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TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology
- ranger_danger 1y ago(in Taiwan)
- 1over137 1y agoThe hint is in the company’s name. ;)
- barbazoo 1y ago> The hint is in the company’s name. ;) They might build factories outside Taiwan you never know.
- 1over137 1y agoOf course. And were that the actual case, it would be worth having in the summary.
- flounder3 1y agoTSMC building outside of Taiwan is a big deal these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Arizona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Arizona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#Germany From the article: "about 30 percent of our 2-nanometer and more advanced capacity will be located in Arizona" .. so it's interesting that they are moving forward with domestic 1.4nm given the geopolitical climate.
- bgnn 1y agoAs TSMC and Taiwang government policy, they always build it first in Taiwan, run for some years and then build in the US. They keep Taiwan relevant and protected this way.
- consumer451 1y agoGeopolitics aside, is this not just good business sense given the accepted labor practices and talent pool in Taiwan vs. other countries?
- indolering 1y agoYeah, who wouldn't invest locally first when there is an economic advantage to doing so? Their suppliers, talent base, and management are all there already.
- iammrpayments 1y agoI don’t think you can separate geopolitics from business in this case.
- andsoitis 1y ago> (in Taiwan) But also: At the TSMC second-quarter earnings conference and conference call on Thursday, TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) said that after the completion of the company’s US$165 billion investment in the US, “about 30 percent of our 2-nanometer and more advanced capacity will be located in Arizona, creating an independent leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing cluster in the US.” The Arizona investment includes six advanced wafer manufacturing fabs, two advanced packaging fabs and a major research and development center.
- esseph 1y agoHey, how much water would that infrastructure need, possibly?
- nine_k 1y agoIsn't this water nearly 100% recyclable? It's not that it would get used up, like water used for watering of almond trees in California.
- LeifCarrotson 1y agoI mean, it could be - the highly filtered water could be re-filtered. But unless it's cheaper to do so, or they're required by law to do so, they're just going to pump cleaner starting water out of the drinking supply and use that. And good luck finding a city or state government that's not so desperate for big industry and tech jobs to arrive that they will hold their feet to the fire and demand they cut water use.
- MangoCoffee 1y agohttps://news.asu.edu/20240925-science-and-technology-why-chip-manufacturers-choose-arizonas-desert-environment https://news.asu.edu/20240925-science-and-technology-why-chi... why not do a simple google search?
- andsoitis 1y ago
- pj_mukh 1y agoThe chips we need for the machines that will defend Taiwan are being built in Taiwan is just a ridiculous game of chicken to be setup. I wish they’d take the next step with the defense treaty to move even more capacity (esp for the highest grade stuff) to stateside.
- coolspot 1y agoMost of the defense tech is not using bleeding edge N2-N7 nodes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MaxPock 1y agoWhat advantage will a 1.4nm chip have over a 4nm one? What new capabilities will this tech unlock on an edge device like my iPhone ? Please don't mention lower power consumption.
- bgnn 1y agoFor iPhone, not much. It already has a ridiculously powerful CPU. SWEs can continue writing ridiculously inefficient code. For data centers, it will help a lot. More compute for same power.
- Waterluvian 1y agoLower heat production.
- boddu 1y agoA 1.4nm chip offers significant performance and capability improvements over a 4nm chip, primarily due to increased transistor density. This allows for more powerful and efficient on-device AI processing, enabling new features and capabilities on devices like an iPhone without relying on cloud-based services
- NoOn3 1y agoBut at the same time, the cost of manufacturing may increase. But I have no data on this, it's just a guess.
- pjc50 1y agoIt will increase, but amortization tends to make that fall off over time. Also the newer processes tend to result in smaller die sizes.
- esseph 1y agoProduction of anything on a new line is expensive, doesn't matter if it is chips or cheeze-its
- preisschild 1y ago
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI wonder if they see reduced geopolitical risk or if they simply must continue to operate as if nothing is going to happen until something happens.
- jonplackett 1y agoThe best thing to do is become as valuable to the USA as possible
- giuliomagnifico 1y agoBy the time the factories are completed, Trump will likely have changed his mind about the tariffs a dozen times. Just move along..
- wongarsu 1y agoTSMC announced new fabs in the US earlier this year. They need new fabs in Taiwan so nobody gets any ideas that TSMC could continue operations without a free Taiwan. Keeping Taiwan indispensable to the US is how they keep Chinese invasion plans in the planning state
- ecshafer 1y agoWhy would a free taiwan be necessary? I don’t think there ccp would have any qualms about tsmc continuing operation. A chinese company being the indisputed best at the modt advanced industry in the world is a good thing for them. Assuming a bloodless takeover occurred it would be business as usual.
- lukevp 1y agoThe implication I got from the GP comment is that the U.S. would be reluctant to have CCP manufacturing the processors due to the (proven) risk that they’ll modify and backdoor stuff. If TSMC over invests in US factories then they could be taken over under imminent domain if Taiwan was no longer independent. So they have to keep a large portion of manufacturing domestic to Taiwan for lessened geopolitical risk.
- 1y ago
- dom96 1y agoHow close are we to the limits here? What is the smallest technology we can get to before physics gets in the way?
