[HN Gopher] TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B inve...
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TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge
Author : baybal2
Score : 271 points
Date : 2021-04-01 07:06 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asia.nikkei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asia.nikkei.com)
| sschueller wrote:
| Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There
| must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our
| trash.
|
| How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are
| still good?
|
| I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips
| of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices)
| and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Moores law rules this out.
|
| A PS3 only has 256mb of ram, so you need to get it out of the
| case, remove it from the board, check it still works, package
| it up and sell it.
|
| But I can buy 2GB for 5 GBP. Can you do all the aforementioned
| things for less than that?
|
| I wonder if we could sort and melt down chips as a source of
| raw semiconductors (I hear rare earth metal mining/refining is
| very dirty). Maybe that would be economic?
| kingosticks wrote:
| Aren't these BGAs? Safely removing and then also re-balling
| large non-socketed chips is tricky.
|
| Do they actually have machines for this? I understand that the
| re-work house we use do it by hand and also spend a chunk of
| time inspecting the chip once removed since it's very easily
| damaged. Maybe there are more automated places doing this on a
| mass scale, we don't do it very often which might explain the
| general poor results.
|
| This video is pretty cool showing the process
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo
| monocasa wrote:
| It's tricky to do on a one off case, but once you get the
| profiles down it's very automatable.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's technically possible for sure, but I would be surprised if
| the total cost of such a process was worth it compared to
| buying new chips in bulk.
| xxs wrote:
| >How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that
| are still good?
|
| Those things have one big APU (with weak CPU cores), some VRM
| and memory, GDDR5 + useless DDR3. I'd discount the APU as it'd
| need someone to make OS support for with the blessing of
| Sony/Microsoft. That leaves the chips of GDDR5, which can be
| used by low end GPUs - I don't think they'd ever recoup and
| investment and likely cheap manual labor of preheat + hot air
| is the easier option. No idea if anyone would get a license
| from AMD or NVidia for such GPU.
|
| Edit: the capacitors would have the best value but well... I
| cant see anyone relying on old caps for anything but repair.
| eptcyka wrote:
| You can buy a motherboard with the xbone apu in China and run
| windows 10 on it.
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-
| on-a...
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics.
| There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going
| into our trash.
|
| This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale
| in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you
| could've still find people selling refurbished chips in
| Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more
| low profile enterprise.
|
| The US defence department, colloquially known as the pentagon,
| ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what will happen
| if US will be hit with a worst case scenario, years long
| semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs,
| massive industry wide cyberattack, or something happening to
| Taiwan.
|
| One of comissioned think tanks recommended that exact methods
| of military going door-to-door to gather old gaming console,
| smartphones, and PCs for conversion to use in munitions, and
| military equipment.
| hyko wrote:
| My first reaction to this plan is that it's for the birds.
| The government would be better off just building a fab
| themselves. The raw materials aren't that hard to get hold
| of; integrating consumer electronics into military systems
| would likely take just as long, if not longer (with all sorts
| of other negative effects on quality and security). I guess
| the analogy is with scrap metal drives in WWII, but this
| situation is nothing like that at all. It's a fantasy
| scenario that makes no sense.
|
| We defend Taiwan with everything we've got. There is no plan
| B, and it's not just about semiconductors.
| Tade0 wrote:
| IIRC the US navy is currently using XBox controllers:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-
| military...
|
| Of course this is a far cry from ripping a SoC from a
| smartphone and putting it into e.g a bomber drone, but I
| assume there's much more being done - just not published.
| qchris wrote:
| I absolutely believe it-I use one professionally to
| maneuver an underwater ROV. They're intuitive, already
| familiar to a lot of people, and surprisingly reliable.
| hyko wrote:
| Wow. As long as they're not using joy cons I guess!
| mbreese wrote:
| One of the reasons cited for using XBox controllers was
| the availability. If one breaks, you can find them at any
| port. Very apropos in this context...
|
| I have a vision that on a submarine there is a cable box,
| not unlike the one that most of us probably have, filled
| with random cables with connectors we haven't used in
| years. And somewhere in that tangled mess is a spare XBox
| controller. I can imagine some poor Seaman trying to
| untangle a the controller cord so that they can use a
| periscope. I'm sure the Navy is far more organized, but
| it's funny to think about.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >The government would be better off just building a fab
| themselves
|
| OP: >years long semiconductor unavailability due to
| sabotage of domestic fabs
|
| OP said "sabotage of domestic fabs". what the govrt. lay
| out is what happened when all else failed thus going door
| to door to collect semis.
| codeulike wrote:
| _The government would be better off just building a fab
| themselves._
|
| But you can't just 'build a fab' can you? Thats the point.
| You need a shipment of ASML's magic EUV machines and a
| bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and
| managers with the right kind of skills for running a large
| cutting edge fab.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you think there's a scenario that justifies it in 10
| years, you start today. In our quest for ever-more-just-
| in-time-efficiency we've forgotten that it _doesn 't
| work_ for certain things.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians
| and managers with the right kind of skills
|
| In a WWII scenario, how long does it take to rapidly
| retrain a bunch of people with these skills. We have no
| shortage bunch of brilliant, quantitatively minded people
| trading derivatives and writing ML models to recommend TV
| shows. In a total war scenario, I assume most would be
| drafted for the war effort. Semiconductor engineering is
| complex, but probably not so complex that your average
| Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial
| capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before
| you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines
| that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for
| building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women
| can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come
| across steps that just take time.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I did some materials engineering coursework in college,
| and I think your comment significantly underestimates the
| technical complexity of <100nm process node
| manufacturing.
|
| We _had_ many brilliant minds working on these problems
| for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money
| over these decades to achieve each milestone of
| development. Now each of these firms (and each of their
| suppliers) has trade secrets that go _deep_ , and barring
| some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets
| can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds
| in any less than the time it already took to discover and
| develop them in the first place.
|
| There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab
| tech requires a _ton_ of downstream tech: the fab
| machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts
| were developed and manufactured... and the machines that
| were required _there_ as well (repeat...). Also the raw
| materials, especially rare earth minerals.
| incrudible wrote:
| > Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not
| so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick
| it up in a month or two.
|
| We have a chip shortage going on for months now, if all
| it took was two months and a bunch of smart people, those
| billions of dollars in chip orders would've made it
| happen. That tells me it has to be a bit more complex
| than you think.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Has any major organization started or entered the
| semiconductor fab space in the past year? From speaking
| with industry analysts, my understanding is we could spin
| up additional capacity. The issue is that most everyone
| fears the shortage will be over after the Covid supply
| chain disruptions, and therefore any new investments will
| not recoup their necessarily long payback periods.
|
| This is a very different calculus than a WW2 type
| scenario. Fully mobilized, the government would almost
| certainly pay up for microchip capacity today, regardless
| of the long-term payback residual.
|
| If there was evidence of deep-pocketed firms trying and
| failing to get into semiconductor fab in 2020, I'd change
| my opinion. Like if Google or Amazon were trying to open
| their own fab plants, but were failing, then I might
| suspect that a WW2 fully mobilized war effort would run
| into difficulties. But as far as I can tell, the issue is
| that nobody wants to jump into the fab business,
| regardless of the temporarily higher profits over the
| next 2-4 quarters.
| baq wrote:
| A 10nm/7nm fab costs $10B and takes years to build,
| assuming you've got a process which works - developing
| that from scratch will take you a decade before you can
| even design the fab. You could compare the enterprise to
| a smaller scale NASA.
| [deleted]
| mkr-hn wrote:
| You only need those for the latest and greatest. A lot of
| options open up if the priority is any decently fast
| processor over the latest. Multi-CPU systems fell out of
| favor in the consumer space because single CPUs got so
| fast with these processes, but multiple CPUs with an
| older process is fine in this scenario.
| elihu wrote:
| ...or just be content with a slower chip.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| They are building a fab, or at least they're having TSMC
| build a fab in Arizona.
| User23 wrote:
| The only chance the USA has in a hot war for Taiwan is
| using nukes to which the PRC would respond in kind. That
| would be even worse for semiconductor availability than
| reunification. So let's cool it with the macho idiocy and
| instead focus on diversifying the semiconductor supply
| chain to areas that aren't inevitably going to fall back
| under Chinese control.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I'm personally willing to end the world to prevent the
| dystopia of hegemonic china.
|
| The total suffering in the world from hegemonic china is
| far higher than in a post WW3 world. You might think this
| is a joke but I am deadly serious. We need to take a very
| extreme stand against techno-authoritarianism or else
| life isn't worth living.
| FpUser wrote:
| I see that they have internet access in those
| institutions.
| foobarian wrote:
| You should look at the stockpile sizes. Unless Russia
| gets involved it would not be a balanced situation at
| all.
| blackearl wrote:
| The stockpile is a ridiculous measurement. How many would
| it take to have mutually assured destruction? A dozen?
| One of the most worthless dick measuring contests in
| history.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > How many would it take to have mutually assured
| destruction?
