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The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost – It Isn't Transistory
- worldvoyageur 5y agoTLDR: - gate cost stopped dropping a decade ago due to the significantly increased costs of manufacturing to more and more complex 3D structures - old chips used to be cheaper. As the new fabs took the margins, the fully depreciated 'hand me down' fabs ran as long as the market would take their chips, until they stopped working. Prices were low. Now the 'hand me down' fabs are operating at 100% and the market still wants more. The old chips have higher yield, cost and reliability than the new ones. For automotive and IoT, that's the requirement. Meeting demand for the older chips requires significant investment in the 'hand me downs'. Prices have to go up. - TMSC has a stranglehold on all leading edge manufacturing. They are a price setter, not a price taker. They are clear that they will use this power, and are doing so. TMSC has a 51% gross margin (!) and spends 52% of revenue on CAPEX (!!) - context: semiconductors are 0.5% of global GDP
- klyrs 5y agoWeird metaphor: while semiconductors are only 0.5% of ggdp, they have become a bottleneck for many other products. Are semiconductors behaving as some sort of... transistor for the flow of money in the economy? I'll show myself out.
- rektide 5y ago- moore's law scaling continues via advanced packaging & 3d stacking, which means more wafers are needed per computer "chip" and more intense processes to assemble the chips.
- mrkramer 5y agoYea more sophisticated technology and expensive machines[0] are needed to keep Moore's law going. [0] https://archive.md/20210831070126/https://www.wired.com/story/asml-extreme-ultraviolet-lithography-chips-moores-law/ https://archive.md/20210831070126/https://www.wired.com/stor...