17 ms·

The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained

164 points by 55873445216111 5y ago

bobsmooth 5y ago
With how critical semiconductors are, I'm really surprised having nationally owned fabs, even a few nodes behind, isn't a priority for big governments.
- roughly 5y ago
  For China it is. The US seems to have been under the impression for the last couple decades that geopolitics don’t exist anymore. On that note, if TSMC’s technical supremacy isn’t a core part of Taiwan’s national security strategy I’d be shocked - whatever else the US may think about Taiwan & China, the fact that our entire electronic infrastructure relies on TSMC in some form or fashion ensures we have a deep and serious ongoing commitment to their independence from our chief geopolitical rival.
- rwmj 5y ago
  As the other reply said, it's a strategic goal for China. The EU has also recently woken up to this and launched: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-processor-initiative-consortium-develop-europes-microprocessors-future-supercomputers https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-proce...
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    The EU has plenty of older-node fabs (e.g. ST). I live next to one...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Seems cheaper to station troops in South Korea and even profitable to arm Taiwan.
tynpeddler 5y ago
Interesting information but I'm not sure about the accuracy of their chart depicting the leading edge node manufacturers. Until the last few years, Intel was ahead of TSMC and Samsung (Intel's 14nm process was equivalent to TSMC's 10-7nm from my understanding). So if Intel is excluded from the current leading edge manufacturers, shouldn't others be removed from the graph for the early 2010's?
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Yeah this is one thing I don't get about the Intel is doomed crowd. Semiconductor manufacturing lead has changed hands a bunch of times in the past, with Intel being in the lead for probably most of the past 2-3 decades. TSMC has had notable problems with nodes and has been about as far behind Intel as Intel is behind now for periods. Why wasn't TSMC doomed then? And why couldn't Intel turn around now like TSMC did? Intel looks nothing like other vertically integrated CPU businesses that divested from manufacturing in the past, it's still making a lot of money and gross margins are still healthy (and still higher than AMD and TSMC at the moment!) although clearly taken a hit from the mid/low 60s where they typically sat down to mid/low 50s in the past 3 years. Manufacturing silicon is still a profitable business for them. Intel also has by some important metrics, the best performing CPUs available despite competitors being on TSMC and Samsung. I don't argue the others aren't better in other equally valid metrics. It was actually much more difficult to make that same statement about competitors back when Intel had a clear silicon tech advantage. So definitely Intel is a leading edge node manufacturer if others were in the past.
  - nwiswell 5y ago
    One of the things to understand about Intel's case is that they were never a foundry. Instead, their process leadership was wielded as a weapon to ensure that their devices maintained performance leadership. In that sense it was almost irrelevant to the rest of the market what node Intel had achieved, since nobody else had access to it. Similarly, because it was core to their business model, the foundry business itself was not very cost sensitive; as long as the process tech was exclusive and enabled them to make the world's best processors, they could extract princely sums for the final products. This has fundamentally changed in a way that will not revert. First, we have reached the "end of Moore's Law": process improvements will still continue, but no longer at a pace such that process leadership guarantees performance leadership. Second, without this guarantee of performance leadership, Intel's entire manufacturing operations are having a crisis of purpose. Their manufacturing operations are much less cost-effective than TSMC because that efficiency was never really a major driving force in the past (and to some extent was at odds with the goal of innovation and leadership). Without the serious prospect of regaining a performance advantage, Intel will probably not be investing the kind of money needed to displace TSMC in process leadership. Instead the focus is going to be on making sure their existing fabs are not stranded assets and figuring out how to effectively compete on price/performance without a persistent process advantage.
cxr 5y ago
You can tell that it originates from within the semiconductor industry by the generally chaotic presentation (e.g. the "stuff everything in and add arrows" layout of the slides and picking a bunch of arbitrary, jarring, and unnecessary colors)—on top of the already-dubious decision to use PowerPoint to explain these ideas in the first place (out of a reflex—read: crutch).
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  I don’t suppose you noticed who the author was either, or did you? ;) Brilliant all-around guy. Wrote the book on some things back in the day. Sometimes reading a difficult presentation is the price to pay for knowledge.
  - cxr 5y ago