- thechao 1y agoThis is effective feature size and has little to do with actual geometry. Transistor size has barely budged in the last 10–15 years. The limitation is electrical, and it's not clear where that limit is. The smallest gate was built with an AFM out ~7 atoms; that's about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than a transistor, rn, and upwards of 9 than a stdcell. There's a LOT of room; we just don't know a good path to get to there.
- mrb 1y ago"The smallest gate was built with an AFM out ~7 atoms; that's about 8 orders of magnitude smaller than a transistor" I was thrown off by your statement, so here are some numbers: a modern chip like Nvidia's GH100 manufactured at a 5 nm process is 80 billion gates in 814 mm². That means a gate is 100 nm wide which is the width of 500 silicon atoms. On a 2D area that's 250k atoms. I don't know the thickness but assuming it's also 500 atoms then a gate has a volume of 125 million atoms. So I guess you get your "8 orders of magnitude" difference if you compare the three-dimensional volume (7 atoms vs 125 million). But on one dimension it's only 2 orders of magnitude (7 atoms vs 500). And the semiconductor industry measures progress on one dimension so to me the "2 orders of magnitude" seems the more relevant comparison to make.
- ZenoArrow 1y agoYou're missing the key point, which is that the size referenced as the semiconductor manufacturing node is no longer an accurate description of the true transistor size, it's more of a marketing term. Even if it's possible to build transistors that are 1.4nm in size (or smaller), that is not what "1.4nm" means in the context of this announcement. I get that this can be confusing, it's just a case of smoke and mirrors because Moore's Law is already dead and semiconductor manufacturers don't want to spook investors. The performance gains are still real, but the reasons for getting them are no longer as simple as shrinking transistor size. As for the true physical limits of transistor sizes, there are problems like quantum tunnelling that we aren't likely to overcome, so even if you can build a gate with 7 atoms, that doesn't mean it'll work effectively. Also note that "gate" does not necessarily mean "transistor".
- GeekyBear 1y agoMore information on the new node: > TSMC's A14 is brand-new process technology that is based on the company's 2nd Generation GAAFET nanosheet transistors and new standard cell architecture to enable performance, power, and scaling advantages. TSMC expects its A14 to deliver a 10% to 15% performance improvement at the same power and complexity, a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency as well as transistor count, and 20% - 23% higher transistor density (for mixed chip design and logic, respectively), compared to N2. Since A14 is an all-new node, it will require new IPs, optimizations, and EDA software than N2P (which leverages N2 IP) as well as A16, which is N2P with backside power delivery. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-unveils-1-4nm-technology-2nd-gen-gaa-transistors-full-node-advantages-coming-in-2028 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-unveils-1-4n...
- sroussey 1y agoWhat about SRAM? At this point, the transistors will scale smaller and the eventually the whole chip will just be sram by area.
- zozbot234 1y agoWe'll just have less SRAM per core. Maybe move to eDRAM for last-level caches where speed is not so important.
- aurareturn 1y agodeliver a 10% to 15% performance improvement at the same power and complexity, a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency as To be clear, it's either 10-15% performance improvement on the same power as N2 or 25-30% lower power at the same performance as N2. It's not both.
- chrsw 1y agoKind of sad what's happened to US semiconductor manufacturing. Speaking from an American perspective, of course.
- delfinom 1y agoI blame the American corporate meme. American corporations are hideously slow, lumbering and quite honestly many are just "too big to fail" prop ups at this point. Long gone are actual qualified individuals running even semiconductor manufacturers and its just bean counters and country club nephews.
- yapyap 1y agoanddd, just like any other Western Europesn country Americans need to be paid (semi-) living wages
- azinman2 1y agoAre you arguing that engineers inadequate salaries are to blame for intel losing its edge?
- kelipso 1y agoSoftware engineer salaries in the US are significantly higher than electrical and computer engineering salaries and have been for a whole. Most of the bright and ambitious EE and CE people went to faang companies in 2010s and probably earlier too.
- corimaith 1y agoA big reason why TSMC is competitive on the global market is precisely that their wages are low.. Granted, they don't have a finance industry or big tech to draw away talent.
- dlenski 1y agoYes, this is true. I had a great job in R&D at Intel, in a department full of PhDs, in the 2010s, then jumped to another semi company from 2015-20. Just before the pandemic in 2020, I got a job at AWS as a software engineer. It wasn't the only reason, but it was clear that I could make a lot more money in software. I quickly became disillusioned with almost everything about how large software companies work, and now back working as a data scientist for an advanced manufacturing company 5 years later.
- ksec 1y agoThanks to all the investment due to AI we have been able to continue these improvement at the current rate. To put things into perspective an Apple 1.4nm A18 Pro ( 3nm ) would only use ~50% of the energy with the same performance. I am hoping we have more to squeeze out from an IPC or PPA ( Performance per area ) metric. ARM seems to be in the lead in this area. Wondering if Apple will have something to show in A19 / M5. NAND and DRAM side is a bit more worrying though. Nothing in the pipeline suggest some dramatic changes. Edit: Not sure why I am getting downvoted every time I say it is AI investment leading to improvements. I guess some on HN really hate AI.