10 ms·

TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

114 points by KuiN 4y ago

hulitu 4y ago
Looks like TSMC is preparing its own grave. When everybody wants to invest in new foundries they are telling customer to go away.
- monocasa 4y ago
  There's not many investing in new >28nm foundries.
  - Zenst 4y ago
    Russia and China may well be still developing fabs for such node sizes as they catchup. EDIT ADD https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture-chips-locally-28-nm-node.html https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture... "Russia plans to manufacture chips locally on a 28 nm node by 2030" currently they are on 90nm
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      If TSMC stops 28+ within a few years, nobody will need it by 2030 with such a huge gap in supply.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      I wonder if it would make sense to keep producing > 28nm with smaller margins in order to make it harder for this competition to catch up and keep a large moat.
  - akmittal 4y ago
    India is investing in 28-65nm https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/indias-semiconductor-mission-moves-into-a-crucial-phase-1093557.html https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/indias-semiconductor-mi...
- PaywallBuster 4y ago
  They're the Apple of foundries. They focus on high end high margin and segment their customers accordingly
causi 4y ago
Which is to say that there isn't the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes I'm disappointed that nobody really bothers to work on the cost reduction side of older nodes. I kind of thought we could easily and cheaply turn out, say, 32nm chips by the million.
- everforward 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but my layman's understanding is that the lower sizes and new production techniques decrease power consumption. The price of ongoing power consumption probably dwarfs the price of the chip itself in terms of cost of ownership in most cases. E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day. That's ~$0.20/day where I live, about $6/month or $36/year. Max draw is ~4x that. I've probably paid more in power to run my CPU than I paid for the CPU itself.
  - humanwhosits 4y ago
    Most chips run rather cool, user-facing CPU in laptop/desktop/server are a bit of an exception
  - causi 4y ago
    E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day I don't know which chip you're talking about but a 12900K idles at ten watts.
    - pure_simplicity 4y ago
      He is talking about an i7 on an older node, since he is comparing the lower production cost of older nodes with their higher usage cost (electricity). I don't know what intel generation would correspond to 32nm, but that was the node discussed.
      - causi 4y ago
        That would be the venerable 2600K of Sandy Bridge. It idled at five watts.
Zenst 4y ago
Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-lived-node-for-semiconductor-applications-in-the-next-five-years https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li... But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a manufacturer and may well see legacy older nodes start becoming more expensive for suppliers to access moving forward. Which for some chips, may well prove less suitable or exsisting designs less accomodating to just shrink as from my understanding if you have a 40nm chip design, just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible? Or certainly not as straight forward. Then there would be validation/testing for certification at the customer will need to do and for some chip nodes, that may prove more costly than sticking with the proven existing nodes. So be interesting how this plays out, not aware of any real stickouts but mindful that for some companies using existing older nodes, things will not be as clear-cut as many will think.
- pbronez 4y ago
  I'm also interested in the migration costs. Perhaps there will be a market for a migration service... though the TAM on that is probably small enough that it can't support a product-first approach.
  - Zenst 4y ago
    Yes it certainly does seem like an opertunity for a specialist company to offer a full service, but aspects like that would usualy be handled for node shrink in colaboration with the node provider. But one aspect will be say for example a microicontoller used for sensitive equipment, the level of certification and validation from goverment/mil certification down to Insurance certification (Lloyds of London have a lot of standard in many feilds that have to be ticked from my experience in the Oil industry alone) that can bury many a product. Heck even your CE/FTC certification is not cheap so any changes,such as node size will see that whole process repeated - hence not all chip makers rush for the latest and greatest node as existing work and proven. Equally some equipment may well see issues upon smaller nodes due to the enviromental factors and smaller nodes more susptable to thinks like radiation in which some exotic space particle would be smaller than the node at larger size but smaller may well start to become an issue. Hence many reasons for legacy nodes still in play and utilised. May well end up in a decade or two in which suppliers end up having to use China or Russia for production as the only way to get access to the nodes they need, and not like things like that not happened before thinking of how NASA for a while was dependant upon old tried and tested Russian rockets for space launches. Just hope this is not a future problem that is allowed to creep up and hit us all.
pbronez 4y ago
How hard is it to migrate a design from 40nm to 28nm? Can this be automated?
- monocasa 4y ago
  Depends on the design. Did you throw RTL at a layout engine and let it figure it out? Pretty damn close to automated and could get to automated with a little upfront elbow grease by a company specializing in such things. Heavy analog design? It's going to be a lot more work.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    How common are those two classes?
    - monocasa 4y ago
      You'd have to ask a fab probably to get real numbers, but the chips that people care about that haven't migrated to a newer node trend towards having at least some mixed analog components more than the set of all chips being made. Otherwise a shrink probably would have already made sense since 28nm isn't even the cheapest node gate for gate but already a bit chonky. It gets cheaper with even smaller nodes.
  - derefr 4y ago