    This is exactly the kind of just-so, cargo cult explanation backed by appeal to authority with a tinge of strawman-y, macho bullshit[1] that I would expect when it comes to the semiconductor industry. Having to "read" something "difficult" is not the issue. Don't misunderstand me. If we grade on a curve by taking into consideration the typical fare that comes out of this sector, these slides are definitely A+ quality. And it's telling that fabless is placed below the foundries. Situated between actual fabs and their equipment vendors? And beside IDMs? Total category error, but correcting this, of course, would mean that foundries don't get to be the top piece. [1] "Pain is gain" is a phrase that I've used in the past (and will continue to use) to describe the resistance to improvement and as an explanation of the day-to-day suffocation of working at a chipmaker.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  It seems like the SC industry is a bunch of Brent from the Phoenix Project where miracles happen when they enter a trance and find the right bit to flip at the right place and that their PowerPoint presentations is a snapshot of the neural network inside their brain.
- initplus 5y ago
  Great example of this presentation style is in an old version of the Extreme ultraviolet lithography wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography&oldid=1025725307 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extreme_ultraviol... One of the most chaotic wikipedia pages I've seen. Sadly today it's much cleaner.
Traster 5y ago
Does this seem a little outdated to anyone else? Like, ImgTec haven't really existed as a top tier player for almost a decade, and AFAIK Apple doesn't license Ip cores from ARM, but the ISA itself. Also, I feel like this diagram is just weird. The pyramid makes no sense to me, I always think of it in terms of physical and logical, you have the physical - the Materials, WFE, Fabs, and logical - IP Cores, and Fabless Semis, with the EDA tools somewhat providing the integration. The logical organisation of the pyramid makes no sense to me.
- klelatti 5y ago
  No disagreeing with your point - the article does seem outdated - but Apple still does license some Arm core designs I think - eg in the U series SoCs.
- capableweb 5y ago
  It can't be too outdated if the stated date is to be trusted ("02-06-2022") as the industry doesn't move that rapidly.
- 55873445216111 5y ago
  It is a little bit dated. But the core concepts are all still valid. I posted it because - as someone working in the industry - I find it is somewhat rare to find a public article that attempts to explain the "big picture" landscape of the semiconductor ecosystem.
- asxd 5y ago
  I hope it's not too outdated, but if it is I'd be really interested in a newer article that's written like this. I really appreciated the simple breakdown of the supply chain. As a total outsider, I've always really wanted to understand why TSMC and ASML (for instance) seemed to be so important politically.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  Some of it is a tiny bit outdated or paints a partial picture (STM does 22nm too for instance, although I'm not sure if it did in 2012). But overall I think it's pretty current and accurate. One thing is doesn't do is point out that "x nm" doesn't have anything to do with gate length or physical dimensions anymore. It's commercial speech for transistor density (vertical FinFET are denser than planar transistor, gate length is roughly the same).
pjdesno 5y ago
Not mentioned in the article: almost all semiconductors used outside of computers and cell phones are produced on old processes - 40nm and up. Fabs for these are cheap - maybe in the $1 billion range - but no one builds them because of low profit margins. Instead these mostly get built in fabs that used to be cutting-edge, long ago. Maybe the automakers could pay a little bit more for these chips, and it would become profitable to build fabs for them again. But everyone knows that the moment people forget the semiconductor shortage, automakers will try to drive the profit on those chips back to zero again, and whoever built one of those fabs will be left holding the bag. Basically the automakers and/or Wall Street would rather forgo the sale of an entire car than pay a buck or two in profit to someone else for the chips that go into that car. The best term I've heard for something like this is "end-stage capitalism".
- 55873445216111 5y ago
  There is another problem: all of the equipment makers have stopped producing the "old" tools that are used for >40nm process 8 inch wafers. People in these "old" fabs seriously go on eBay to buy used parts to replace broken parts inside tools in their fab because the original tool maker stopped making spare parts years ago.
vmsp 5y ago
Can anyone recommend a good manual on the semiconductor industry? Sort of like this but long form.
- 55873445216111 5y ago
  The very long form is an EE degree with an emphasis in VLSI. In seriousness, there just isn't as much information about semiconductors publicly available like there is in software. If you can make your question a little more specific I will try to help.
  - vmsp 5y ago
    You're absolutely right, I just sort of assumed it would be easily available. Nothing specific, I wanted an overview of the whole thing. I guess the question I'm asking myself is "What would I need to know if I wanted to setup a fab from the ground up?" Which materials are used and where they come from, the different types of companies that would need to be involved and why (e.g. ASML) and so on. But honestly, I don't really know much. So an intro to semiconductor manufacturing that could be read by a plain old software engineer would also be great.