|
| In case of China, or Russia, thousands.
| lainga wrote:
| What leads you to the estimate of a dozen? Very few
| modern warheads have multiple-megaton yields, it's less
| efficient than many small-yield warheads.
| jjk166 wrote:
| A 100kt nuclear warhead airburst will cause moderate
| damage to an area of 33.5km^2. Beijing has an area of
| 16800km^2, 501 times larger. China has 160 cities with
| over 1 million inhabitants. Even if they were all used
| against major population centers (which they wouldn't be)
| and all of them made it to their targets (which they
| wouldn't), thousands of nuclear warheads would still not
| be enough to destroy a large nation.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Seriously. We're talking about horrible things, here.
|
| But _if_ it came to a nuclear exchange, China has ~300,
| and the US and Russia ~6,000 each. Total yield numbers
| are harder to come by(?), so those are + /- considering
| tactical-scale inventory.
|
| Historically, this was because China's nuclear doctrine
| was to limit their stockpile to a minimal deterrent.
|
| Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target,
| I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's
| freedom.
|
| Either you stand for something, or you don't. And China
| doesn't get to claim modern territory by dusting off
| historical documents. Hong Kong was untenable, but Taiwan
| should be a line. If its citizens don't want to be
| Chinese, they get to make that choice.
|
| PS: Russia would probably care less about a strike on
| China, unless China negotiated their support via treaty.
| That ship sailed in the early 60s.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US
| target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee
| Taiwan's freedom."
|
| Personally I'd support the US never letting people with
| this kind of thinking anywhere near decision making. Let
| them play stocks.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| All insistence in international politics has risk. If you
| can't tolerate risk, you'll get pushed around by those
| who are willing to.
| FpUser wrote:
| Respond with overwhelming force if being pushed. If
| however you are the one starting pushing you are just a
| bully or in this particular case fuckin' war criminal.
| comte7092 wrote:
| It's not "dusting off historical documents" it's official
| government policy on both sides of the straight that
| there's "one China".
|
| One could argue that the only reason why the ROC hasn't
| declared independence is because they'd fear that it
| would provoke an attack from across the straight, but the
| reality is that independence is not a cut and dry issue
| in Taiwan.
|
| Take some time to actually educate yourself on the issue
| before advocating for nuclear war.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Taiwan has been Dutch, Han, Qing, Japanese, and ROC. Any
| appeal to history is nine^H^H^H^Hten dashes of
| propaganda.
|
| > _it's official government policy on both sides of the
| straight that there's "one China"_
|
| That's an oversimplification. The KMT / Pan-Blue believe
| there's "one China" in the sense that they believe the
| PRC is an illegitimate government, currently occupying
| mainland Chinese territory that belongs to the ROC.
|
| The DPP / Pan-Green believe there are two Chinas, with
| Taiwan as an independent entity from the mainland PRC.
| Their current official position is that this state of
| affairs already exists, and therefore there is no need to
| make any declarations or changes from the status quo.
|
| So in summary, about one half of Taiwanese political
| power considers the communist government as illegitimate,
| and the other half considers Taiwan independent. Which I
| would guess is fairly different from what the PRC defines
| "one China" as.
| comte7092 wrote:
| This is the nuance I was calling for.
|
| Yes, there are different definitions on both sides of the
| straight. And while the independence side has gained
| strength in recent years, the official stance has been
| that China and Taiwan are a part of one country, however
| defined, and, to my knowledge, no official government act
| of the ROC has been promulgated to the contrary.
|
| As I stated in my original reply, independence isn't a
| cut and dry issue. To assert that these claims are
| "dusty" historical claims in light of what you've written
| here is disingenuous.
|
| Edit: I should add that there is only one government in
| Taiwan, the ROC. The stances of the individual political
| parties cannot be taken as synonymous with the stance of
| the ROC itself. To do so would be as ludicrous to say
| that there's no right to an abortion in the United
| States, because 1 of the two major political parties
| opposes it. The most that can be said is that both
| abortion in the US and independence in Taiwan are
| controversial and delicate political issues within each
| respective jurisdiction.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _to my knowledge, no official government act of the ROC
| has been promulgated to the contrary_
|
| The 1999 "Resolution on Taiwan's Future," since elevated
| to DPP party platform, is crystal clear on "two Chinas."
| comte7092 wrote:
| Party platforms are not official government policy.
| dalyons wrote:
| > Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US
| target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee
| Taiwan's freedom
|
| What? That doesn't make sense. If the US triggered nuke
| slinging over Taiwan the Taiwanese would be ash, not
| free.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Why would China nuke Taiwan?
| baq wrote:
| out of spite. they'd get glassed anyway, so why not use
| those nukes for something?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Because that's literally the land the hypothetical war
| would have been started to capture? Because the casus
| belli to their public has been that it's (PRC) Chinese
| land by historical and cultural right? Because the entire
| domestic and international point of provoking a Strait
| war would be to demonstrate China's strength?
|
| It's a pretty bad look if your "winning" looks like
| "killed millions of people and rendered the land in
| question uninhabitable for a decade+." (To say nothing of
| the potential non-Taiwan collateral damage)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| We can shoot down some of those nukes. Maybe china has to
| fire 20 on taiwan before one of them gets through our
| anti-ICBM weapons on our naval ships.
|
| Means that we might come out of a war with china with
| only a few cities lost. Might actually be worth it.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Means that we might come out of a war with china with
| only a few cities lost. Might actually be worth it."
|
| How generous of you. Hopefully you'll be in one of those
| cities at the moment.
| unixhero wrote:
| And retalliation would be immediate and dooming.
|
| Mutually assured destruction
| Leary wrote:
| Better Dead Than Red is alive and well, hahahaha.
| hyko wrote:
| There's nothing macho about a conflict of this magnitude,
| it would be absolutely horrible. But we have to set clear
| expectations and unambiguous boundaries to avoid a
| dangerous miscalculation, not pretend we have contingency
| plans that don't actually exist.
|
| There is nothing inevitable about a Chinese invasion of
| Taiwan. My sense is that the Chinese leadership are far
| too insightful to actually start that war, but you never
| know.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > My sense is that the Chinese leadership are far too
| insightful to actually start that war, but you never
| know.
|
| I think it's not too hard for a dictator to become out of
| touch and go off the rails, mentally. Or turn paranoid or
| whatever. Hopefully he isn't using stimulants.
| Leary wrote:
| They haven't been churning out amphibious ships that you
| would expect them to if they thought invasion was
| imminent.
| squarefoot wrote:
| "The US defence department, colloquially known as the
| pentagon, ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what
| will happen if US will be hit with a worst case scenario,
| years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of
| domestic fabs, massive industry wide cyberattack, or
| something happening to Taiwan."
|
| There is also the danger of counterfeit chips. It is already
| a plague for those of us hoping to get some good deals from
| Chinese vendors, but the US Navy as well was hit at least
| once with fakes.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-
| ccips/l... (.pdf document)
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for
| in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is
| gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For
| Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to
| install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more
| questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this
| specific configuration.
| unionpivo wrote:
| because for a lot of things you don't need that much cpu
| power.
|
| Creating something that can read several sensors (switches
| and buttons are also sensors), and putting aggregate status
| updates on a serial line, or displaying status lights,
| triggering relay or something similar can be done, on
| decades old gaming consoles, and is probably one of the
| most common use of processors in the world today.
|
| In fact it is easier than trying to use modern cpu, that
| wasn't designed for that.
|
| Not everything is about computation, in fact in terms of
| units sold its probably a minority.
| blagie wrote:
| I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz
| worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I
| couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM.
| Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are
| more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word
| processor fits more text.
|
| On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly
| bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be
| interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to
| play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics
| (including things like family photos and videos), and so
| on.
|
| It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-
| or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't
| be done on older hardware with appropriate software.
| There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where
| migrations would be massive projects.
|
| If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't
| automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging),
| word process, write code, I think that'd be a major
| systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of
| people would simply die.
|
| On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-
| level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd
| likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but
| without such a collapse.
| ip26 wrote:
| Older levels of performance wouldn't cripple humanity.
| But putting together something that actually works out of
| a big parts bin is a crapshoot, and supporting a
| deployment of machines which are each completely unique
| is an IT nightmare.
|
| We could do it if we had to, of course.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think the best chances to get something useful would be
| to collect x86 consoles. x86 means you've got a well
| supported target, and consoles means you've got limited
| hardware variations.
|
| Military could probably pressure Microsoft to give them
| some way to turn an original xbox into a PC; and if you
| give people $50 for an original xbox most will be happy.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Youtube isn't sticking around
|
| As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget
| that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries
| would collapse if computing power is gone
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Computational power < network connectivity
|
| If we lost a few decades of processor improvements, it
| would be about as parent noted.
|
| If we lost worldwide connectivity or all undersea
| backbones between some terrestrial networks... it would
| be civilization-altering.
