, and the lead time is years. So a "quick fix" isn't possible. Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this. If greedy CEOs and shareholders would just be humans for once and think about the future we wouldn't have this trainwreck. That ain't ever gonna happen.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this And the chips in question exist in the first place because...?
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Because Gordon Moore, Andy Grove and Robert Noyce wanted to improve integrated circuits to do amazing things with technology. Not rape the planet to become trillionaires. You realize there are other motivations in the world for doing things, other than just money, right? Perhaps you don't based on your reply.
blueblisters 5y ago
Building it is one thing. Making it operational without importing talent and running it profitably is another. Taiwan has some of the best fab engineers who work at US minimum wage salaries. Of course you can pull them away with higher pay like China is doing, but that means profitability will likely go for a toss.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  Do you have a source for the best Taiwan engineers working for minimum wage?
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Monthly salary for a TSMC fab engineer is about NTD$48,000/month [1]; I saw another source on the web that listed NTD$612K/year, which is consistent. The exchange rate is 1 USD ~= 28 NTD, so that about USD$1700/month or about USD$10.50/hour, which is pretty close to what McDonald's pays these days. Prices in many foreign countries are wonky though, because of different cultural & economic systems. You can have a good lunch out (the equivalent of fast-casual; most eateries are like that) in Taiwan for about USD$2-4, and because the expectation is that you live with your parents until you get married, housing expenses are minimal. There's also a big oversupply of 20-30something labor, because the older engineers who built the company (and get paid significantly more) aren't retiring and so those skilled jobs aren't opening up. That's behind both the low prices for food (many young Taiwanese open small restaurants) and for entry-level fab engineer jobs. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Monthly-Pay/TSMC-Process-Engineer-Taiwan-Monthly-Pay-EJI_IE4130.0,4_KO5,21_IL.22,28_IN240.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Monthly-Pay/TSMC-Process-Engineer-...
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      McDonald's is paying $15 where I am now, and begging for applications.
ed_balls 5y ago
in a few years there will be 10x number of factories. Covid just sped things up. It's too critical for army and other industries. Food and army cannot be outsourced.
freemint 5y ago
> Make america fab again. America does fab. However not newest nodes at high capacity. It just doesn't take building an identical factory and hiring away engineers. There is a complete supply chain of specialist companies which produce or fix the part the part that goes into a machine that that ... . Not mentioning that those construction costs are at economies of scale of building factories. Such a thing can't be build in the US as every state needs a piece of the pie. An US run copy will be more expensive even when you ignore wages. Extra spare capacity for emergencies is not sound either.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Yeah, people underestimate the complexity of chip production. It is not one fab that you need to build, it is an entire ecosystem around it. EU has lately been thinking about localizing chip production here, but they seem to be stuck in the same fallacy: we need a huge, gleaming fab on our soil. No, that is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.
vondur 5y ago
Heck, didn't Apple finance expansion of TSMC so Apple could ensure that they received priority when ordering chips?
eurokc98 5y ago
Reuters previously reported that TSMC plans to build as many as six factories at the Arizona site over a 10- to 15-year span. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-has-started-arizona-chip-factory-2021-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-ha...
mhh__ 5y ago
What are Intel doing then?

Kye 5y ago

Isn't TSMC working on expanding into the US?

datameta 5y ago
They are indeed, in Arizona. First they are going to have employees train on-site in Taiwan (will get housing for themselves and their families for duration).
- api 5y ago
  This makes it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes.
  - datameta 5y ago
    I thought similarly - this is true if we can have lossless knowledge transfer. I imagine we would have to put what is learned into practice before translating it into distributed knowledge for a US fab workforce.
    - zsmi 5y ago
      The US does produce ~10% of the global chip supply today, and much of the equipment used in the world's factories, and a very significant portion of the software needed, is made in the U.S.A. This is an economic issue. Not a knowledge gap.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > it easier for the US to spin up more, since we gain more trained workers who understand these processes. Given that they will return
cronix 5y ago
Yes, but from what I understand, it won't be the most advanced plant making the smallest feature sizes, so it's not like Apple is going to be utilizing that plant (maybe for ancillary chips, but not main processor). Understandably, TSMC keeps a tight reign on their top-tier production methods, which is their reason for being #1. It's also 3 years away from opening in AZ (2024). Then they have to fine tune the equipment and processes over x runs. New plants tend to have low yields until those processes are smoothed out and perfected. You don't just set up a plant and start churning out chips with 98% success rate at 5nm once the factory is built. It probably takes 5-6 years from construction start to churning out quality chips in numbers that are actually profitable.
- bradknowles 5y ago
  And the machines they’re going to be running take years to build. And they have to be built custom for each site. Not just for each site, but also each location within the site. Just moving a machine a couple of feet can cause massive delays as they have to effectively rebuild the machine for the new location. ASML has engineers who go out and spend months or a year or more, just taking various measurements of the location inside the building at the site where the machine will be operating. Then those engineers go back to Eindhoven to oversee the building of that machine from the ground up, and run through proving cycles. Then the whole thing has to be taken apart and shipped and then rebuilt at the site. And then there are months afterwards as the team does further work and testing before they can finally use that machine for production purposes. The Saturn V rocket was much easier to build and move. Nothing the rocket industry has can compare to the difficulty of building and moving these machines. Disclaimer: I worked as a consultant at ASML for several months, helping them to rebuild their Unix infrastructure systems that they used to support the engineers who did all that design and build work.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Seems like long term the human race is going to lose this ability if something serious is not done to reduce the complexity of building these things. This pandemic has shown that everything is super fragile and with Climate Change on the horizon I cannot believe they decided to build this damn thing in Arizona of all places. Maybe the collapse people were right and we should be working on CollapseOS [1]: https://collapseos.org/ https://collapseos.org/