    - 55873445216111 5y ago
      There is a video called "Silicon Run" (1996) which I feel gives a good overview of semiconductor manufacturing. This video is now quite old, but the major principles remain the same. Seems to be available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3XTWXRj24GM https://youtu.be/3XTWXRj24GM
    - tanseydavid 5y ago
      A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg
kens 5y ago
I happened to notice that the die in the second diagram is an East German clone of the Zilog Z80 (1976). An interesting choice...
sam_goody 5y ago
Can someone please explain RISC to me? I gather that it is a direct competitor to ARM. By extension it competes with Intel and AMD [and NVidia?] - as phones swallow the world, Both Apple and MS have ARM desktop OS's, and the big boys like Adobe are rewriting for ARM. But I don't see how RISC has any hope, as ARM is already everywhere, and so much software has been written, and is being converted to being ARM compatible. In fact, I don't see how x64 has any real future! What am I missing with both AMD and RISC? How does RISC get such good press? And - OT - how anyone choose a name which projects the concept of being risky ;)
- capableweb 5y ago
  I'm no expert, but in lieu of not having any sibling comments yet, let me offer my amateur view: The name RISC-V (which I'm supposing you're referring to) comes from "reduced instruction set computer (RISC)" (from around 1980s), with a added "five". It's a instruction set architecture (ISA) which is basically a abstract specification for how a CPUs instructions could be. RISC-V is not a company, but a "open standard" for this ISA. While ARM for example both maintains a ISA, runs a company and builds chips, RISC-V is maintained by a foundation which many companies are a part of. RISC-V is exciting because it's one of the few open standard ISA with a lot of public references and available material for curious hackers, compared to what we've seen before. So far, the performance and the power consumption (as far as I know) hasn't been as optimized as other architectures, so it's still early to tell if it'll have some larger impact on the industry at large or not.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Intel and AMD are focused on the x86(-64) ISA, with a strong presence in the desktop and server space [1]. ARM is everywhere mobile, they really cornered the "low-power" (ie energy) space way ahead of Intel and AMD. They provide a great ecosystem of IPs and tools around them. Think of them as the "battery's included" DIY provider for building chips. But both of the above generally target general-purpose CPUs [2], the one you usually think as being the core of your computer. But there are others! DSPs have dedicated instructions for saturated math (no overflow/rollover) and multiply-accumulate, GPUs are DSPs on steroids, and there's otherwise an entire spectrum of complexity you can have from your 8-bit integer microcontroller that doesn't even have a divide instruction, all the way up to the massively-parallel floating-point processors. Problem is, that spectrum was divided between many different proprietary ISAs, each with their various levels of tool sophistication and support. RISC-V is based on the idea that we can do a better job unifying the ISAs across this spectrum of processor complexity. It's an extensible ISA that starts with basic integer-only operations and direct addressing, and can extend with instructions for more sophisticated operations such as adding 32-bit floating operations, 64-bit float, supervisor mode, hypervisor mode, SIMD... All of which can share a common ecosystem of compilers, formal verification, debuggers... But the real popularity of RISC-V is that you can use its ISA, and design a chip around it, freely without having to pay a (expensive!) license to ARM. This does present an existential threat to ARM, although they have a strong head-start in offering a ready-made ecosystem of tools. Do you want to spend $10M in engineering manpower and experimental silicon tape-out designing your new chip? Or just pay $2M to ARM to license their known-good CPU? It takes a lot of effort, expertise (and iteration!) to design a CPU core that's as performant and feature-full as what ARM spent years (decades!) perfecting. Do companies choose RISC-V because it allows them to re-use their tools on novel chip designs, or because it's just cheaper and, new as it is, sufficient for their purposes? It's exciting to watch the development. (Also I can't help but notice that many of the RISC-V chip announcements are coming from China) [1] Fun fact: in the 80s and 90s, x86 was the "cheap, consumer" chip that was looked down upon by the Workstation class RISC-type chips like the Sun Sparc, or DEC Alpha (and much of Apple's chip design team sprang from a core of ex-DEC designers!) But Linux came along, Intel kept improving their chips, and took over the workstation/big-iron space from the incumbents [2] cue the corrections about ARM's (and Intel's!) GPU design, co-processor architecture...
not2b 5y ago
This is nicely done, despite some nitpicks in the comments; it should be interpreted as giving a qualitative picture. The recent development not mentioned is that China is launching a massive effort to bootstrap its own EDA industry, and they've poached a number of stars from the big three, with very generous signing bonuses. This is to get around sanctions, which are starting to bite.