| chefkoch wrote:
| Military equipment is often more than a decade old and uses
| far older electronics.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I bought a Tesla T4 on eBay. Many people will buy a set of
| broken laptops and use the parts to make a fixed one like Like
| Miami. Louis Rossman constantly has to find donor boards to fix
| laptops.
| monocasa wrote:
| Xboxes and PlayStations have cryptographic chains of trust
| going back to their on die boot ROM. You can't just pull it out
| and use it on another Xbox or PlayStation, much less use them
| for generic computation.
|
| I think the Xbox One is the first console to have no unsigned
| code execution at all during it's lifetime.
| qball wrote:
| You can trivially run whatever code you wanted to if you
| seized the signing keys; I suspect that in such a "collect
| all the general-purpose computers for general-purpose
| computing things" that would be the first order of business.
|
| Not that the government doesn't already have copies, of
| course.
| monocasa wrote:
| I guess I didn't read a .gov mandate in what the parent was
| suggesting.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| What would you put them in? Everyone wants the latest and
| greatest Playstation or Xbox with the fastest chips.
| londons_explore wrote:
| _If_ latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation
| collapse), we 'd do just fine with existing chips for decades
| or maybe even centuries.
|
| With clever software, you can eek much more real world use
| out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting
| with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful
| computations for someone else who needs more computing power.
| KMag wrote:
| > existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries.
|
| Chips experience solid-state diffusion, so I'd expect the
| expected survival probability of chips (ignoring any infant
| mortality effects) to go something like feature_size /
| sqrt( time ). If this is true, then I'd guess modern
| process nodes would have very low survival rates out at 100
| years. Though, it's been over 20 years since I had any
| solid state chemistry, and most of my experience with
| diffusion modeling is in financial models, so take my wild
| guess with a grain of salt.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But the failure rate in observed time for non-nand
| components is very very low.
|
| Take a 5 year old phone, and the chances of the main
| board being bad might be 10%... But the chances of the
| main CPU being bad is probably under 0.1%. The other 99%
| of failures are mostly water damage, physical damage, bad
| soldering, fatigue failure, bad nand, etc.
|
| Maybe they'll all fail at once, but I somehow doubt it.
| IC's from the 1970's are still going strong, also with a
| low failure rate.
| swiley wrote:
| You don't have to be clever (unless you're talking about
| video games), just not completely reckless.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Completely pie-in-the-sky. Chips aren't fungible.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah, we would have to assume a post-fab apocalypse where we
| dig out electronics from a landfill for it to be economically
| viable.
| rasz wrote:
| Yet here we are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s
| Chinese "Motherboard" made using salvaged VRMs and
| transistors, salvaged capacitors, salvaged Intel Chipset!,
| and made to work with retired Intel Xeons and older DDR3 ECC
| memory.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.
| alexgray1415 wrote:
| Get out!
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Serious answer: Reusing old components makes no sense as
| the changes in technology are too big (say from a PS3 which
| has 45nm chip to a 7nm PS5 cpu). However you can keep using
| your playstation for longer as the new one will be more
| expensive or harder to get.
| jonplackett wrote:
| NEW 5nm Kettle Chips! I'd buy some.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Careful setting next year's quotas based on last year's
| shortages...
| carlmr wrote:
| True, but where do you see demand dropping off? I would
| actually assume demand will go up even more, since the economy
| was slowed down due to the pandemic.
| bsder wrote:
| > True, but where do you see demand dropping off?
|
| Likely December.
|
| Right now, because everyone is fearful of shortages, they've
| overbought or are in the process of overbuying.
|
| At some point, everyone is going to realize that, in the US,
| carrying inventory has tax implications, and everybody is
| going to try to dump a bunch of inventory back into the
| system that they really didn't need and aren't prepared to
| pay taxes on.
|
| Which will be fine for a while--until the middlemen get back
| up to what they consider useful inventory levels and quit
| buying. And all the prices will crash.
| iopq wrote:
| For TSMC there's very little risk
|
| This is because a newly competitive AMD takes up a ton of
| wafers. They can't make them fast enough, and in 2022 they
| are releasing a completely new platform with DDR 5 on 5nm,
| and presumably new GPU line.
|
| This should again clobber Intel 10nm products. Even if
| there's no chip shortage, the customers of TSMC are very
| healthy (AMD, Apple, other phone manufacturers).
| rcxdude wrote:
| Who's keeping inventory? Certainly for consumer channels
| there's basically no inventory to be had.
| bsder wrote:
| End companies, themselves. Any inventory that shows up
| gets overbought immediately. Two companies I know have
| x10 the microcontrollers they need for the year because
| they overbought when they could.
|
| If they pushed those microcontrollers back right now,
| they'd make quite a nice profit. But they won't.
|
| Instead, those companies will hit the tax implications
| starting in December and _then_ will try to push their
| overbought inventory. Of course, at that point
| _everybody_ will be trying to push their inventory and
| the prices will crash.
| rasz wrote:
| Crypto bans would free a large portion of GPU demand.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| I think the changes pushed people to invest in new devices,
| etc, for a per-user lifestyle, while going back to
| restaurants, meeting rooms, etc, there's an excess of second
| hand inventory.
| Shivetya wrote:
| oh I bet many are going to find the opportunity provided by
| the equipment gives them a lot of flexibility with work but
| also to communicate with friends and family. Many had never
| considered using zoom, their ipads, and other means, to
| keep in touch. The visual aspect may finally lead to where
| people will desire phones calls are both audio and visual.
|
| maybe the video phone will become an actual reality instead
| of something most people only see on TV and in movies
| bigdogc wrote:
| I don't think the shortage will be over in the next 2-3 years
| at the least. This is a huge problem that the media only
| briefly covers. Biden just announced 25b to semiconductors bc
| homeland security knows we have major flaws in the supply
| chain.
| Wohlf wrote:
| This isn't about next year though, this is about planning
| capacity for the next decade at least.
| Hypx wrote:
| This reminds me of Moore's Second Law, namely that the cost of
| maintaining Moore's Law will itself follow an exponential growth
| curve. You figure there will come a date where any attempt to
| maintain Moore's Law will become so expensive that there's no way
| it can avoid slowing down drastically. At which point the
| semiconductor industry will behave like other heavy industries
| and improves at a much more modest rate.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| 1. can we afford to just build fab without consideration of
| profit? what you going to do when you can't turn a profit with
| all the fabs in the US?
|
| 2. TSMC and the rest of the foundry industry are exposed to the
| highly cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry. we are
| seeing the high demands for chip because of covid and car
| vendors' f'ck up. what you going to do with all the fabs build in
| the US when you are hit with downturn?
|
| we saw Intel struggle with 10nm and 7nm delay. i think its wiser
| to invite fab company like TSMC and Samsung to build fab in the
| US even with smaller capacity.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Some choice quotes from Mark Liu, chairman of TSMC this week
| agreeing with you:
|
| * "It's economically unrealistic for all the countries to build
| additional chip production capacity,"
|
| * "Uncertainties led to double booking, but actual capacity is
| larger than demand," How quickly those concerns are resolved
| "really depends on future U.S.-China negotiations."
|
| * each country developing its own domestic semiconductor
| industry would lead to a lot of "nonprofitable" capacity.
|
| >what you going to do with all the fabs build in the US when
| you are hit with downturn?
|
| Priority sourcing from domestic fabs, let TSMC whither, by
| design. Semi is oil now, there's more strategic/geopolitical
| considerations than supply/demand curve. US/EU/CN do not want
| Taiwan to have semi dominance, it's not in anyone's interest.
| Current TSMC position is happenstance due to poor industrial
| policies that countries are scrambling to address. IMO press
| releases and capex spending around Arizona announcement suggest
| TSMC wasn't prepared to built US fab, let alone 6. US pressured
| them, EU failed to. There's a good chance TSMC/Taiwan will try
| to delay their silicon shield evaporating for as long as they
| can. Probably not a coincidence big ticket US weapons sales are
| scheduled around when fabs would be up.
| ip26 wrote:
| 1. Yeah, we certainly could, but profit is what got us from
| 50um to 3nm.
| bigdogc wrote:
| How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business?
| On the low end of the budget.
| clarifier123 wrote:
| I don't know how much would it normally cost, but the EU is
| spending 145 billion EUR to kick-start it:
| https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...
| mastax wrote:
| You can read around the parallax propeller 2 forums for an idea
| of what it takes on the low end - they were very open about the
| process. IIRC they have one guru who does software and Verilog,
| one who does RTL layout (term?) and the rest are support staff
| who do other things at the rest of the company most of the time
| (PCB designer, assembly, sales, HR, etc.)
|
| The raspberry pi pico team also did a good podcast episode
| talking about this - I think it was a podcast called innovation
| coffee or something like that. Hosted by a guy from ARM Europe.
