Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2019/06/05/2003716336

by Ultramanoid • 7 years ago

135 31 7 years ago

baybal2• 7 years ago

New backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor fabbers.

If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year straight.

culturestate• 7 years ago

Not to mention that semiconductor manufacturing (among other advanced mfg verticals) is such an integral part of Taiwan’s economic strategy at this point that it would be shocking if they weren’t making heavy investments, global trends be damned.

StudentStuff• 7 years ago

Newer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has 10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead silicon (due to process issues).

We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very real, and exceedingly costly to attempt to work around. AMD's strategy of using 14nm chiplets for components that don't scale down well (eg: analog interfaces, DRAM, etc) is likely to become much more common.

wil421• 7 years ago

Global Foundries has a 12nm for most of the new AMD CPUs.[1] I’ve heard the difference between processes at different companies is just marketing talk but I’ll let someone knowledgeable chime in.

[1]https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B

adamzhou• 7 years ago

TSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government. TSMC should stop the supply.

adinobro• 7 years ago

I'm just curious why you think a Taiwanese company should stop selling to a Chinese company based on statement/policy of a foreign country?

It is obviously in their best financial interest to sell to Huawei. Why should they stop?

TomMarius• 7 years ago

I could understand them wanting TSMC to stop buying from Huawei, but why this?

thefounder2• 7 years ago

Because all this "national security" is really about trade not national security. Trump declared national security on steel, cars and pretty much any important industry that US didn't lead.

i_am_proteus• 7 years ago

Communist China intends to conquer Taiwan. If that happens, all Taiwanese companies will be under the de facto control of the Chinese Communist Party. Selling to Huawei most likely aids Communist China in acheiving it's long-term goal of conquering Taiwan.

So if the owners of a Taiwanese company prefer to control the company rather than cede de facto control to the Chinese Communist Party, this seems entirely reasonable.

chvid2• 7 years ago

Taiwan's chip industry is an obvious winner in USA's trade war against China.

chvid2• 7 years ago

Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner. If you were TSMC or the Taiwan government - why would you risk that relationship?

qaq• 7 years ago

Because the main reason Taiwan is not part of communist China is it has military protection from US?

tooltalk4• 7 years ago

Mainland China is by far Taiwan's biggest trading partner.

That's true for most neighboring Asian countries. But I'm also guessing that most fabless customers are American. Sure, there are Chinese fabless chipmakers such as HiSilicon (Huawei), Tsinghua Unigroup, but nowhere as big as Apple, Qualcomm, or AMD.

emmelaich• 7 years ago

aside: Taipei Times please get a tls site.

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

This may have something to do to with making sure mainland doesn't block them.

pteraspidomorph• 7 years ago

They don't seem to stricly rely on the mainland for connectivity, if you look at https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Although, after a quick check, my own access route seems to touch on Hong Kong (EU -> US -> Pacific).

Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending

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