dehrmann 5y ago
Fun seeing which names I recognize from buildings around the valley. For some, I had no idea what they even do.
kagaw 5y ago
Im surprised Fairchild semiconductor is not in the pyramid
- 55873445216111 5y ago
  Fairchild was acquired by Onsemi
janekm 5y ago
Missing from this article, and rather important in the current supply chain issues situation, is packaging (testing, dicing, packaging into the chip package e.g. BGA, QFN, SOIC etc). Packaging is generally done at separate factories from the fabs. A vast proportion of packaging factories are in China, something to keep in mind in the context of "trade wars": https://www.marketresearchreports.com/blog/2019/04/24/top-10-osat-companies-world https://www.marketresearchreports.com/blog/2019/04/24/top-10...
sleepingadmin 5y ago
Infographic is outdated and borderline propaganda. The war with China has started. SMIC is shut to outsiders. Hong Kong fell to China. Taiwan is expected to fall next. So what's going down? Everyone getting into the chip game because they must. Europe’s Chip Act, Infineon is building chips in Germany Chips for USA Act hasn't quite passed yet. Biden issued an executive order that is unchallenged by anyone. US sanctioned SMIC. Samsung will be building a fab in Taylor Texas near to Austin. Intel will be building 2 fabs in Arizona(RISCV!) Samsung obviously also building much more in Korea. TSMC is building a fab in Japan with Sony. Everyone hoping the fabs in taiwan don't fall. Really good chance those fabs will be destroyed if China moves on them. India is blowing up big time with fabs. The number of secret fabs is surprising as well. Tons of them popping up in the midwest, primarily sourcing for the automotive industry. Makes sense to keep them quiet because it seems there's lots of fabs catching fire or being hacked and shutdown. Oh the nature of war...
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Infographic is outdated and borderline propaganda. > Taiwan is expected to fall next. You'll do everyone a favor by not exaggerating that much. You make it seem like there is consensus around the expectation that Taiwan will "fall next" while there is no such thing. You're also making claims about fabs being set on fire or being hacked by foreign entities without any sort of evidence.
  - sleepingadmin 5y ago
    >You'll do everyone a favor by not exaggerating that much What exaggeration? https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/taiwan-says-it-is-preparing-for-war-but-are-taiwanese-mentally-ready/ https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/taiwan-says-it-is-preparing-... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-warns-of-next-step-if-china-invaded-taiwan-20211126-p59ckg.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-warns-of-next... https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/10/14/2003766069 https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/10... https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/the-three-reasons-taiwan-keeps-talking-up-the-threat-of-war-with-china-20220131-p59skk.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/the-three-reasons-taiwan-k... https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/us-and-australia-signed-a-nuclear-arms-deal-simple-as-that/ https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/us-and-australia-signed-a-nucl... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/is-australia-ready-for-war-the-army-s-battle-for-relevance-20211229-p59knl.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/is-australia-ready-f... https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2022/01/24/china-sends-39-warplanes-toward-taiwan-largest-in-new-year/ https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2022/01/24/china-s... https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3164139/taiwan-war-risk-highest-past-25-years-us-tensions-rise https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3164139/ta... https://warblog.org/news/us-approves-support-deal-with-taiwan-for-patriot-missiles/ https://warblog.org/news/us-approves-support-deal-with-taiwa... https://seapowermagazine.org/rep-gallagher-navy-must-be-ready-to-counter-china-if-taiwan-is-attacked/ https://seapowermagazine.org/rep-gallagher-navy-must-be-read... If you believe this to be exaggeration... this is happening right now. Out of curiousity, which country are you in? How do you not know about this? 10 links provided and can be easily added to. >You make it seem like there is consensus around the expectation that Taiwan will "fall next" while there is no such thing. Is your claim that Taiwan won't be next and it's someone else who is next? Taiwan is second? Or is your do you believe all these governments are spreading propaganda? >You're also making claims about fabs being set on fire or being hacked by foreign entities without any sort of evidence. I suspect you're not asking for me to prove APT groups are chinese? https://web.archive.org/web/20211127025205/https://www.akm.com/us/en/about-us/news/information/20210122-information/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211127025205/https://www.akm.c... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-chips-idUSKBN2BN27E https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-chips-idUSKBN2BN27E Multiple fires hitting non-chinese chip fabs? Just a coincidence... nothing to do with the ongoing war...