| orbifold wrote:
| The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per seat
| each, there is no way around them if you want to actually tape
| out the chip. An experienced backend engineer needs 3-4 months
| to take a design from Verilog to a file that can be send to a
| Foundry. You also need access to a PDK from a manufacturer like
| TSMC and probably will have to license some of the digital-
| analog components (PLL, IO-Pads) from someone. Manufacturing
| itself is fairly expensive as well, we taped out via
| europractice ( https://europractice-ic.com/schedules-prices/),
| you pay about 12k per square millimetre in TSMC 65nm. Even
| older processes are more affordable, but you have to keep in
| mind that each of them requires at least some customisation and
| access to blocks specific to the process (memories for
| instance).
|
| On the design and verification side the story is slightly
| better, verilator (https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator) for
| instance is an excellent tool that lets you simulate system-
| verilog code with high performance. It has seen wide industry
| adoption in the last years and now a couple of companies like
| Google, SiFive, etc. are investing in open source tooling for
| hardware. You can go a long way to building your design without
| having to pay for expensive licenses. The downside is that most
| of the interface type components (PCI-Express, DDR4, etc.) are
| prohibitively complicated to build yourself, so you will need
| to rely on external IP at some point.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > The professional tools are licensed at 100k-200k/year per
| seat each, there is no way around them if you want to
| actually tape out the chip.
|
| Unless you talk about countries where people simply don't pay
| for software no matter what.
|
| Some companies are just fine with 10 years old pirated
| Virtuosos in places like China.
|
| It was a big surprise to me that even software which probably
| has less than 100 licensees globally is still getting
| warezed.
| orbifold wrote:
| Yes, I can totally believe that, the software itself is
| actually distributed in a fairly convenient format, given
| that some of it is only compatible with some obscure RedHat
| version, so installation amounts to copying files from an
| iso image and pointing it to a license server. It probably
| is also easy to patch out the License server code. I would
| be fairly surprised if those places also had access to
| current gen PDKs and the required memory compilers. We have
| to basically order memory blocks by mail and don't get
| access to the tools to generate them ourselves.
| madengr wrote:
| 100k-200k is low. I know a full suite of the 500 pound
| gorilla is $550k.
| swiley wrote:
| It depends pretty heavily on the semiconductors you want to
| produce, if you want to replicate the technology of the early
| 60s people have done that in their kitchen (see cooking with
| Jerry for an example.)
| pjc50 wrote:
| _Manufacturing_ you 'd need billions and the support of your
| government. But a _design_ business? There 's quite a lot of
| those around.
|
| Bare minimum estimates, working backwards:
|
| - $? for marketing and distribution, physical inventory costs
|
| - $100k/y for one field engineer (FAE)
|
| - $250k for first successful manufacturing run
|
| - $250k for first full mask run with bugs
|
| - $100k bringup boards, test equipment, engineering time fixing
| it
|
| - $25k shuttle run for initial testing. This will find at least
| one bug.
|
| - $100-200k outsourced layout: this is boring, specialised, and
| low value-add, so get someone else to do it
|
| - $500k/y misc software and testing staff or consultants
|
| - $100-500k/y each: 3-5 senior design engineers. For best
| results, these are people you already know and are spinning out
| of their job at Big Boring Semi Co
|
| - optional $100k really big FPGA + software + custom boards
|
| - $250k/y software licenses from Cadence or Synopsys, unless
| you're very brave and want to try the open source flow
|
| - IP licenses. Not just obvious things like ARM cores, but
| analogue or semi-analogue IP like high-speed transcievers.
| icefo wrote:
| Do you know how it is to work on software in this industry ?
| Be it for the tools or embedded software programming or in
| VHDL / verilog.
|
| I'm still in university and I've always liked hardware and
| low level related stuff but I've heard bad things about
| software in hardware companies like Qualcomm.
| baybal2 wrote:
| The wage disparity in between semi industry at large, and
| almost everything else is a matter of legends...
|
| Almost every part of semi industry is very bad on effort to
| salary ratio, and players like Intel, or Qualcomm are far
| from the worst, they actually do very well on salary front,
| and attracting talent. It's Asian companies who score the
| worst on that.
|
| TSMC process development job is 100:1 lottery win + 20
| years of your life for $50k a year salary. Know people with
| first hand experience of that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm quite happy at Cirrus doing tools, but I'm aware that
| they are an outlier who put effort into staff happiness.
|
| In many other places software is an afterthought to the
| hardware, and it shows.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Excellent description, I wished I could've pushed your
| comment higher.
|
| People are always shocked when I tell how tiny is the semi
| industry, but it really is.
|
| Besides the super-concentration of semi manufacturing which
| starts to get more coverage, designs needs some exposure too.
|
| When Apple bought PA Semi, it went rather unnoticed, but
| people didn't know that the amount of logic designers of a
| such calibre who can design cores like ZEN, or Firestorm is
| probably less than 100 in the whole of North America.
|
| Sounds very dramatic, but America is less than 100 senior
| logic designers away from getting out of design business too.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| the software license number is off by a large factor for
| leading edge nodes. large!
| throwaway4good wrote:
| There was this a while back:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755693
|
| Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips (fossi-
| foundation.org)
| baybal2 wrote:
| > How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor
| business? On the low end of the budget.
|
| A decade ago, it would've taken you $1m in China for a 50/50
| shot at it.
|
| If your first tapeout works, you will make money, if not... you
| wasted $1m.
|
| $1m looks like pocket change to most American tech people now,
| but the fabless trains has long since departed.
|
| You will need a sum with few more zeroes, to get a jumpstart in
| the industry now.
|
| There was 4-3 years long extreme consolidation push in the
| industry, with big swallowing dozens producers of commodity
| products. It is very reminiscent how the demise of American oil
| industry happened when the industry gone from thousands of oil
| producers, to less than 10 in one decade. Everybody bets now
| that there will be 10-15 or so mega-fabless running the
| industry in coming decade.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It massively depends what you want to build...
|
| There are plenty of designs where just $10k will get you an
| ASIC built in some university... It won't be anything like
| leading edge silicon though, but for some products that's all
| you need.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > There are plenty of designs where just $10k will get you
| an ASIC built in some university
|
| With a few micron university process? Yes, can you
| commercialise it? No.
|
| I believe 180nm has for long been the limit of how
| "commercially viable" is defined even for stuff like
| analogue, and discrete logic ICs.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| To build chips similar to what TSMC produces (i.e. some of the
| most cutting-edge fab tech in the world)? Hundreds of billions
| of dollars. Decades of experience. Growing silicon crystals and
| turning them into transistors barely bigger than a few dozen
| atoms is immensely difficult. And then turning that into a
| process you can repeat with precision and churn out at high
| yield is another enormous hurdle.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Serious question as someone totally naive on this. A few
| hundred billion dollars seems like an extremely good deal to
| lead this area of technology - why don't we see funding for
| this at a government level? I mean, we now have a 2 trillion
| dollar infrastructure plan.
|
| Is there an impediment I'm not aware of? Or maybe it's not as
| good of a deal as I think?
| nindalf wrote:
| > why don't we see funding for this at a government level
|
| Because America fell asleep at the wheel while Taiwan did
| not. TSMC and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers benefited
| from a government that saw the need to be a part of high
| value manufacturing. Meanwhile America of the 90s and 2000s
| assumed that it would be the most powerful country in
| perpetuity and so it wouldn't matter where something was
| being produced as long as they could pay for it.
|
| The events of the 2010s has shown the flaws of this
| thinking. It is now possible for American firms to be cut
| off completely from semiconductor manufacturing, similar to
| how Huawei was cut off. There is now support from the
| American government to restore semiconductor manufacturing.
| They are footing a part of the bill for TSMC's new plant.
| I'm sure Intel's lobbyists are skilled enough to get part
| of their new plants paid for as well. China is doing the
| same - the state has deployed all it's resources behind
| SMIC to ensure that what happened to Huawei never happens
| again.
|
| It's more complicated than this though. You don't just need
| semiconductor fabs, you also need rare earth metals, almost
| all of which is mined and refined in China. America is
| attempting to reshore this too
| (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-
| economics/2021/03/31/g...)
| throwawayzRUU6f wrote:
| > need rare earth metals, almost all of which is mined
| and refined in China
|
| This is usually presented as an ace up the sleeve that
| China has secured through shrewd strategic thinking. In
| reality, rare earth metals are neither particularly rare,
| nor are they expensive, nor are they in high demand.
|
| Rare earth metals are more common than silver or mercury,
| somewhat rarer than cobalt. The ones with excellent
| magnetic quantities go for ~$50 per kilo (allegedly only
| 200g is required per electric car), the ones used for
| catalysts and alloy making go for as low as $2 per kilo,
| cheaper than copper.
|
| They're not nearly as much of a constraint as claimed.
| shigawire wrote:
| My understanding is that they are hard to extract
| economically without destroying the environment. Also I
| believe more come from Brazil now anyways?