    Maybe my intuition is completely wrong here, but would the analog case be simplified if the target node+technology was chosen to have trace widths exactly 1/2 the size of the node being transitioned from? I.e. the traces would have essentially the same standing-wave tuning requirements when modelled as waveguides; would catch a harmonic of the original frequency when acting as antennae; etc.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Analog isn't just RF; PHYs for weird protocols is a giant component of the space, as well as power monitoring/management. The changes in how voltage/resistance/capacitance/etc work at each node for a given layout is the heavy lift. Additionally, you very, very rarely have the antenna on chip, and the analog bits even for RF are more signal conditioning that isn't typically modeled like waveguides, but instead more like those old analog plug board computers, simply integrated onto a chip.
tiffanyh 4y ago
Dumb question: if something is being manufactured on 60nm today, can you not just take the same design and start manufacturing it on 28nm? Or do you need to literally redesign the entire circuit?
- cumshitpiss 4y ago
  No, you'd need to invest a lot of labor to port the design over. Factors like area, power, gate voltages can be completely different even between technologies on the same node (for example Global Foundaries 28nm is likely completely different than TSMC 28nm, aside from the feature size).
- verall 4y ago
  Chip designs have multiple layers of abstraction to represent a "circuit". Moving from 60nm to 28nm, your RTL is probably fine, but the physical layout will need some reworking as the transitors have different characteristics, SRAM different latencies, etc. It could be more cost effective to also rework some of your RTL, depending on your volume.
- kurthr 4y ago
  You need to redesign the entire circuit. If it is completely standard digital (e.g. no RAM, no Flash, no 3V IO, no ESD structure), then you can likely port it without too much pain. However, you still have to change the entire package/bond pattern, and completely requalify the part with a customer who sees no advantage. Minimum port/design cost $1M and expect mask fees of at least $2M. So at 30% margins on a $0.33 part, you can expect to break even 30M sales later!
- variaga 4y ago
  In almost all cases, switching processes means a complete redesign. 28nm vs 60nm isn't just "we can draw smaller parts now". Lots of other things (silicon doping levels, choice of metal for the routing layers, operating voltage levels, thickness of the insulating layers, ...) change too, requiring design changes to keep the old design working the same way it used to. A very small set of processes allow one way reuse e.g. you can build a tsmc28hpm design directly in the tsmc28hpc process (but you can't build a 28hpc design in the 28hpm process) - but, for instance, neither of those is directly compatible with the tsmc28hpc+ (note the 'plus' in the name) process. And all 3 of those have the same feature size and are made by the same foundry.
kurthr 4y ago
Thanks TSMC... when will you release a HV version of 28nm? Oh... never, because you transitioned to bottom poly at 40nm. How is your automotive eFlash at 28nm... oh, you're still working on it (since 2018)? Well, guess we won't have many display drivers (or displays) or autos then, or maybe marketing should pull their heads out and smell the roses. I mean, I get it. Most things should transition to 28nm on 300mm wafers for process & equipment reasons, but in order to do that many of them need for the right process to exist, and the foundries are concentrated only on the latest nodes that make margin $$ so they don't develop critical features for even 28nm. Could your customers redesign their entire architecture and packaging? Yes, but it will take years to decades to prove reliability. I'll note that Apple's rumored OLED on Si for MR/AR is likely on a giant 80-90nm process in 300mm at TSMC so for money and volume, they'll do most anything... even build capacity.
- drcongo 4y ago
  I honestly don't really understand 95% of what you've written here, but could this mean an end of godawful touch screens in cars?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    No, it means there will be even worse touchscreens because now automakers can't afford silicon that might actually power a tablet.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      Oh damn. Thanks.
    - awestroke 4y ago
      How can they not afford a 300 dollar tablet in a 40k dollar car?
      - PeterisP 4y ago
        A 300 dollar tablet dies quickly in the automotive environment with outdoors-like variation in temperature and humidity. Tablet manufacturers literally write in their product sheets "do not leave the device in a car or it may get damaged"; if you leave an iPad in direct sun for a month and it dies, it's expensive for you, if the same happens to a car console, that's expensive for the manufacturer which has to repair it under warranty. The temperature range for iPad listed by Apple is 0 to +35 C for operation and -20 to +45 C for storage. The required temperature range for electronics on automotive dashboards (which may be exposed to direct sun) is -40 to 90 C, which effectively requires different materials, which means you can't even reuse most components.
baybal2 4y ago
lizardactivist 4y ago
It reminds me of how this backwards way of thinking seems to have infested everyone's heads; that stuff has to be, or make use of, the very latest technology available, or it will be useless junk that barely works.
- gnufx 4y ago
  There was a lot of that talk about the Newport Wafer Fab being sold to China. I remember it produces in-demand automotive stuff, but not the process size(s), if that's even relevant with the different technology. Shame I can't find anything about it on http://youknowsit.co.uk/ http://youknowsit.co.uk/ innit.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Every infotainment system I have ever used has been useless junk that barely worked.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Why don’t they find a way to move these workflows to developing economies who are trying to increase their exposure to chip manufacturing (eg india)?
ksec 4y ago
Sigh. There are things like PMICs that gets little to no benefits by moving to 28nm. I doubt that will happen. But there are also plenty of designs that are stuck using older mature node, that gets some benefits but has no financial incentive in doing so. Or will require some specialty nodes that is not on offer, which TSMC are currently working on. ( Compared to what comments here suggest they dont give a toss about it. ) So the whole thing is basically about balancing Fab capacity. And there is no better time to do it. You are either stuck waiting for capacity in a node or you move to 2xnm node where new GigaFab are being built and has much better capacity planning. Do you want your $thousands to even $million product to be on hold because of a ( what used to be ) $2 chip cant be Fabbed?
Havoc 4y ago
24 hours before Raspberry announce Pi Pico W on 40nm...
sitkack 4y ago
TSMC, Open Source your 28nm PDK!