phreeza 5y ago

I assume that is if you already have the know-how. Starting from (almost) scratch would require more upfront work, right?

jvanderbot 5y ago
The US isn't starting from scratch. And presumably the total cost includes all the R&D cycles. TSMC was started by a Texas Instruments employee. But, if we assume they were, just double the cost as a sign-on bonus for all the engineers and poach away. This is problem that can be solved with money, and not a lot of it in the grand scheme of things.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  You vastly underestimate the institutional knowledge necessary to operate state of the art fabs. Intel has been at the forefront of the field for decades, and even they are stumbling vs the current challenges. TSMC was founded over 3 decades ago. That it was founded by a TI employee says nothing about the situation today. The US is subsidizing a TSMC plant here, which should help the situation, as it'll give us access to their engineers and cross pollination. But it's still tiny compared to the need if we want to move the majority of our chip imports to domestic.
  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    I agree that I'm underestimating the startup cost. That's inevitable, I think. I can only counter by saying that I think we're also underestimating the benefits of being self-sustaining at the scale of TSMC, especially with the changing political landscape re: China.
dan_quixote 5y ago
This is a huge hurdle. There is actually some chip/silicon fab sites that never left (only scaled down considerably from their peak). A family member has worked at one for many years as an engineer/manager. When he tells me stories about the insane complexity of their process engineering it really hits home. Impurities at the nanometer scale can ruin 10 million dollar batches of silicon. Nasty chemicals are piped everywhere at the plant - the kind that explode if touching oxygen in the atmosphere or acids that dissolve bone before they noticeably affect your skin. Running such a production is difficult.

dave_sullivan 5y ago

Government can't make a website, let alone a chip fab. Talk to Intel and ask them why we've fallen behind. Do any VCs want to fund a direct Intel competitor? I doubt it. Making chips seems to be quite a bit more complicated than making and launching rockets, I don't think even Elon Musk could do it.

bumby 5y ago
>Government can't make a website, let alone a chip fab. Tbf, many (most?) government websites are built and maintained by private companies. Remember the ACA website debacle a few years back? The government was mad at the contractor for building a shoddy product. They claimed they would take action against them but I’m not sure anything happened. If the government should be held to task on anything it should be an inability to write good contracts or hold companies feet to the fire. I’ve heard civil servants are unwilling to to the latter because they don’t want to hurt businesses or are afraid of legal protests.
- wincy 5y ago
  Anecdotal, I know, but the saddest interview I’ve ever done was a state government web developer. I was writing a js on the whiteboard, setting up a problem that started something like var a = 1; a = 2; Before I got any further they blurted out “that’s false! The second line is false” and this was someone who had been writing production code for the government for the last five years. I honestly just felt really bad for them, more than anything.
  - bumby 5y ago
    I wonder how much of this is due to being forced to select lowest bid contractors. I’ve seen some orgs rely on rely bad programmers because they were relatively cheap. Programmers who make changes on the fly in meetings to live production systems or say their test plan is to push it to production and just wait for customers to send in work tickets when they encounter a bug. Or blatantly lie about feasibility because they would prefer to work in an antiquated framework rather than learn a new one. The govt owns some responsibility for lack of technical oversight but I can’t help but think a lot of it is due to business contracting incentives.

dheera 5y ago

Cost isn't the issue, it's that we have incompetent buffoons as presidents these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc That's what a president sounds like.