| qchris wrote:
| This is my understanding as well; one of the reasons why
| China has such a high percentage of that market isn't
| because no one else can, but rather that they don't want
| to. The environmental damage is often horrendous [1][2]
| so everyone that can outsources it. I believe there's
| also been a lot of work on reducing or replacing relience
| on those materials in quite a few areas, as I believe a
| parent comment mentioned.
|
| [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-
| the-toxic...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-
| worst-place-...
| BuckRogers wrote:
| Intel's new fab is in the US (where I reside), I hope
| they get subsidized as I'm worried about our
| manufacturing capability across the board. It's affecting
| what I'm looking to purchase as well, having a few issues
| with my Ryzen 5900X system and instability matters far
| more than performance so I'm thinking hard to an Intel
| alternative. "Slow" but stable, and investing in the US?
| Sign me up.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Modern semiconductors were invented in America, literally
| why we call it Silicon Valley. We used to have the best
| fabs in the world but 80's and 90's corporate American
| business culture decided it was better to shut down all
| that manufacturing and move it overseas for more short-term
| profit. They're now coming to the hard realization that
| maybe that was a massive mistake.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The story is not anywhere near that straightforward for
| semiconduction fabrication. A huge portion of that
| fabrication, for example, just moved out of california to
| other places in the US. Also there's been a general
| consolodation of fabrication plants over time as more and
| more advanced nodes put the price of a plant up by orders
| of magnitudes. There just isn't enough money for the same
| number of fabs at the bleeding edge. Also, intel are
| still US based manufacturing and they have only quite
| recently been toppled from the throne of most advanced
| process. They have simply lost to the advancement of
| overseas tech companies (generally it seems because they
| made a bad bet on their strategy for further shrinks to
| their process), nothing to do with US companies
| outsourcing overseas.
| sfifs wrote:
| > There just isn't enough money for the same number of
| fabs at the bleeding edge.
|
| There definitely is but it will come at the cost of share
| buy backs and keeping share price up which affects
| compensation of management. Failure to keep the share
| price up by investing in manufacturing in US will also
| invite predatory share holders to topple the management.
| The cult of "free" markets driving wealth growth at the
| top of the society seems to have trumped strategic common
| sense.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 20 years ago I had the line, American businessman and
| political leaders are stupid. Because they think they own
| those factories in China and the far east.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > but 80's and 90's corporate American business culture
| decided it was better to shut down all that manufacturing
| and move it overseas for more short-term profit
|
| This is a very non-confrontational way to say, "Greedy
| ass Boomers who were given practically everything by the
| events surrounding the end of World War II -
| manufacturing destroyed across all of Europe, Asiatic
| nations still mostly third-world places, second world at
| best, managed to fuck up so badly due to greed and
| incompetence while growing up in a world with, literally,
| no competition, sold their children and their
| grandchildren down the river so they wouldn't have to be
| even slightly uncomfortable in retirement, unlike their
| parents."
|
| This just furthers my belief that if you couldn't make an
| above-average life for yourself as a Boomer, you were
| just a pathetic fuck-up who would have probably starved
| to death 100-200 years ago.
| iopq wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Samsung and TSMC are home-grown in their respective
| countries and Intel still makes chips. Together, they
| make the majority of the world's chips.
| orbifold wrote:
| The US is heavily investing in that, there are recent DARPA
| programs (POSH, IDEA, SHIELD, SAHARA, ...) addressing this
| and continuous government investment in semiconductor
| technologies.
| kwere wrote:
| having skilled peoples at every org level capable to do the
| job is the most difficult part. Any gov could spend
| Trillions and still get little in return
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >why don't we see funding for this at a government level?
|
| China big fund 2014 yield nothing. SMIC still have to poach
| TSMC engineers to get them to 14nm. we'll see how China big
| fund II going to do.
|
| U.S. govrt is dumping money into semis by asking TSMC and
| Samsung to open fab in US and Intel is gunning for US
| govrt's money by going IDM 2.0.
| elsjaako wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are referring to the US specifically,
| but there are governments doing this.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-tech-semiconductor-
| idUSKB...
| insert_coin wrote:
| One word: Financialization.
|
| The 70s started the trend of financializing (is that the
| word?) everything, that meant that at every step of every
| productive process someone packaged it into a tradable
| "paper", which got packaged with other paper from other
| productive processes and then re-sold and repackaged again
| and again to the market as proxies of the value from those
| productive processes.
|
| Holding paper assets turned out to be much more lucrative
| than the actual production for most companies, not to
| mention far far easier than competing in the market with
| products and innovation, so naturally it slowly began to
| chip away at the quality of the production in favor of
| holding paper that represented production. Outsourcing
| became possible and they noticed it didn't matter to the
| ones buying the paper assets who actually did the work, so
| it skyrocketed.
|
| Financialization required an immeasurable amount of debt,
| they began extending credit to anyone so they could buy
| said paper, and then turned around and made the debt itself
| financial paper.
|
| That got us the stock market booms of the 80s, the 90s, the
| dot com, the financial crisis, and of course their busts.
|
| Now we are at the end, and the signal? companies are adding
| bitcoin to their balance sheets. The cycle of
| finacialization is complete, paper is no longer required
| and you don't even have to outsource your production, not
| that you have it anyways, as all you need to post profits
| and pretend you are a good CEO is buy crypto and hodl.
|
| Production for a 'modern' business is rapidly becoming a
| thing of the past. Governments can try to buy their way
| into any market but it is useless; most businesses have no
| real capacity to compete delivering cutting edge products
| with actual real "bare-metal" profitable businesses because
| they can only make profits "on paper".
|
| (sorry if finacialization is not how it's written)
| Guthur wrote:
| Doom doom money doom doom. Nonsense.
|
| Top 10 companies
|
| https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-
| worl...
|
| Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s
| millions of people are getting value from, with the
| possible exception of Facebook :p
|
| As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta
| Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th
| most valuable company.
|
| Out of the top 10 you do get some pure play financial
| companies like Berkshire, Morgan Chase, Visa (maybe).
|
| Cutting edge semi conductor manufacture is arguably some
| of the most advanced technology and manufacturing we do
| at scale. It's just plain hard hard. The equipment, the
| expertise, the lead time to manufacture, it's all big
| scale problems.
|
| Relatively speaking getting manufacturing of old node
| sizes would like not be remotely as hard, 32nm maybe even
| 16nm.
| kcb wrote:
| That list is wildly incorrect. Delta Electronics doesn't
| have anything remotely close to a 1.4T USD market cap.
| insert_coin wrote:
| Those companies, maybe with the exception of Facebook and
| Microsoft, are literally only possible because of paper
| money. Take out the paper they hold from their balance
| sheets and their size goes down in half. Take away their
| ability to own their markets by issuing debt bonds, which
| would mean competing with the revenue generated by their
| own products, and you kill them.
|
| Apple became the biggest company in the world not only
| because they create products everyone wants, but equally
| because they are masters at managing money and debt. That
| is what gives them the edge in production as they barely
| produce anything. They are probably the best at managing
| financial assets by far.
|
| And Tesla, well Tesla is very bad at building cars, they
| are bankrupt without paper profits. They shouldn't be on
| that list.
|
| Semiconductors is not harder than any other cutting edge
| industry that has come before. Taiwan is not special,
| they are 20 million people. A good chunk of them trained
| and educated in the US.
| sfifs wrote:
| Also note that as far as hardware production is
| concerned, Tesla is the only company on that list that
| actually manufacturers anything at scale in the US
| anymore.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The US dominant ideology is _private_ enterprise, not
| government enterprise. This is why the US does not even own
| its high-tech weapon manufacturers, preferring to have
| Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin at one remove. Of
| course, they wouldn 't exist without government money, but
| they're private companies with private shareholders.
|
| So when you're talking a few hundred billion dollars for a
| US-first technological capability, the important question
| is who will get the money and how will they be held
| accountable for delivery? What, even, are they expected to
| deliver - no use if the plant is more expensive than TSMC
| so everyone chooses them anyway.
|
| The history of these initiatives is not great:
| https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/foxconn-
| promised-130... (Republican)
|
| https://fortune.com/2015/08/27/remember-solyndra-mistake/
| (Democrat)
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but the question was about a design business, not start
| a new fab.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Equipment = billions.
|
| A bunch of talented people with experience who can use the
| equipment productively = priceless. Probably can't be bought,
| otherwise some countries would already have done it.
| povik wrote:
| The question is about design of chips, not manufacturing.
| That is quite the difference in the market that has
| developed.
| exhilaration wrote:
| The (mainland) Chinese are buying as much TSMC talent as
| possible [0] so don't count them out just yet. It turns out
| everyone has a price.
|
| [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=china+hiring+tsmc
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Selfishly... so will all this CapEx by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel
| put pressure on wages? I'm in the industry at a large company
| getting 3% raises, 10% of comp as stock, and a salary about 1/3
| less than a software dev. All while being highly reviewed.
