A look inside TSMC

https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2019/12/18/a-look-inside-the-factory-around-which-the-modern-world-turns

by bdon • 7 years ago

116 65 7 years ago

economist.com

seraphsf• 7 years ago

https://archive.is/NHfyj

purpleidea• 7 years ago

lol, nobody who gets a look inside lives to tell the tale :/

dotnetcore• 7 years ago

TSMC = 80% foreign investment. its hardly Taiwanese at this point...

PhantomGremlin2• 7 years ago

TSMC is a Taiwanese company.

The people in the C-suite are Taiwanese.

The fabs are in Taiwan. The people who operate the fabs are in Taiwan.

The people who do the R&D for all the processes live in Taiwan. The people who create the Intellectual Property live in Taiwan.

Analogously, many decades ago Mitsubishi Group, a Japanese company, bought Rockefeller Center. Ha ha. Good luck with that. If things didn't work out it's not like they could disassemble 30 Rock and put it on a boat to Japan. Unsurprisingly they no longer own it.

It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.

TSMC's assets are in fabs that are difficult to disassemble without great expense. And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. Who gives a fuck what some bookkeeping entries in some computer ledgers say about "foreign investment".

vladimirralev• 7 years ago

Sooner or later TSMC will build next-gen R&D facilities and fabs. Shareholders will be able to vote for the new locations.

rapsey• 7 years ago

And the other important assets go home every night. "Foreign investment" isn't able to spirit them out of the country.

China has been very aggressively recruiting those engineers to the mainland with high salaries and succeeding.

selimthegrim• 7 years ago

If they were to nationalize it tomorrow (say under threat of war from PRC) I don’t think you’d see 80% of the employees walk

ant6n• 7 years ago

It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.

Is there a source for this story?

qaq• 7 years ago

A look inside without a single photo ...

0-_-0• 7 years ago

5 nm is not visible to the naked eye

sytelus4• 7 years ago

One thing I don't understand is why fabs got uprooted from USA. There doesn't seem to be cost savings if you try to offshore a multi-billion dollar fab because labor is not the main cost. So fab in China/Taiwan/USA should cost more or less same money to run.

barrkel2• 7 years ago

There's nothing magical about innovation that requires it to be located in the US. Why do you think a foreign company should relocate to the US?

sytelus4• 7 years ago

Transistors, microchips and fabs were all born and thrived in USA. One would think USA would have first mover advantage because this is very very hard to replicate tech but for some reason, fabs got completely eradicated from USA.

di4na2• 7 years ago

Environment protection laws. They all reject quite a lotbof nasty chemicals.

We can filter or recycle them but it cost a lot at scale. This is an open secret in EE schools.

sytelus4• 7 years ago

I'm doubtful Taiwan has such loose laws that would make up the cost difference.

redis_mlc2• 7 years ago

EPA and ROI on capital ...

Western companies tend to look at the ROI as a percentage, while Chinese businessmen at the actual profit amount.

As one said, "You can't take ROI to the bank. But I can deposit my nickels."

yorwba• 7 years ago

If fabs everywhere cost the same, why would you build a new fab in the US instead of closer to where the final product will be assembled?

sytelus4• 7 years ago

I know these would e controversial but here it goes:

1. You want fabs in a country where IP laws are protected so third parties don't get their designs stolen.

2. Critical tech from a military/trade perspective.

3. Other governments don't get to introduce secret low-level artifacts such as microcode into chips which runs whole world.

4. General availability of a higher level of capital for research.

5. The confluence of talent from all over the world can contribute to state of the art advancement.

shmerl• 7 years ago

May be pollution reduction? Just a guess.

gumby• 7 years ago

Typically a process step means a completely new fab. Thus when you Build a new one everything is on the table: cost of land, cost of labor, skill level of labor, distance from HQ... So when intel build new fabs in Penang and later PRC these all went into the decision. The old fabs are still around making older-generation parts.

seanmcdirmid• 7 years ago

Intel doesn’t have a fab in Penang, it only has a testing assembly site there. It has one fab in the PRC doing flash memory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...

No non-PRC company is fearless enough to build a new fab in the PRC with anything that aren’t comfortable with being copied by mainland companies.

booblik• 7 years ago

This is not true, Intel regularly upgrades existing fabs to new processes. For example they upgraded 4 fabs to 22nm back in 2010. This list shows how old some fabs are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...

w0utert2• 7 years ago

Intel has ~10 fabs in the US. GlobalFoundries has 3

tpmx4• 7 years ago

Employing 48k qualified people (like TSMC did in 2018) isn't cheap anywhere, and it's likely 2-3 times more expensive in the US. Maybe $1.5B/yr in Taiwan and $5B/yr in the US?

icegreentea2• 7 years ago

As a sibling comment points out, there is still significant fab capacity in the US.

There are a LOT of things to untangle. The first thing is the difference between leading edge fabrication, and everything else. If you look at this wiki list of active fabs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...), you'll see lots of plants still building stuff at 45nm+, and a large chunk building in 22-45nm.

There are only 3 main leading edge manufacturers', TSMC, Intel, and Samsung (I'm discounting Global Foundry since they publicly announced they're not chasing smaller process nodes). All of them concentration their fabs in their home country. Intel has some fabs in Ireland (I don't really know why..), Israel (Intel's Israel team is top-notch and a real contributor to Intel's success, so I guess that makes sense), and one in China (cause that's the world we live in). All of Intel's leading edge plants (10 and 7nm) are in the USA.