With how critical semiconductors are, I'm really surprised having nationally owned fabs, even a few nodes behind, isn't a priority for big governments.

roughly 5y ago
For China it is. The US seems to have been under the impression for the last couple decades that geopolitics don’t exist anymore. On that note, if TSMC’s technical supremacy isn’t a core part of Taiwan’s national security strategy I’d be shocked - whatever else the US may think about Taiwan & China, the fact that our entire electronic infrastructure relies on TSMC in some form or fashion ensures we have a deep and serious ongoing commitment to their independence from our chief geopolitical rival.
rwmj 5y ago
As the other reply said, it's a strategic goal for China. The EU has also recently woken up to this and launched: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-processor-initiative-consortium-develop-europes-microprocessors-future-supercomputers https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-proce...
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  The EU has plenty of older-node fabs (e.g. ST). I live next to one...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dehrmann 5y ago
Seems cheaper to station troops in South Korea and even profitable to arm Taiwan.

tynpeddler 5y ago

Interesting information but I'm not sure about the accuracy of their chart depicting the leading edge node manufacturers. Until the last few years, Intel was ahead of TSMC and Samsung (Intel's 14nm process was equivalent to TSMC's 10-7nm from my understanding). So if Intel is excluded from the current leading edge manufacturers, shouldn't others be removed from the graph for the early 2010's?

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Yeah this is one thing I don't get about the Intel is doomed crowd. Semiconductor manufacturing lead has changed hands a bunch of times in the past, with Intel being in the lead for probably most of the past 2-3 decades. TSMC has had notable problems with nodes and has been about as far behind Intel as Intel is behind now for periods. Why wasn't TSMC doomed then? And why couldn't Intel turn around now like TSMC did? Intel looks nothing like other vertically integrated CPU businesses that divested from manufacturing in the past, it's still making a lot of money and gross margins are still healthy (and still higher than AMD and TSMC at the moment!) although clearly taken a hit from the mid/low 60s where they typically sat down to mid/low 50s in the past 3 years. Manufacturing silicon is still a profitable business for them. Intel also has by some important metrics, the best performing CPUs available despite competitors being on TSMC and Samsung. I don't argue the others aren't better in other equally valid metrics. It was actually much more difficult to make that same statement about competitors back when Intel had a clear silicon tech advantage. So definitely Intel is a leading edge node manufacturer if others were in the past.
- nwiswell 5y ago
  One of the things to understand about Intel's case is that they were never a foundry. Instead, their process leadership was wielded as a weapon to ensure that their devices maintained performance leadership. In that sense it was almost irrelevant to the rest of the market what node Intel had achieved, since nobody else had access to it. Similarly, because it was core to their business model, the foundry business itself was not very cost sensitive; as long as the process tech was exclusive and enabled them to make the world's best processors, they could extract princely sums for the final products. This has fundamentally changed in a way that will not revert. First, we have reached the "end of Moore's Law": process improvements will still continue, but no longer at a pace such that process leadership guarantees performance leadership. Second, without this guarantee of performance leadership, Intel's entire manufacturing operations are having a crisis of purpose. Their manufacturing operations are much less cost-effective than TSMC because that efficiency was never really a major driving force in the past (and to some extent was at odds with the goal of innovation and leadership). Without the serious prospect of regaining a performance advantage, Intel will probably not be investing the kind of money needed to displace TSMC in process leadership. Instead the focus is going to be on making sure their existing fabs are not stranded assets and figuring out how to effectively compete on price/performance without a persistent process advantage.

cxr 5y ago

You can tell that it originates from within the semiconductor industry by the generally chaotic presentation (e.g. the "stuff everything in and add arrows" layout of the slides and picking a bunch of arbitrary, jarring, and unnecessary colors)—on top of the already-dubious decision to use PowerPoint to explain these ideas in the first place (out of a reflex—read: crutch).