|
| I write a lot of software for my job (although it's not my title)
| and I've been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if
| the work is more boring (I do semiconductor R&D)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I write a lot of software for my job (although it's not my
| title) and I've been thinking of trying for pure software jobs
| even if the work is more boring (I do semiconductor R&D)
|
| This sounds like me in a past life. I assure you: It's worth
| the change. (Often) Easier work. Paid more. Treated better.
| Nicer work environment. It's worth it even if the pay were the
| same.
|
| Also, with SW roles in your resume, you can then find jobs
| outside the semiconductor industry. Lots more options available
| to you.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| 3% raise a pretty typical for software engineers as well.
| justsid wrote:
| 3% raise of 50k is much less than 3% of 150k though. GP could
| get a hella big pay bump and then much larger raises if he
| switched, even if on paper it's still the same percentage.
| throwawayiIiIII wrote:
| I also find it surprising that Hardware Engineers have a lower
| pay scale (Although I didn't hear very big differences like you
| said). Is there some kind of supply-demand behind this?
| Engineers for car-related things as well. Anecdotally I think
| you could in theory get a title change to software engineer,
| while doing the same thing, to get more pay.
| kccqzy wrote:
| There are big differences. A close friend who's a hardware
| engineer shared with me her salary. With five years of
| experience and a MS, her salary is the same as a fresh-out-
| of-undergrad junior software engineer at the same company.
| That's $120k in the valley.
| kbelder wrote:
| Huh, I'm surprised. As a software guy, I think the hardware
| engineer has a tougher job that requires more skill.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It is tougher, but how tough a job is has little to do
| with the pay.
|
| It's all about supply/demand ratio, which is higher for
| hardware engineers. Hence they get paid less. There are
| simply far fewer HW jobs than SW ones. While there are
| more SW engineers, it doesn't make up for the delta in
| number of jobs available.
|
| Even within the SW world, I've jumped around jobs of
| varying difficulty. The tougher jobs did not pay more.
| coryrc wrote:
| I switched for the money
| musingsole wrote:
| I switched for the flexibility (only a few hardware players
| versus a seemingly endless list of software shops) but the pay
| bump has been nice.
| heisenbit wrote:
| The expected price reductions will have been part of the
| financial modelling for products. Big customers of TSMC is Apple
| which traditionally build the best products with the best inputs
| and then sells them for quite some time benefiting from lower
| input costs.
| tempfs wrote:
| I am wondering if this concentration of capacity in Taiwan with
| China looming over it is really such a great idea.
| vkou wrote:
| It's been a great idea for Taiwan, and it's been a great idea
| for price sensitive consumers, who don't give two figs about
| where in the globalized marketplace their products come from.
|
| Whether it's been a great idea for someone who _isn 't_ a price
| sensitive consumer doesn't matter - markets don't optimize the
| world for the comfort of ideologues. You can't sell ideology.
|
| If China were to successfully annex Taiwan, there would be two
| likely outcomes.
|
| 1. China would be difficult to sanction, because in a world
| with chip shortages, we can't drop our reliance on TSMC fabs.
| (See, also, Russia selling oil and gas to the EU, despite
| sanctions on it. Given the option to take the moral high
| ground, and using Russian natgas to not freeze to death in the
| winter, Germans are taking the latter, while the Department of
| State gnashes it's teeth.)
|
| 2. Or, as some posters on HN gleefully speculate, the TSMC fabs
| will be destroyed, either by TSMC, or by the United States. I'm
| sure that will be quite cathartic for all of thirty minutes,
| until we all realize that we're in for a multi-year chip
| shortage that makes today's problems look like nothing. Hope
| everyone's looking forward to half the supply, and quadruple
| the prices.
| fastball wrote:
| TSMC is building a fab in AZ.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| While true, if I recall correctly that fab will be a tiny
| minority of TSMC's overall output.
| ksec wrote:
| 1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure
| already.
|
| 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the
| next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be
| higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend
| / target anyway.
|
| 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise,
| delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable
| given the current demand situation. And No, it is not TSMC's
| fault. You should ask how every single Fabless Semiconductor
| company has failed with their demand, supply chain analysis and
| projection. Although one could argue it is not their fault
| either, since their client gave wrong projection. The only
| company that is not affected is possibly Apple.
|
| 4. There has been mounting pressure from investors, politicians
| and MSM media on Intel IDM 2.0, and supply problems. This
| announcement feels more like addressing those concerns.
|
| 5. Remember both Samsung _and_ Intel are expanding capacity. And
| even GF and many other smaller players. It took DRAM and NAND
| three years to catch up with demand ( and then over supply ).
| Which in hindsight is pretty damn impressive. Although during the
| ~2016 - 2019 everyone felt awful.
| gumby wrote:
| > The only company that is not affected is possibly Apple.
|
| This is an interesting point. Apple is pretty hard nosed on
| their predictions and capacity reservations, to the point where
| they could be funding part of this expansion at TSMC (as they
| have done for Hon Hai, among others, for decades).
|
| I continue to be astonished by Apple's ability to manage their
| supply chain so tightly (which requires not just an iron fist
| but very very intense internal process). They seem to be the
| only ones who can manage to do that.
|
| And it's not like other big companies are lazy; the part that
| really amazes me is that their process hasn't leached out to
| other companies, as so much else does in the Valley.
| mooman219 wrote:
| Apple is experiencing supply chain issues, and there is a
| shortage of laptop devices right now if you try to make bulk
| orders (>1000 units). I have no context on their phones.
| somethingwitty1 wrote:
| I just saw something about this. The reason Apple hasn't been
| impacted is because their sales have been dropping for the
| past few years on iPhones and other devices. That trend
| hasn't changed during the pandemic. While many of the other
| players predicted drops during the pandemic, and initially it
| did, that demand dramatically increased, especially in the
| desktop market (AMD, Nvidia, etc). It is hard to fault
| companies from predicting the massive increase in a market
| that has been decreasing for decades(?) now. There is limited
| capacity at TSMC and Samsung. They leave buffer, but that was
| quickly consumed because almost everyone needed more
| capacity. It takes potentially years to increase capacity
| (build a new fab, etc), they have no room to allow any
| companies to adjust their capacity reservations.
|
| So at the end of the day, it isn't that Apple was necessarily
| better...their demand just didn't change and continued the
| downward trend in certain product areas, giving them
| breathing room.
| gumby wrote:
| It does look like apple's unit sales (of phones at least
| which are the lion's share of product) have been declining
| (conveniently they stopped reporting unit sales long ago)
| but I don't think that really applies here. Apple's share
| of the total semiconductor market is far from dominant.
|
| What's really interesting is how well they couple demand to
| shipment. One is that they appear to have low levels of
| unsold inventory, both on the incoming (BOM) side and
| output (unsold manufactured output, such as phones),
| reflecting some incredible discipline. They also manage to
| insure themselves against supply shock (because such a
| tight tolerance for over purchase and overproduction makes
| your supply chain more brittle) by making big moves in
| their supply chain like financing their suppliers, doing
| manufacturing R&D on their suppliers' technology and then
| supplying that tech to the suppliers, taking big positions
| in commodity markets (e.g. famously in DRAM a few years
| ago) and other such things you can do when you have so much
| cash on the balance sheet.
| barkingcat wrote:
| One thing to remember is that the current CEO Tim Cook
| started in the supply chain management side of the company...
|
| And did that job for Steve Jobs during the growth of the
| iphone.
|
| It would be expected that Apple would have extended insight
| into supply chain and capacity, seeing as the head of the
| company was/is the one who did that job.
| commandar wrote:
| I'm constantly surprised by how many people seem to forget
| that Tim Cook got to where he is on the basis of being a
| supply chain logistics whiz.
|
| If there's _anything_ I expect Apple to excel at, almost
| without question, under his leadership, it 's supply chain
| management.
| tommilukkarinen wrote:
| The comment reminds me of Nokia end times. Everyone said
| they mastered logistics.
| commandar wrote:
| I wasn't commenting on Apple as a whole; I'm actually not
| a huge fan of the company overall under Cook's
| leadership.
|
| But supply chain management? They excel at that which
| doesn't surprise me given who the CEO is.
| gumby wrote:
| It's also a strength on the demand _prediction_ side which
| is typically done by marketing not the manufacturing side
| of the business.
|
| Yes, I know Cook came from Compaq for his supply chain
| chops, but there are amazing supply chain folks elsewhere
| in the industry. On this dimension Apple is in a class by
| itself. Perhaps that fixation _does_ come from Cook, as
| supply chain wizards typically don 't rise that high in the
| corporate chain.
| [deleted]
| swalsh wrote:
| I find it concerning how few companies exist to do this work. I
| really hope Intel's new foundry business is successful.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| Their 20B investment into their Arizona campus has me
| convinced. They're doing the right thing (if you live in the
| US), my 5900X is pretty unreliable and I never had issues
| with my Intel systems. The stars have aligned so I'm going to
| buy their chips from here on out.
| LouisContant wrote:
| What issues have you been having with your 5900x? I've been
| using mine without issue but for a short amount of time.
