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Do I understand correctly the much of the worlds semiconductor fabrication is in Taiwan and that Taiwan is currently under threat? If those fabs become unavail

by xupybd 4y ago

Do I understand correctly the much of the worlds semiconductor fabrication is in Taiwan and that Taiwan is currently under threat? If those fabs become unavailable to the west do we know what that would do to the world economy?

deqwer 4y ago
The current most advance fabs are place in Taiwan ( along the coastline which is nearer to China ) if those fabs are destroyed, there will no longer be newer CPU generation for a decades due to the recipe to make these chips are lost in war. Companies which relies on the advance of semicon will halt but will eventually recover as other players ( Intel, SMIC, Samsung or the parts of what’s left of TSMC ) catches up with progress made in the fabs in Taiwan.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
panda88888 4y ago
There are really 2 tiers of semiconductor manufacturing, and for the advanced nodes Taiwans TSMC is in the lead with Samsung close behind, and Intel is lagging. The less advanced (aka older, larger) nodes manufacturing capability are more spread out.
kube-system 4y ago
Those fabs are a fairly significant part of the whole situation. China wants them because they have those sweet ASML EUV machines that they are sanctioned from buying. The US needs those fabs to stay controlled by Taiwan because they don’t want the world’s most advanced contract fab to be overseen by a hostile country. Taiwan needs those fabs because it makes them important for the US to defend. And because those fabs are so important to everyone to who wants high end chips, just having them is a good defense.
- webmobdev 4y ago
  I remember reading somewhere that Taiwan has rigged all the TSMC fabs to explode and flood in case China invades it. The fabs however are less important than the innovation and technical knowledge to run it and is stored elsewhere and also with the human resource. These can be quickly transported to ensure they can setup elsewhere and prevent the tech from falling into China's hand.
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    The machines may be rigged to explode, flood, or otherwise hose themselves, but active sabotage is largely unnecessary. If China takes Taiwan by force, two things will happen: 1) the US will heavily sanction anyone who trades with them, so even if they manage to keep the TSMC fab online it won't do them any good in a commercial sense; and 2) without ongoing service and support from ASML and many other Western vendors, the equipment will work for about as long as the leased aircraft that Russia stole from Airbus's and Boeing's customers. They might get six or twelve months of production out of TSMC's facility, and then things will start to break that they will not be able to fix easily. Invading Taiwan will cause economic damage measured in hundreds of billions of dollars at a bare minimum, and much of that damage will be suffered by China. Bottom line, it would be insanely stupid of China to attack Taiwan. Of course, many people (including myself) said the same thing about Putin and Ukraine, so...
    - whatever1 4y ago
      Apple produces almost 100% of their processors at TSMC (Samsung was making some previous gen if I recall). If Taiwan falls, Apple falls. The US economy will be in ruins, and nothing can stop a large scale military conflict.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - dirtyid 4y ago
      >and much of that damage will be suffered by China Signiciantly more will be suffered by US/west whose advanced industries extracts disproportionate patent fees and have extreme reliance on TW semi for short to medium term. We're talking trillions in knock on effects. Proximity of semi production / supply chain concentration in TW and broader east Asia is PRC's trump card in war. During peace US has trump card in sanctions / tech control, but during war PRC has leverage of simply setting the advanced economies back 30 years which will actually close relative gap. PRC might even pull ahead if they manage to mass rollout of 28nm indigenous fabs and complete indigenous semi supply chain before anyone else. That's without mentioning during war, PRC has incentive to attack SKR/JP fabs to draw US into first island chain where they're weakest to honor security commitments. If things ever get heated with US, it would be insanely smart for China to threaten TW/JP/SKR as well. And if PRC attacks TW, I surmise there's going to be three way side deal between PRC, US and TW leadership to maintain TSMC production continuity in exchange for evacuations for TW leadership to US who would otherwise get the noose for treason. Which itself makes the notion that TSMC is rigged to blow counterproductive - surival of TSMC is TW elites golden ticket off the island - US isn't going to look kindly to a TW admin that explodes US economy and tech lead.
ksec 4y ago
>Do I understand correctly the much of the worlds semiconductor fabrication is in Taiwan Not straightly true. The worlds "leading edge" Semiconductor Fabs is located and dominated by TSMC. Yes. But Semiconductor as an industry includes many things not leading edge like small chips used in appliances as well big volume commodities like NAND and DRAM. Those are mostly in South Korea, Japan and then US. ( Along with Singapore and Germany in case anyone wants to nitpick. ) If TSMC get destroyed, it will likely set back the whole Semiconductor industry by 10 years. Simply rebuilding the Fabs capacity, leading edge or not would take 5 - 10 years with perfect project planning and execution. Not to mention no player in the industry has shown they are capable to providing similar quality, yield, services to TSMC with similar prices at an acceptable margin.