theandrewbailey 5y ago
It's not just incompetent presidents, it's incompetent politicians at every level.
- shakezula 5y ago
  That's not a bug, it's a feature. Politicians like MTG and Boebert are part of the system just to cheapen it. The crazier they are, the more off-tilt they are, the better the strategy works, the more it weakens the average Americans faith in the system. This strategy started with Trump, but it's started permeating every level of politics. The more wild they act, the more they can insist that the other side is being just as crazy.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    It started with Reagan. People just didn't realize that it was the boiling frog scenario. It won't end with MTG and Boebert.
NotSammyHagar 5y ago
I agree that a president speaking to goals like that would be incredible. But he didn't have almost half the country supporting complete fantastical claims and a decent fraction trying to overturn elections. But look what he did against racism vs Johnson (not that much compared to J.), and they both still pushed the Vietnam war. Kennedy had to work around the edges on entrenched racism to maintain his Democratic majority with southern votes. At least the parties are more honest about their proclivities today.
rootsudo 5y ago
Well, to be frank, there's precedent for why presidents won't be like Kennedy.

alfalfasprout 5y ago

We're doing it but obviously Taiwan isn't going to give up their smallest die processes (only older processes) since it keeps the US at least unofficially allied with them.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Part of the reason fabs are spread out is capitalism: if you manufacture the part in the country, you don't pay import taxes (e.g., Intel's Ireland fab debacle). Another part is lax environmental laws. Hillsboro Oregon is embroiled in a suit with Intel where Intel dumped 100x the fluorine into the air that they claimed when D1X was first pitched. Don't need to worry about that stuff in Asia (for now). Also, lead time. The x-ray litho machines take years to build and test. There are only two companies that make Intel's testers, and the lead time is years. So a "quick fix" isn't possible. Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this. If greedy CEOs and shareholders would just be humans for once and think about the future we wouldn't have this trainwreck. That ain't ever gonna happen.

CamperBob2 5y ago
Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this And the chips in question exist in the first place because...?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Because Gordon Moore, Andy Grove and Robert Noyce wanted to improve integrated circuits to do amazing things with technology. Not rape the planet to become trillionaires. You realize there are other motivations in the world for doing things, other than just money, right? Perhaps you don't based on your reply.

blueblisters 5y ago

Building it is one thing. Making it operational without importing talent and running it profitably is another. Taiwan has some of the best fab engineers who work at US minimum wage salaries. Of course you can pull them away with higher pay like China is doing, but that means profitability will likely go for a toss.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
twobitshifter 5y ago
Do you have a source for the best Taiwan engineers working for minimum wage?
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Monthly salary for a TSMC fab engineer is about NTD$48,000/month [1]; I saw another source on the web that listed NTD$612K/year, which is consistent. The exchange rate is 1 USD ~= 28 NTD, so that about USD$1700/month or about USD$10.50/hour, which is pretty close to what McDonald's pays these days. Prices in many foreign countries are wonky though, because of different cultural & economic systems. You can have a good lunch out (the equivalent of fast-casual; most eateries are like that) in Taiwan for about USD$2-4, and because the expectation is that you live with your parents until you get married, housing expenses are minimal. There's also a big oversupply of 20-30something labor, because the older engineers who built the company (and get paid significantly more) aren't retiring and so those skilled jobs aren't opening up. That's behind both the low prices for food (many young Taiwanese open small restaurants) and for entry-level fab engineer jobs. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Monthly-Pay/TSMC-Process-Engineer-Taiwan-Monthly-Pay-EJI_IE4130.0,4_KO5,21_IL.22,28_IN240.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Monthly-Pay/TSMC-Process-Engineer-...
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    McDonald's is paying $15 where I am now, and begging for applications.

ed_balls 5y ago

in a few years there will be 10x number of factories. Covid just sped things up. It's too critical for army and other industries. Food and army cannot be outsourced.

freemint 5y ago

> Make america fab again. America does fab. However not newest nodes at high capacity. It just doesn't take building an identical factory and hiring away engineers. There is a complete supply chain of specialist companies which produce or fix the part the part that goes into a machine that that ... . Not mentioning that those construction costs are at economies of scale of building factories. Such a thing can't be build in the US as every state needs a piece of the pie. An US run copy will be more expensive even when you ignore wages. Extra spare capacity for emergencies is not sound either.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Yeah, people underestimate the complexity of chip production. It is not one fab that you need to build, it is an entire ecosystem around it. EU has lately been thinking about localizing chip production here, but they seem to be stuck in the same fallacy: we need a huge, gleaming fab on our soil. No, that is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.

vondur 5y ago

Heck, didn't Apple finance expansion of TSMC so Apple could ensure that they received priority when ordering chips?

eurokc98 5y ago

Reuters previously reported that TSMC plans to build as many as six factories at the Arizona site over a 10- to 15-year span. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-has-started-arizona-chip-factory-2021-06-01/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-ha...

mhh__ 5y ago

What are Intel doing then?