| Kliment wrote:
| Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict
| demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry
| pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even
| more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is
| screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that
| demand for cars would go down, and because they have a
| religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots of
| orders with their vendors, screwing said vendors over. Their
| vendors could not afford their fab slots because automotive is
| such a big part of their revenue, so they cancelled their fab
| slots. Those slots were happily sold on to entertainment and
| computing customers, who anticipated a jump in demand due to
| people staying home more. So far so normal.
|
| However, the car industry got it badly wrong - people, afraid
| of public transit, started buying _more_ cars rather than less.
| The car industry, being screwed due to their just-in-time
| religion of zero stock, was faced with their production lines
| stopping so they called up all their vendors, and asked for
| those orders back, and some more on top. The vendors then tried
| to get their fab slots back, and were told to come back next
| year. Some of them ended up buying other fabless IC designers
| out of their slots, causing the problem to spread. Others
| cancelled their existing orders to other customers, and
| auctioned off their existing inventory to increasingly
| desperate car manufacturers at a 6x to 8x premium. Anyone who
| was not prepared to pay that or didn 't act fast enough was
| screwed. From that point on, a bunch of companies that depend
| on those lines of microcontrollers had to rapidly redesign
| their product to use another device, taking even more devices
| off the market with unplanned demand. The users of _those_
| devices then had to move to others, causing even more
| availability cascades. This is how two nasty moves by the car
| industry caused global market disruption in a number of
| industries that depend on electronics. This is not a normal
| "demand has increased, and industry can't keep up" event, it's
| elephants dancing and trampling everyone else underneath.
|
| This is further aggravated by the top three automotive
| semiconductor suppliers (NXP, Renesas, Infineon) having their
| facilities destroyed in two unrelated disastrous events - a
| fire at Renesas' wafer processing plant, and Texas freezing
| over, destroying NXP's and Infineon's fabs through cleanroom
| contamination and process interruption. Those events took out
| months' worth of production, and destroyed product that had
| already been sold before manufacture. This would have been
| recoverable in a normal market, because distributor stock could
| hold a couple months, but in this case it was game over for
| non-automotive customers as all distributor stock was already
| gone by then.
|
| I see this in my work every day now - customers coming to me
| for help with redesigning products to use a different
| microcontroller, or help with sourcing parts from unusual
| sources because their normal channels are gone. I've been in
| this industry a long time and never seen anything like this
| before. This is not a failure of supply chain analysis and
| projection on the part of the fabless semicon vendors. This is
| their biggest customers fucking their vendors over not once but
| twice by lying to them about their own demand.
| lacker wrote:
| I think "lying" is pretty harsh. The pandemic caused many,
| many people and companies to have trouble predicting future
| demand. To me, it's a miracle that the American economy has
| kept going as strong as it has. I know it's very important
| for car manufacturers to predict future demand, and I know
| it's an extreme frustration for many people whose logistics
| are screwed up, but really, it shouldn't be a surprise that
| the car manufacturers mispredicted the impact of a once-in-a-
| lifetime pandemic.
| ballenf wrote:
| Maybe we need a futures market for fab slots. Then we could
| just blame speculators for price swings instead of a
| particular industry.
| monkeydust wrote:
| A futures market here could help investment in fabs.
|
| Allow manufactures to hedge / lock in future value.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock
|
| In the US people _love_ to keep huge numbers of cars in
| stock. Apparently most people buy from stock there, and
| almost nobody does JIT, for some reason. So this isn't the
| case everywhere.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Creates an interesting dynamic where the dealership has to
| sell what's parked on it's lot right now.
| monocasa wrote:
| If you're talking about dealers, they're very different
| from the manufacturers. Pretty much every car has someone
| who's bought it already (whether that be an end consumer or
| a dealer) by the time it rolls off the line.
| rendang wrote:
| I had taken parent poster to mean that car manufacturers
| hate keeping large stocks of their component parts, not of
| finished cars.
| kyrra wrote:
| Just in time delivery has its downfalls when vendors have
| issues, but this is a known trade-off to that model. If a
| company keeps inventory on hand, then they have the worry of
| owning excess parts that they can never use and is a sink
| cost later. So these companies can lose money with either, it
| just depends on the circumstances that cause it.
|
| I'd be interested to learn more about the order cancellation
| you were saying that fabs were doing to non car
| manufacturers. Shouldn't contracts prevent that sort of
| behavior (without proper compensation)? And if they did that,
| they are burning bridges that would make people less likely
| to do business with them in the future. Maybe the car chip
| business is enough money to warrant such moves, but seems
| potentially sort sighted depending on exactly all what you
| said happened.
| bkor wrote:
| > Shouldn't contracts prevent that sort of behavior
| (without proper compensation)?
|
| That depends on how big the customer/order is, no? If (as a
| manufacturer) you could get away with not having it in a
| contract, why include it?
|
| Similarly, instead of actually cancelling they could also
| "lie". Say that there are capacity issues, etc. That the
| capacity issue is mostly because they resold the existing
| manufacturing capacity, is left out.
|
| > Just in time delivery
|
| The well-known example of this is Toyota. Interestingly,
| they've started ensuring they do have stocks. See e.g.
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-
| anniversa.... I found that rather interesting.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| As with all things, an optimization (e.g. agile, JIT/lean
| manufacturing) is predicated on certain assumptions. In
| this instance, "we exist in an ecosystem where our
| suppliers can rapidly respond to volatile demand from
| us."
|
| If the assumptions fail, then it's not a failure of the
| optimization, but an incorrect _application_ of it. Maybe
| we don 't currently live in a world in which elastic
| semiconductor availability at scale can be assumed.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Nearly all industries have moved to Just-In-Time to
| reduce costs, at the cost of making the entire economy
| more fragile. We saw this highlighted in the pandemic as
| suddenly there were no reserves of hospital capacity due
| to JIT optimization.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Heck even consumer goods like toilet paper were impacted.
|
| JIT is useful when the end-product has a high
| depreciation rate and/or you forsee yourself frequently
| changing the part out for a newer version.
|
| Another tendril on the issue; modern accounting practices
| tend to prefer JIT instead of the costs/overhead
| mechanics of storing inventory.
| lenkite wrote:
| When I first studied about JIT in college, I asked my
| professor: Doesn't this manufacturing methodology lack
| fault-tolerance and isn't it deeply susceptible to
| natural calamities or economic failures ? He replied that
| it was proven, adaptable and reliable. Other suppliers
| would come in if some suppliers failed.
|
| JIT (aka lean manufacturing) today has now permeated
| pretty much most of the global supply chain. Human
| civilisation is far more fragile at the moment than in
| the last few. hundred years.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The true argument should have been that it's more
| _efficient_ (for everyone involved). Which would have
| invited the honest debate between the relative merits of
| resilience vs efficiency.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| People forget why "just in time" was invented and why it
| became a religion...
|
| I do not fault companies for not planning for a worldwide
| pandemic.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >fabs were doing to non car manufacturers
|
| fabless design house sign wafer agreement with Fab like
| TSMC. I'm guessing they didn't sign the agreement thus
| cancel their slot.
| baybal2 wrote:
| The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large.
|
| If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing,
| that's a $100,000 car you can't sell.
|
| Car industry haphazardly buying out last stocks of ICs will
| not help them work around that "one missing chip" problem,
| and production lines are potentially stuck for many more
| months.
|
| The panic was undue, well, or best say of no use. The are
| screwed, but its of no use for them to hope for some
| desperate moves improving the situation now if they can't
| assure 100% availability of _all, and every_ component on
| their BOM.
|
| I have few buddies who went to work on an ECU for
| MTU/Siemens. They ran exactly into that when their companies
| went for a complete redesign of their ECU to run on consumer
| STM32. They had hopes of that such old 180nm-130nm CMOS chips
| easily tolerating around 130Cdeg, they did tests, it worked
| fine, and then they ran into undocumented high temperature
| protection kicking in on a slightly newer chip revision, but
| they already bough few millions of them, and other ICs for a
| new design in inventories.
| skybrian wrote:
| Ouch.
|
| It seems like the way to reduce risk would be
| interchangeable parts from multiple suppliers?
| Xorlev wrote:
| And now STM32 are really tough to find for hobby
| electronics when one used to find them everywhere, and
| cheap.
| swalsh wrote:
| I was looking yesterday, the STM32 chip used in the
| typically $5 blue pill now goes for $16 a piece.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What's a $5 blue pill?
| techrat wrote:
| Similar Microcontroller to others like the Teensy, Elite
| C, Proton C, Pro Micro, etc...
|
| All of which have been used in custom keyboard builds but
| are capable of doing other things as well.
| swalsh wrote:
| It's a small development board (similar to Arduino but
| based on the STM32F103C8T6) It's often blue so people
| often call it the "blue pill"
| rasz wrote:
| >undocumented high temperature protection
|
| sneaky market segmentation by STM?