- amelius 4y ago
  > If TSMC get destroyed, it will likely set back the whole Semiconductor industry by 10 years. If that is true, why doesn't TSMC crank up its prices? Or why don't they build a consumer brand? They could fade out Apple if they start building their own consumer products.
  - swores 4y ago
    I don't understand what part of the sentence you've quoted makes you think that TSMC hasn't put a lot of thought into their price points already. Regardless of how true quoted sentence is, it's also obviously true that if they changed prices to $1billon for every single chip sold then they would sell close to zero chips (ignoring that such a crazy move would probably see an attempt to replace leadership, or a takeover attempt, or whatever). And equally, if they lowered their prices to give each sale only 1% of their current profit margins, they would sell more chips. Every time they set a price, they'll be thinking about where the line is to get that balance right. And they already know they're the industry leader, and of course they know it in a lot more detail than that simple statement, so they're taking that into account (along with things like demand, how close the competitor products are, etc.) Of course that's not to say that they've necessarily made the ideal choice every time, and maybe if they raised prices they would make more money overall. But how does the fact that them literally disappearing would set back the industry make this more or less likely to be the case?
dirtyid 4y ago
It's an internet meme that some goof at US Army War College picked up on and wrote a paper suggesting TW should blow up their own fabs to deter PRC invasion. Which is dummy take since for PRC, TW is a political problem and US can always strangle fab operations via supply chain sanctions. TW media saw this as serious traction and pushed some articles basically saying "leave TSMC alone". TW, at least TW leadership won't blow up TSMC for the simple reason that it'll destroy US advanced economy, and if they ever want a safe ride off the island to retire in US, it would be in everyones interest the fabs stay untouched.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > for PRC, TW is a political problem That’s surely the reason for their political exercises in the region these days.
  - swores 4y ago
    Does anyone not think those exercises were designed to send a political message, specifically in response to US politicians visiting Taiwan? Yes they were military exercises, but quite blatantly it wasn't China actually needing to do any testing or training of their military, except using it to send a political message (both domestically and internationally). (Which isn't my giving an opinion on the likelihood or not of China ever using military force against Taiwan, just a response to your ridiculing the idea that recent actions weren't political).
yyyk 4y ago
The economic damage a war would cause is immense. TSMC however would contribute surprisingly little to the economic damage. TSMC has a big volume and an edge in node process. However, the vast majority of chips in use are in embedded usecases. Most non-general-computing hardware containing chips doesn't need 4nm. It would chug just fine with two decade old chips. Even military hardware uses very outdated chips. Catching up to a modern semi fab would cost time and money, but making more outdated chips isn't that much of a problem. There's a certification issue, but in such a scenario surely certification would be relaxed. As for general purpose computing, servers always have the option of scaling horizontally. The biggest issue would be with phones and tablets. Unfortunate, but tiny compared to the other costs of war.
- freemint 4y ago
  It would mean no new gaming consoles, Apple devices, AMD CPUs, high performance FPGAs, GPUs by either NVIDIA or AMD, WIFI chips from Broadcam, no Qualcomm ARM CPUs, maybe also no cheap Mediathek CPUs for smartphones.
  - yyyk 4y ago
    IIRC, NVidia and Qualcomm fab at Samsung. Others would have to compete for limited remaining quantity or use slightly inferior chips. All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause.
    - freemint 4y ago
      NVIDIA does some manufacturing at Samsung however certain products are only made on TSMC. Such as the coming RTX 4000 series which is made entirely on TSMC 5nm. I missed some announcement though that Qualcomm is moving more towards using Samsung. > All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause. This 'difficulty' would set Moores Law back more than half decade outside of Intel and Samsung smartphone chips. The next smallest large scale node being 12nm at Global Foundry and keep it frozen there for at least 2-3 years in total leaving as decade behind Moore's Law. You underestimate how much damage that causes. Even if China completely wipes out Taiwans 1% share of GDP that impact is miniscule compared falling 10 years behing on Moore's Law.
throwaway4good 4y ago
The CHIPS act, while promoted as an effort against China, is very much about moving the advanced chip fabrication away from Taiwan and onto US soil. If it is successful Taiwan is left with a hole to fill as its economy is completely dominated by its semiconductor industry.
ekianjo 4y ago
it's not. South Korea has fabs as well and Japan too in Asia. China is also making progress in developing the own nodes (with TSMC's help for older nodes), and Europe and the US have significant capacity at higher nm nodes. TSMC is getting a lot of press because they manufacture the leading edge nodes at the moment, that are used in high profile products.