114 points by KuiN 4y ago

Looks like TSMC is preparing its own grave. When everybody wants to invest in new foundries they are telling customer to go away.

monocasa 4y ago
There's not many investing in new >28nm foundries.
- Zenst 4y ago
  Russia and China may well be still developing fabs for such node sizes as they catchup. EDIT ADD https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture-chips-locally-28-nm-node.html https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture... "Russia plans to manufacture chips locally on a 28 nm node by 2030" currently they are on 90nm
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    If TSMC stops 28+ within a few years, nobody will need it by 2030 with such a huge gap in supply.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    I wonder if it would make sense to keep producing > 28nm with smaller margins in order to make it harder for this competition to catch up and keep a large moat.
- akmittal 4y ago
  India is investing in 28-65nm https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/indias-semiconductor-mission-moves-into-a-crucial-phase-1093557.html https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/indias-semiconductor-mi...
PaywallBuster 4y ago
They're the Apple of foundries. They focus on high end high margin and segment their customers accordingly

causi 4y ago

Which is to say that there isn't the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes I'm disappointed that nobody really bothers to work on the cost reduction side of older nodes. I kind of thought we could easily and cheaply turn out, say, 32nm chips by the million.

everforward 4y ago
I'm not an expert, but my layman's understanding is that the lower sizes and new production techniques decrease power consumption. The price of ongoing power consumption probably dwarfs the price of the chip itself in terms of cost of ownership in most cases. E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day. That's ~$0.20/day where I live, about $6/month or $36/year. Max draw is ~4x that. I've probably paid more in power to run my CPU than I paid for the CPU itself.
- humanwhosits 4y ago
  Most chips run rather cool, user-facing CPU in laptop/desktop/server are a bit of an exception
- causi 4y ago
  E.g. an i7 draws 65W at idle, or about 1.5kWh/day I don't know which chip you're talking about but a 12900K idles at ten watts.
  - pure_simplicity 4y ago
    He is talking about an i7 on an older node, since he is comparing the lower production cost of older nodes with their higher usage cost (electricity). I don't know what intel generation would correspond to 32nm, but that was the node discussed.
    - causi 4y ago
      That would be the venerable 2600K of Sandy Bridge. It idled at five watts.