| sitkack wrote:
| I doubt it. You want a part to shutdown if knows it is
| going to fail, not pull everything high and cause the
| device to catastrophically malfunction.
| foobarian wrote:
| Just wanted to say that I really appreciate your comment.
| baq wrote:
| if you wrote a book about it, i'd buy it.
| speeder wrote:
| Now I know why my business, that has nothing to do with
| semiconductors are booming too.
|
| I own a store that sells parts and tools to attach things to
| each other (originally we sold nuts and bolts but those are
| unprofitable without gigantic volumes).
|
| In the last months suddenly we started to get an unusually
| high amount of orders from factories intending to use our
| products in manufacturing, while until then all we ever got
| was orders for replacements parts and maintenance.
|
| Since we are a store, not a manufacturer, our prices aren't
| lowest as possible... so we are very confused about why
| Toyota/Honda and others for example, called us wanting parts,
| instead of calling our supplier, since we know they have
| their contact anyway (I won't say who it was but for example
| one time a manufacturer asked us if a product would help
| them, and asked us to design something for their production
| line... we did, then they ordered the product from our
| supplier and never paid us anything for all "free"
| engineering work we did for them).
|
| So now I can guess what happened: car industry cancelled non-
| semiconductor orders too, their slots got sold, and now they
| want it back... so my store that tends to have higher stock
| than others keep getting new clients willing to pay through
| the nose to have parts because our own supplier doesn't have
| them in stock and can't deliver any in short term...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Top comment. Really appreciate this analysis. I think there
| is a tangential question to be asked: are consumers really
| demanding "software defined cars" in the first place?
|
| 4 Forces Changing Automotive Electronics Systems
|
| https://www.eetimes.com/4-forces-changing-automotive-
| electro...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >However, the car industry got it badly wrong
|
| You write at the beginning and end of your post that the car
| industry lied to their vendors, but then you also write they
| got it badly wrong, which means they were incorrect about
| their projections of demand. Surely it can't be both, and it
| sounds like the car industry did not lie, but simply were
| wrong about their predictions for the future.
|
| Or am I misunderstanding?
|
| Nevertheless, thanks for providing context for the whole
| situation.
| Kliment wrote:
| The car industry got their demand planning wrong, so they
| lied to their vendors that they wouldn't need that
| inventory. They then turned around and went "hey actually
| screw that we want the inventory after all", making their
| previous promise that they wouldn't buy it a lie.
| shock-value wrote:
| That's not what "lie" means.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would not characterize that as a lie, which typically
| involves an intent to deceive.
|
| Rather, the only people with intent to deceive might be
| the chip vendors. They either sold chip capacity that the
| automakers still had the legal rights to, or they reneged
| on sales to non automakers to resume supplying to
| automakers.
| lumost wrote:
| There aren't many companies that can compete with 100 billion
| dollar capex demands. While the loans are freely available, the
| development risk remains. TSMC has a proven track record
| pushing into the latest node - intel does not. Samsung has been
| a little bit behind for a while while keeping pace.
|
| Following this trend - 2nm will have something on the order of
| 200 billion in capex outlays. Given that being first to market
| has a premium, the loan will be high risk. If you borrow
| thinking you'll be first and are late by 4 years then you and
| your bank are going to have a problem.
| eloff wrote:
| On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer
| life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a
| less than a decade, there's a huge gap there and the old
| process isn't worth much. If you go from 14nm to 2nm, you can
| still use 14nm for a lot of price sensitive customers.
| oivey wrote:
| The density increase is similar between those two jumps,
| isn't it? Density significantly drives the price of chips
| since you can use it to create more chips per wafer. Maybe
| developing chips at 2 nm will be much more difficult due to
| quantum effects?
| packetlost wrote:
| Before you start reaching quantum effects, you'll run
| into crosstalk problems where electrons on 1 circuit path
| can jump through the silicon substrate to other paths,
| effectively causing a short. There is a limit to how much
| you can do with silicon as your substrate simply because
| of the size of the atoms.
| oivey wrote:
| That's quantum tunneling, right? That's one of the
| quantum effects I was referencing.
| buran77 wrote:
| The law of diminishing returns. Shrinking brings lower and
| lower benefits because the jumps may be hefty in relative
| values (10% smaller) but in absolute values (nm) they don't
| bring the same benefit as they did 15-20 years ago.
|
| On the other hand, even in practical terms the older nodes
| are more than adequate for most customers these days simply
| because they are far closer to a modern node than the
| equivalent would have been 20 years ago (for the reason
| stated above).
| alberth wrote:
| > "the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024"
|
| I wish the industry would standardize on using "transistors per
| square millimetre" as the metric for their node size instead of
| "nm".
| baybal2 wrote:
| Even that is not exactly the same. Cells, or logic gates per
| mmdeg is too rather ambiguous, as different implementations
| of same logic families do things differently, and the metric
| gets even wronger for different logic families.
|
| The best I believe will be a whole cell library metric using
| some lowest common denominator blocks like registers, adders,
| bus pieces etc
| addaon wrote:
| Honestly, SRAM bits per square mm seems like a perfectly
| fine metric for me. While I recognize that the memory-to-
| logic density varies, sometimes significantly, between
| processes, (a) SRAM cells are optimized to within an inch
| of their lives ("within a nm of their lives"?), including
| often being revised in minor process updates, so accurately
| reflect the capabilities of the process; (b) many chips,
| including the ones I personally tend to be interested in
| (processors, etc) are SRAM-heavy, and get more so each
| generation; (c) it's a single number with some connection
| to reality, which is better than both a single number with
| limited connection to reality ("process"), or a whole suite
| of numbers that require deep interpretation (cell library
| metrics).
| baybal2 wrote:
| And it is exactly because SRAM gets so intensely
| optimised with each generation, I did not want to list
| it. SRAM density, and performance is not characteristic
| of how the rest of logic will perform no other logic
| component get squeezed so much.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Ironically, it seems random logic may have been scaling
| better than SRAM recently...
| baybal2 wrote:
| Because SRAM was already squeezed to the max generations
| ago.
| keanebean86 wrote:
| I'm going to be that person and say it doesn't matter.
| Either you're a consumer who really only cares about a
| finished product's performance or you're a chip designer
| who has the time and money to research past the nm number.
|
| All us armchair semiconductor fabrication experts can have
| a good old time arguing ove who's 2nm is better. The real
| world will continuing doing it's thing.
|
| *I know this is hacker news and some of you might be real
| experts. I know nothing. Please don't feel disrespected.
| variaga wrote:
| You're basically right. Nobody doing actual chip design
| cares about process nm numbers. Process selection done
| right is a fairly tedious comparison of dynamic power
| consumption, static power consumption, achievable
| operating frequencies, wafer cost, SRAM density, IP
| availability, process maturity/yeild, fab capacity/
| availability and about a dozen other factors.
|
| There will be a large-ish excel spreadsheet somewhere to
| do the comparison.
|
| The nm number is for press releases and non-technical
| investors.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's basically a version number.
| variaga wrote:
| Yes, that's a good analogy, although the nm number by
| itself isn't the full version e.g for 28nm alone, TSMC
| had 28HP, 28HPL, 28HPM, 28HPC and 28HPC+ variants, of
| which only HPM and HPC (but not HPC+!) are at all
| compatible.
|
| 28HPC+ and 28HP have very different performance, even if
| they're both "28nm".
|
| And if you really want to specify a process you also need
| to know the metal stack ( _lots_ of options there), Vt
| selection(s) (most processes have 2-5 options) & high-
| voltage device support option.
| ebruchez wrote:
| I found this article on the topic really informative:
|
| https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20.
| ..
| mullingitover wrote:
| This reminds me of a fun fact I learned many years ago, which is
| that there's a corollary to Moores Law: the same growth curve
| applies to the cost of building new fabs.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "However, Liu said that it is "economically unrealistic" for all
| countries to "onshore" additional chip production, warning that
| this could lead to more unprofitable capacity."
|
| Well. The world is clearly not listening to that. So the question
| is how the business of chip manufactoring will look in 2 or 3
| years?
| simonh wrote:
| He may well be right, but concerns about supply chain security
| might make it worthwhile for countries to subsidise capacity
| that would not otherwise be economically viable.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| It makes sense for China to overinvest in national chip
| manufactoring due to sanctions. However for the west, of
| which Taiwan here is a part of, it is very risky. If the west
| no longer supplies China's chip market, it would need
| significant less chip manufactoring capacity.
| cwhiz wrote:
| If the west can't supply China, the west should ban Chinese
| imports.
| nindalf wrote:
| You assume there would be malice involved. Even today
| TSMC prioritises some customers (Apple) over others (car
| manufacturers). In a future Taiwan that is a part of
| China, TSMC might have a new pecking order where Huawei
| is at the top and now Apple is chip constrained. You'd
| ban all Chinese imports unless one Chinese company
| rewrites it's contracts? Of course not.
| cwhiz wrote:
| With China there will unequivocally be malice.
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