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
I don’t suppose you noticed who the author was either, or did you? ;) Brilliant all-around guy. Wrote the book on some things back in the day. Sometimes reading a difficult presentation is the price to pay for knowledge.
- cxr 5y ago
  This is exactly the kind of just-so, cargo cult explanation backed by appeal to authority with a tinge of strawman-y, macho bullshit[1] that I would expect when it comes to the semiconductor industry. Having to "read" something "difficult" is not the issue. Don't misunderstand me. If we grade on a curve by taking into consideration the typical fare that comes out of this sector, these slides are definitely A+ quality. And it's telling that fabless is placed below the foundries. Situated between actual fabs and their equipment vendors? And beside IDMs? Total category error, but correcting this, of course, would mean that foundries don't get to be the top piece. [1] "Pain is gain" is a phrase that I've used in the past (and will continue to use) to describe the resistance to improvement and as an explanation of the day-to-day suffocation of working at a chipmaker.
TeeMassive 5y ago
It seems like the SC industry is a bunch of Brent from the Phoenix Project where miracles happen when they enter a trance and find the right bit to flip at the right place and that their PowerPoint presentations is a snapshot of the neural network inside their brain.
initplus 5y ago
Great example of this presentation style is in an old version of the Extreme ultraviolet lithography wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography&oldid=1025725307 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extreme_ultraviol... One of the most chaotic wikipedia pages I've seen. Sadly today it's much cleaner.

Traster 5y ago

Does this seem a little outdated to anyone else? Like, ImgTec haven't really existed as a top tier player for almost a decade, and AFAIK Apple doesn't license Ip cores from ARM, but the ISA itself. Also, I feel like this diagram is just weird. The pyramid makes no sense to me, I always think of it in terms of physical and logical, you have the physical - the Materials, WFE, Fabs, and logical - IP Cores, and Fabless Semis, with the EDA tools somewhat providing the integration. The logical organisation of the pyramid makes no sense to me.

klelatti 5y ago
No disagreeing with your point - the article does seem outdated - but Apple still does license some Arm core designs I think - eg in the U series SoCs.
capableweb 5y ago
It can't be too outdated if the stated date is to be trusted ("02-06-2022") as the industry doesn't move that rapidly.
55873445216111 5y ago
It is a little bit dated. But the core concepts are all still valid. I posted it because - as someone working in the industry - I find it is somewhat rare to find a public article that attempts to explain the "big picture" landscape of the semiconductor ecosystem.
asxd 5y ago
I hope it's not too outdated, but if it is I'd be really interested in a newer article that's written like this. I really appreciated the simple breakdown of the supply chain. As a total outsider, I've always really wanted to understand why TSMC and ASML (for instance) seemed to be so important politically.
MayeulC 5y ago
Some of it is a tiny bit outdated or paints a partial picture (STM does 22nm too for instance, although I'm not sure if it did in 2012). But overall I think it's pretty current and accurate. One thing is doesn't do is point out that "x nm" doesn't have anything to do with gate length or physical dimensions anymore. It's commercial speech for transistor density (vertical FinFET are denser than planar transistor, gate length is roughly the same).

pjdesno 5y ago

Not mentioned in the article: almost all semiconductors used outside of computers and cell phones are produced on old processes - 40nm and up. Fabs for these are cheap - maybe in the $1 billion range - but no one builds them because of low profit margins. Instead these mostly get built in fabs that used to be cutting-edge, long ago. Maybe the automakers could pay a little bit more for these chips, and it would become profitable to build fabs for them again. But everyone knows that the moment people forget the semiconductor shortage, automakers will try to drive the profit on those chips back to zero again, and whoever built one of those fabs will be left holding the bag. Basically the automakers and/or Wall Street would rather forgo the sale of an entire car than pay a buck or two in profit to someone else for the chips that go into that car. The best term I've heard for something like this is "end-stage capitalism".

55873445216111 5y ago
There is another problem: all of the equipment makers have stopped producing the "old" tools that are used for >40nm process 8 inch wafers. People in these "old" fabs seriously go on eBay to buy used parts to replace broken parts inside tools in their fab because the original tool maker stopped making spare parts years ago.

vmsp 5y ago

Can anyone recommend a good manual on the semiconductor industry? Sort of like this but long form.

55873445216111 5y ago
The very long form is an EE degree with an emphasis in VLSI. In seriousness, there just isn't as much information about semiconductors publicly available like there is in software. If you can make your question a little more specific I will try to help.
- vmsp 5y ago
  You're absolutely right, I just sort of assumed it would be easily available. Nothing specific, I wanted an overview of the whole thing. I guess the question I'm asking myself is "What would I need to know if I wanted to setup a fab from the ground up?" Which materials are used and where they come from, the different types of companies that would need to be involved and why (e.g. ASML) and so on. But honestly, I don't really know much. So an intro to semiconductor manufacturing that could be read by a plain old software engineer would also be great.
  - 55873445216111 5y ago
    There is a video called "Silicon Run" (1996) which I feel gives a good overview of semiconductor manufacturing. This video is now quite old, but the major principles remain the same. Seems to be available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3XTWXRj24GM https://youtu.be/3XTWXRj24GM
  - tanseydavid 5y ago
    A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg

kens 5y ago

I happened to notice that the die in the second diagram is an East German clone of the Zilog Z80 (1976). An interesting choice...