Zenst 4y ago

Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-lived-node-for-semiconductor-applications-in-the-next-five-years https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li... But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a manufacturer and may well see legacy older nodes start becoming more expensive for suppliers to access moving forward. Which for some chips, may well prove less suitable or exsisting designs less accomodating to just shrink as from my understanding if you have a 40nm chip design, just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible? Or certainly not as straight forward. Then there would be validation/testing for certification at the customer will need to do and for some chip nodes, that may prove more costly than sticking with the proven existing nodes. So be interesting how this plays out, not aware of any real stickouts but mindful that for some companies using existing older nodes, things will not be as clear-cut as many will think.

pbronez 4y ago
I'm also interested in the migration costs. Perhaps there will be a market for a migration service... though the TAM on that is probably small enough that it can't support a product-first approach.
- Zenst 4y ago
  Yes it certainly does seem like an opertunity for a specialist company to offer a full service, but aspects like that would usualy be handled for node shrink in colaboration with the node provider. But one aspect will be say for example a microicontoller used for sensitive equipment, the level of certification and validation from goverment/mil certification down to Insurance certification (Lloyds of London have a lot of standard in many feilds that have to be ticked from my experience in the Oil industry alone) that can bury many a product. Heck even your CE/FTC certification is not cheap so any changes,such as node size will see that whole process repeated - hence not all chip makers rush for the latest and greatest node as existing work and proven. Equally some equipment may well see issues upon smaller nodes due to the enviromental factors and smaller nodes more susptable to thinks like radiation in which some exotic space particle would be smaller than the node at larger size but smaller may well start to become an issue. Hence many reasons for legacy nodes still in play and utilised. May well end up in a decade or two in which suppliers end up having to use China or Russia for production as the only way to get access to the nodes they need, and not like things like that not happened before thinking of how NASA for a while was dependant upon old tried and tested Russian rockets for space launches. Just hope this is not a future problem that is allowed to creep up and hit us all.

pbronez 4y ago

How hard is it to migrate a design from 40nm to 28nm? Can this be automated?

monocasa 4y ago
Depends on the design. Did you throw RTL at a layout engine and let it figure it out? Pretty damn close to automated and could get to automated with a little upfront elbow grease by a company specializing in such things. Heavy analog design? It's going to be a lot more work.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  How common are those two classes?
  - monocasa 4y ago
    You'd have to ask a fab probably to get real numbers, but the chips that people care about that haven't migrated to a newer node trend towards having at least some mixed analog components more than the set of all chips being made. Otherwise a shrink probably would have already made sense since 28nm isn't even the cheapest node gate for gate but already a bit chonky. It gets cheaper with even smaller nodes.
- derefr 4y ago
  Maybe my intuition is completely wrong here, but would the analog case be simplified if the target node+technology was chosen to have trace widths exactly 1/2 the size of the node being transitioned from? I.e. the traces would have essentially the same standing-wave tuning requirements when modelled as waveguides; would catch a harmonic of the original frequency when acting as antennae; etc.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Analog isn't just RF; PHYs for weird protocols is a giant component of the space, as well as power monitoring/management. The changes in how voltage/resistance/capacitance/etc work at each node for a given layout is the heavy lift. Additionally, you very, very rarely have the antenna on chip, and the analog bits even for RF are more signal conditioning that isn't typically modeled like waveguides, but instead more like those old analog plug board computers, simply integrated onto a chip.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Dumb question: if something is being manufactured on 60nm today, can you not just take the same design and start manufacturing it on 28nm? Or do you need to literally redesign the entire circuit?