by xupybd 4y ago

deqwer 4y ago

The current most advance fabs are place in Taiwan ( along the coastline which is nearer to China ) if those fabs are destroyed, there will no longer be newer CPU generation for a decades due to the recipe to make these chips are lost in war. Companies which relies on the advance of semicon will halt but will eventually recover as other players ( Intel, SMIC, Samsung or the parts of what’s left of TSMC ) catches up with progress made in the fabs in Taiwan.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

panda88888 4y ago

There are really 2 tiers of semiconductor manufacturing, and for the advanced nodes Taiwans TSMC is in the lead with Samsung close behind, and Intel is lagging. The less advanced (aka older, larger) nodes manufacturing capability are more spread out.

kube-system 4y ago

Those fabs are a fairly significant part of the whole situation. China wants them because they have those sweet ASML EUV machines that they are sanctioned from buying. The US needs those fabs to stay controlled by Taiwan because they don’t want the world’s most advanced contract fab to be overseen by a hostile country. Taiwan needs those fabs because it makes them important for the US to defend. And because those fabs are so important to everyone to who wants high end chips, just having them is a good defense.

webmobdev 4y ago
I remember reading somewhere that Taiwan has rigged all the TSMC fabs to explode and flood in case China invades it. The fabs however are less important than the innovation and technical knowledge to run it and is stored elsewhere and also with the human resource. These can be quickly transported to ensure they can setup elsewhere and prevent the tech from falling into China's hand.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  The machines may be rigged to explode, flood, or otherwise hose themselves, but active sabotage is largely unnecessary. If China takes Taiwan by force, two things will happen: 1) the US will heavily sanction anyone who trades with them, so even if they manage to keep the TSMC fab online it won't do them any good in a commercial sense; and 2) without ongoing service and support from ASML and many other Western vendors, the equipment will work for about as long as the leased aircraft that Russia stole from Airbus's and Boeing's customers. They might get six or twelve months of production out of TSMC's facility, and then things will start to break that they will not be able to fix easily. Invading Taiwan will cause economic damage measured in hundreds of billions of dollars at a bare minimum, and much of that damage will be suffered by China. Bottom line, it would be insanely stupid of China to attack Taiwan. Of course, many people (including myself) said the same thing about Putin and Ukraine, so...
  - whatever1 4y ago
    Apple produces almost 100% of their processors at TSMC (Samsung was making some previous gen if I recall). If Taiwan falls, Apple falls. The US economy will be in ruins, and nothing can stop a large scale military conflict.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dirtyid 4y ago
    >and much of that damage will be suffered by China Signiciantly more will be suffered by US/west whose advanced industries extracts disproportionate patent fees and have extreme reliance on TW semi for short to medium term. We're talking trillions in knock on effects. Proximity of semi production / supply chain concentration in TW and broader east Asia is PRC's trump card in war. During peace US has trump card in sanctions / tech control, but during war PRC has leverage of simply setting the advanced economies back 30 years which will actually close relative gap. PRC might even pull ahead if they manage to mass rollout of 28nm indigenous fabs and complete indigenous semi supply chain before anyone else. That's without mentioning during war, PRC has incentive to attack SKR/JP fabs to draw US into first island chain where they're weakest to honor security commitments. If things ever get heated with US, it would be insanely smart for China to threaten TW/JP/SKR as well. And if PRC attacks TW, I surmise there's going to be three way side deal between PRC, US and TW leadership to maintain TSMC production continuity in exchange for evacuations for TW leadership to US who would otherwise get the noose for treason. Which itself makes the notion that TSMC is rigged to blow counterproductive - surival of TSMC is TW elites golden ticket off the island - US isn't going to look kindly to a TW admin that explodes US economy and tech lead.

ksec 4y ago

>Do I understand correctly the much of the worlds semiconductor fabrication is in Taiwan Not straightly true. The worlds "leading edge" Semiconductor Fabs is located and dominated by TSMC. Yes. But Semiconductor as an industry includes many things not leading edge like small chips used in appliances as well big volume commodities like NAND and DRAM. Those are mostly in South Korea, Japan and then US. ( Along with Singapore and Germany in case anyone wants to nitpick. ) If TSMC get destroyed, it will likely set back the whole Semiconductor industry by 10 years. Simply rebuilding the Fabs capacity, leading edge or not would take 5 - 10 years with perfect project planning and execution. Not to mention no player in the industry has shown they are capable to providing similar quality, yield, services to TSMC with similar prices at an acceptable margin.