sam_goody 5y ago

Can someone please explain RISC to me? I gather that it is a direct competitor to ARM. By extension it competes with Intel and AMD [and NVidia?] - as phones swallow the world, Both Apple and MS have ARM desktop OS's, and the big boys like Adobe are rewriting for ARM. But I don't see how RISC has any hope, as ARM is already everywhere, and so much software has been written, and is being converted to being ARM compatible. In fact, I don't see how x64 has any real future! What am I missing with both AMD and RISC? How does RISC get such good press? And - OT - how anyone choose a name which projects the concept of being risky ;)

capableweb 5y ago
I'm no expert, but in lieu of not having any sibling comments yet, let me offer my amateur view: The name RISC-V (which I'm supposing you're referring to) comes from "reduced instruction set computer (RISC)" (from around 1980s), with a added "five". It's a instruction set architecture (ISA) which is basically a abstract specification for how a CPUs instructions could be. RISC-V is not a company, but a "open standard" for this ISA. While ARM for example both maintains a ISA, runs a company and builds chips, RISC-V is maintained by a foundation which many companies are a part of. RISC-V is exciting because it's one of the few open standard ISA with a lot of public references and available material for curious hackers, compared to what we've seen before. So far, the performance and the power consumption (as far as I know) hasn't been as optimized as other architectures, so it's still early to tell if it'll have some larger impact on the industry at large or not.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
Intel and AMD are focused on the x86(-64) ISA, with a strong presence in the desktop and server space [1]. ARM is everywhere mobile, they really cornered the "low-power" (ie energy) space way ahead of Intel and AMD. They provide a great ecosystem of IPs and tools around them. Think of them as the "battery's included" DIY provider for building chips. But both of the above generally target general-purpose CPUs [2], the one you usually think as being the core of your computer. But there are others! DSPs have dedicated instructions for saturated math (no overflow/rollover) and multiply-accumulate, GPUs are DSPs on steroids, and there's otherwise an entire spectrum of complexity you can have from your 8-bit integer microcontroller that doesn't even have a divide instruction, all the way up to the massively-parallel floating-point processors. Problem is, that spectrum was divided between many different proprietary ISAs, each with their various levels of tool sophistication and support. RISC-V is based on the idea that we can do a better job unifying the ISAs across this spectrum of processor complexity. It's an extensible ISA that starts with basic integer-only operations and direct addressing, and can extend with instructions for more sophisticated operations such as adding 32-bit floating operations, 64-bit float, supervisor mode, hypervisor mode, SIMD... All of which can share a common ecosystem of compilers, formal verification, debuggers... But the real popularity of RISC-V is that you can use its ISA, and design a chip around it, freely without having to pay a (expensive!) license to ARM. This does present an existential threat to ARM, although they have a strong head-start in offering a ready-made ecosystem of tools. Do you want to spend $10M in engineering manpower and experimental silicon tape-out designing your new chip? Or just pay $2M to ARM to license their known-good CPU? It takes a lot of effort, expertise (and iteration!) to design a CPU core that's as performant and feature-full as what ARM spent years (decades!) perfecting. Do companies choose RISC-V because it allows them to re-use their tools on novel chip designs, or because it's just cheaper and, new as it is, sufficient for their purposes? It's exciting to watch the development. (Also I can't help but notice that many of the RISC-V chip announcements are coming from China) [1] Fun fact: in the 80s and 90s, x86 was the "cheap, consumer" chip that was looked down upon by the Workstation class RISC-type chips like the Sun Sparc, or DEC Alpha (and much of Apple's chip design team sprang from a core of ex-DEC designers!) But Linux came along, Intel kept improving their chips, and took over the workstation/big-iron space from the incumbents [2] cue the corrections about ARM's (and Intel's!) GPU design, co-processor architecture...

not2b 5y ago

This is nicely done, despite some nitpicks in the comments; it should be interpreted as giving a qualitative picture. The recent development not mentioned is that China is launching a massive effort to bootstrap its own EDA industry, and they've poached a number of stars from the big three, with very generous signing bonuses. This is to get around sanctions, which are starting to bite.