Of the non-leading edge plants, you'll also find that the majority of companies also concentrate their fabs in their home country, with American companies being a bit more dispersed. I would evaluate that the majority of fabs reside in a company's home country. I wager a bunch of the greater American dispersion comes from mergers/acquisitions. There's been a lot consolidation in the chip industry (at every level and vertical) in the last few decades.

I think what you're seeing isn't so much companies moving their fabs off shore. What you have is that most companies are no longer willing to invest their own R&D into pushing fabrication processes, so they stop building new fab plants, and instead look for a fabrication house to buy from. And today there's really only one choice, TSMC, which happens to be Taiwanese.

baybal22• 7 years ago

Intel has some fabs in Ireland (I don't really know why..)

Tax

magicsmoke• 7 years ago

I've been reading Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry lately, and there's a whole bit in there about TSMC.

TSMC was the first company to be a "pure-play" company that did no design work and only manufactured orders. This was back in the days when the guys at Intel and IBM had the attitude that to be a real player in the industry, you had to have your own fab. But there was an increasing amount of fabless design houses in the US that would piggyback off the excess fab capacity that Intel/IBM had after they were done with their own chips, and TSMC targeted that demand by tables companies for manufacturing capacity directly.

The takeaways I got was fabs moved away from the US because TSMC and the like figured out an innovative business model that let them focus on a single part of the supply chain that provided substantial cost savings for all these new fabless companies in the US. Meanwhile, the old established players like Intel/IBM with fab experience weren't willing to hop on this new segment and kept their fab capacity mainly for making their own designs. Although TSMC started in a high capital low return segment, as opposed to fabless that could produce and capture most of the value in a chip design, the IP itself, TSMC eventually became so good at what they do and process nodes became so expensive to develop that no other US companies had the incentive to enter this segment from scratch and lose money for years before catching up with TSMC for frankly not very high returns. The only US company keeping up with TSMC is Intel, and that's because they've been manufacturing from the start and have enough volume to make investing in a fab and spreading that fixed expenditure over all their chips worth it.

trebligdivad• 7 years ago

I did wonder if Apple would build a fab; I mean what else do you do with all that cash you've got sloshing about, and they must use a fair chunk of output of a fab.

notlukesky• 7 years ago

“Samsung announced at the Foundry Forum earlier this year that it plans on spending $116 billion over the next decade in an effort to develop the chip production capacity and expertise that will serve the needs of key players in the 5G, automotive, machine learning, blockchain, and high-performance computing markets.”

From: https://www.techspot.com/news/83331-samsung-pouring-116-bill...

siscia3• 7 years ago

I really found TSMC inspiring, the level of technology reached is amazing.

I only wish an effort from Europe to bring this expertise also in Europe.

barrkel2• 7 years ago

Two European companies are mentioned as producing critical hardware for the process.

siscia3• 7 years ago

And I am quite happy.

But still there is a huge difference between being a provider of technology and actually using that technology.

kken2• 7 years ago

Yes, it's ASML and their technology partners in Europe (Zeiss, Trumpf, many others).

ASML is really at the core of bleeding edge semi. Their lithography equipment is basically unchallenged in the industry. Noone can make a 7nm CPU without them.

taspeotis• 7 years ago

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat.

I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes.

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

Fordec2• 7 years ago

I can think of a few.

Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one.

New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea.

Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though.

Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.

temac2• 7 years ago

Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.

nrp• 7 years ago

I suspect SMIC or another Chinese foundry will get there over the next 10-20 years. China justifyably considers it a strategic priority and a matter of national security and will put in as much money as it takes to pull people and IP out of Taiwan, South Korea, and the US to make it happen. The closest parallels are display fabrication, where BOE and CSOT have swallowed the LCD market and BOE is on track to compete with Samsung on OLED market share over the next five years. Similarly, there are a handful of fabs in China now starting to ramp DRAM and flash on competitive process nodes.

throw0101a• 7 years ago

I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes.

There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time.

I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security.

Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.

lainga• 7 years ago

You know what I like to think about sometimes: all of TSMC's facilities, except for one each in Washington and Singapore, are easily in range of mainland A2/AD weapons. Even if Taiwan is unhit, the silicon will be no good if it can't get off the island.

cedivad• 7 years ago

"Balanced on a 5nm point, the world could fall either way."

kken2• 7 years ago

When I read the title, I was actually hoping for a video tour of one of their fully automated 300mm Fabs.

Unfortunately it seems that video material of cutting edge fabs on the web is scarce, and what is available does not really show the fab as a whole, but only details instead.

Well, I guess everybody is afraid of giving away IP...

Some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inoOAOOMjHo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaASEMAMCNM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VIgU1hPok

Research labs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_PCQAJzHj8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttD7JOwpNXo

perlgeek• 7 years ago

The article ended right when it promised to get interesting.

It set up the stage with the construction of the fab, the market, the international tension -- and then nothing.

I would've really loved some insight about what the international influences mean for day to day operation, some technical challenges etc.

(Or this would be the perfect setup for a murder mystery. One of the key engineers is found dead, and her ex-boyfriend, US and Chinese spies all could have a hand in it. My fantasy running wild again... :D )

A look inside TSMC

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