amelius 4y ago
> If TSMC get destroyed, it will likely set back the whole Semiconductor industry by 10 years. If that is true, why doesn't TSMC crank up its prices? Or why don't they build a consumer brand? They could fade out Apple if they start building their own consumer products.
- swores 4y ago
  I don't understand what part of the sentence you've quoted makes you think that TSMC hasn't put a lot of thought into their price points already. Regardless of how true quoted sentence is, it's also obviously true that if they changed prices to $1billon for every single chip sold then they would sell close to zero chips (ignoring that such a crazy move would probably see an attempt to replace leadership, or a takeover attempt, or whatever). And equally, if they lowered their prices to give each sale only 1% of their current profit margins, they would sell more chips. Every time they set a price, they'll be thinking about where the line is to get that balance right. And they already know they're the industry leader, and of course they know it in a lot more detail than that simple statement, so they're taking that into account (along with things like demand, how close the competitor products are, etc.) Of course that's not to say that they've necessarily made the ideal choice every time, and maybe if they raised prices they would make more money overall. But how does the fact that them literally disappearing would set back the industry make this more or less likely to be the case?

dirtyid 4y ago

It's an internet meme that some goof at US Army War College picked up on and wrote a paper suggesting TW should blow up their own fabs to deter PRC invasion. Which is dummy take since for PRC, TW is a political problem and US can always strangle fab operations via supply chain sanctions. TW media saw this as serious traction and pushed some articles basically saying "leave TSMC alone". TW, at least TW leadership won't blow up TSMC for the simple reason that it'll destroy US advanced economy, and if they ever want a safe ride off the island to retire in US, it would be in everyones interest the fabs stay untouched.

kgwgk 4y ago
> for PRC, TW is a political problem That’s surely the reason for their political exercises in the region these days.
- swores 4y ago
  Does anyone not think those exercises were designed to send a political message, specifically in response to US politicians visiting Taiwan? Yes they were military exercises, but quite blatantly it wasn't China actually needing to do any testing or training of their military, except using it to send a political message (both domestically and internationally). (Which isn't my giving an opinion on the likelihood or not of China ever using military force against Taiwan, just a response to your ridiculing the idea that recent actions weren't political).

yyyk 4y ago

The economic damage a war would cause is immense. TSMC however would contribute surprisingly little to the economic damage. TSMC has a big volume and an edge in node process. However, the vast majority of chips in use are in embedded usecases. Most non-general-computing hardware containing chips doesn't need 4nm. It would chug just fine with two decade old chips. Even military hardware uses very outdated chips. Catching up to a modern semi fab would cost time and money, but making more outdated chips isn't that much of a problem. There's a certification issue, but in such a scenario surely certification would be relaxed. As for general purpose computing, servers always have the option of scaling horizontally. The biggest issue would be with phones and tablets. Unfortunate, but tiny compared to the other costs of war.

freemint 4y ago
It would mean no new gaming consoles, Apple devices, AMD CPUs, high performance FPGAs, GPUs by either NVIDIA or AMD, WIFI chips from Broadcam, no Qualcomm ARM CPUs, maybe also no cheap Mediathek CPUs for smartphones.
- yyyk 4y ago
  IIRC, NVidia and Qualcomm fab at Samsung. Others would have to compete for limited remaining quantity or use slightly inferior chips. All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause.
  - freemint 4y ago
    NVIDIA does some manufacturing at Samsung however certain products are only made on TSMC. Such as the coming RTX 4000 series which is made entirely on TSMC 5nm. I missed some announcement though that Qualcomm is moving more towards using Samsung. > All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause. This 'difficulty' would set Moores Law back more than half decade outside of Intel and Samsung smartphone chips. The next smallest large scale node being 12nm at Global Foundry and keep it frozen there for at least 2-3 years in total leaving as decade behind Moore's Law. You underestimate how much damage that causes. Even if China completely wipes out Taiwans 1% share of GDP that impact is miniscule compared falling 10 years behing on Moore's Law.

throwaway4good 4y ago

The CHIPS act, while promoted as an effort against China, is very much about moving the advanced chip fabrication away from Taiwan and onto US soil. If it is successful Taiwan is left with a hole to fill as its economy is completely dominated by its semiconductor industry.

ekianjo 4y ago

it's not. South Korea has fabs as well and Japan too in Asia. China is also making progress in developing the own nodes (with TSMC's help for older nodes), and Europe and the US have significant capacity at higher nm nodes. TSMC is getting a lot of press because they manufacture the leading edge nodes at the moment, that are used in high profile products.