cumshitpiss 4y ago
No, you'd need to invest a lot of labor to port the design over. Factors like area, power, gate voltages can be completely different even between technologies on the same node (for example Global Foundaries 28nm is likely completely different than TSMC 28nm, aside from the feature size).
verall 4y ago
Chip designs have multiple layers of abstraction to represent a "circuit". Moving from 60nm to 28nm, your RTL is probably fine, but the physical layout will need some reworking as the transitors have different characteristics, SRAM different latencies, etc. It could be more cost effective to also rework some of your RTL, depending on your volume.
kurthr 4y ago
You need to redesign the entire circuit. If it is completely standard digital (e.g. no RAM, no Flash, no 3V IO, no ESD structure), then you can likely port it without too much pain. However, you still have to change the entire package/bond pattern, and completely requalify the part with a customer who sees no advantage. Minimum port/design cost $1M and expect mask fees of at least $2M. So at 30% margins on a $0.33 part, you can expect to break even 30M sales later!
variaga 4y ago
In almost all cases, switching processes means a complete redesign. 28nm vs 60nm isn't just "we can draw smaller parts now". Lots of other things (silicon doping levels, choice of metal for the routing layers, operating voltage levels, thickness of the insulating layers, ...) change too, requiring design changes to keep the old design working the same way it used to. A very small set of processes allow one way reuse e.g. you can build a tsmc28hpm design directly in the tsmc28hpc process (but you can't build a 28hpc design in the 28hpm process) - but, for instance, neither of those is directly compatible with the tsmc28hpc+ (note the 'plus' in the name) process. And all 3 of those have the same feature size and are made by the same foundry.

kurthr 4y ago

Thanks TSMC... when will you release a HV version of 28nm? Oh... never, because you transitioned to bottom poly at 40nm. How is your automotive eFlash at 28nm... oh, you're still working on it (since 2018)? Well, guess we won't have many display drivers (or displays) or autos then, or maybe marketing should pull their heads out and smell the roses. I mean, I get it. Most things should transition to 28nm on 300mm wafers for process & equipment reasons, but in order to do that many of them need for the right process to exist, and the foundries are concentrated only on the latest nodes that make margin $$ so they don't develop critical features for even 28nm. Could your customers redesign their entire architecture and packaging? Yes, but it will take years to decades to prove reliability. I'll note that Apple's rumored OLED on Si for MR/AR is likely on a giant 80-90nm process in 300mm at TSMC so for money and volume, they'll do most anything... even build capacity.

drcongo 4y ago
I honestly don't really understand 95% of what you've written here, but could this mean an end of godawful touch screens in cars?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  No, it means there will be even worse touchscreens because now automakers can't afford silicon that might actually power a tablet.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    Oh damn. Thanks.
  - awestroke 4y ago
    How can they not afford a 300 dollar tablet in a 40k dollar car?
    - PeterisP 4y ago
      A 300 dollar tablet dies quickly in the automotive environment with outdoors-like variation in temperature and humidity. Tablet manufacturers literally write in their product sheets "do not leave the device in a car or it may get damaged"; if you leave an iPad in direct sun for a month and it dies, it's expensive for you, if the same happens to a car console, that's expensive for the manufacturer which has to repair it under warranty. The temperature range for iPad listed by Apple is 0 to +35 C for operation and -20 to +45 C for storage. The required temperature range for electronics on automotive dashboards (which may be exposed to direct sun) is -40 to 90 C, which effectively requires different materials, which means you can't even reuse most components.

baybal2 4y ago

lizardactivist 4y ago

It reminds me of how this backwards way of thinking seems to have infested everyone's heads; that stuff has to be, or make use of, the very latest technology available, or it will be useless junk that barely works.

gnufx 4y ago
There was a lot of that talk about the Newport Wafer Fab being sold to China. I remember it produces in-demand automotive stuff, but not the process size(s), if that's even relevant with the different technology. Shame I can't find anything about it on http://youknowsit.co.uk/ http://youknowsit.co.uk/ innit.
babypuncher 4y ago
Every infotainment system I have ever used has been useless junk that barely worked.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Why don’t they find a way to move these workflows to developing economies who are trying to increase their exposure to chip manufacturing (eg india)?

ksec 4y ago

Sigh. There are things like PMICs that gets little to no benefits by moving to 28nm. I doubt that will happen. But there are also plenty of designs that are stuck using older mature node, that gets some benefits but has no financial incentive in doing so. Or will require some specialty nodes that is not on offer, which TSMC are currently working on. ( Compared to what comments here suggest they dont give a toss about it. ) So the whole thing is basically about balancing Fab capacity. And there is no better time to do it. You are either stuck waiting for capacity in a node or you move to 2xnm node where new GigaFab are being built and has much better capacity planning. Do you want your $thousands to even $million product to be on hold because of a ( what used to be ) $2 chip cant be Fabbed?

Havoc 4y ago

24 hours before Raspberry announce Pi Pico W on 40nm...

sitkack 4y ago

TSMC, Open Source your 28nm PDK!