dehrmann 5y ago

Fun seeing which names I recognize from buildings around the valley. For some, I had no idea what they even do.

kagaw 5y ago

Im surprised Fairchild semiconductor is not in the pyramid

55873445216111 5y ago
Fairchild was acquired by Onsemi

janekm 5y ago

Missing from this article, and rather important in the current supply chain issues situation, is packaging (testing, dicing, packaging into the chip package e.g. BGA, QFN, SOIC etc). Packaging is generally done at separate factories from the fabs. A vast proportion of packaging factories are in China, something to keep in mind in the context of "trade wars": https://www.marketresearchreports.com/blog/2019/04/24/top-10-osat-companies-world https://www.marketresearchreports.com/blog/2019/04/24/top-10...

sleepingadmin 5y ago

Infographic is outdated and borderline propaganda. The war with China has started. SMIC is shut to outsiders. Hong Kong fell to China. Taiwan is expected to fall next. So what's going down? Everyone getting into the chip game because they must. Europe’s Chip Act, Infineon is building chips in Germany Chips for USA Act hasn't quite passed yet. Biden issued an executive order that is unchallenged by anyone. US sanctioned SMIC. Samsung will be building a fab in Taylor Texas near to Austin. Intel will be building 2 fabs in Arizona(RISCV!) Samsung obviously also building much more in Korea. TSMC is building a fab in Japan with Sony. Everyone hoping the fabs in taiwan don't fall. Really good chance those fabs will be destroyed if China moves on them. India is blowing up big time with fabs. The number of secret fabs is surprising as well. Tons of them popping up in the midwest, primarily sourcing for the automotive industry. Makes sense to keep them quiet because it seems there's lots of fabs catching fire or being hacked and shutdown. Oh the nature of war...

capableweb 5y ago
> Infographic is outdated and borderline propaganda. > Taiwan is expected to fall next. You'll do everyone a favor by not exaggerating that much. You make it seem like there is consensus around the expectation that Taiwan will "fall next" while there is no such thing. You're also making claims about fabs being set on fire or being hacked by foreign entities without any sort of evidence.
- sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >You'll do everyone a favor by not exaggerating that much What exaggeration? https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/taiwan-says-it-is-preparing-for-war-but-are-taiwanese-mentally-ready/ https://thediplomat.com/2021/10/taiwan-says-it-is-preparing-... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-warns-of-next-step-if-china-invaded-taiwan-20211126-p59ckg.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/dutton-warns-of-next... https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/10/14/2003766069 https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2021/10... https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/the-three-reasons-taiwan-keeps-talking-up-the-threat-of-war-with-china-20220131-p59skk.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/the-three-reasons-taiwan-k... https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/us-and-australia-signed-a-nuclear-arms-deal-simple-as-that/ https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/us-and-australia-signed-a-nucl... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/is-australia-ready-for-war-the-army-s-battle-for-relevance-20211229-p59knl.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/is-australia-ready-f... https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2022/01/24/china-sends-39-warplanes-toward-taiwan-largest-in-new-year/ https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2022/01/24/china-s... https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3164139/taiwan-war-risk-highest-past-25-years-us-tensions-rise https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3164139/ta... https://warblog.org/news/us-approves-support-deal-with-taiwan-for-patriot-missiles/ https://warblog.org/news/us-approves-support-deal-with-taiwa... https://seapowermagazine.org/rep-gallagher-navy-must-be-ready-to-counter-china-if-taiwan-is-attacked/ https://seapowermagazine.org/rep-gallagher-navy-must-be-read... If you believe this to be exaggeration... this is happening right now. Out of curiousity, which country are you in? How do you not know about this? 10 links provided and can be easily added to. >You make it seem like there is consensus around the expectation that Taiwan will "fall next" while there is no such thing. Is your claim that Taiwan won't be next and it's someone else who is next? Taiwan is second? Or is your do you believe all these governments are spreading propaganda? >You're also making claims about fabs being set on fire or being hacked by foreign entities without any sort of evidence. I suspect you're not asking for me to prove APT groups are chinese? https://web.archive.org/web/20211127025205/https://www.akm.com/us/en/about-us/news/information/20210122-information/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211127025205/https://www.akm.c... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-chips-idUSKBN2BN27E https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-chips-idUSKBN2BN27E Multiple fires hitting non-chinese chip fabs? Just a coincidence... nothing to do with the ongoing war...