[HN Gopher] TSMC's 3-Nm Push Faces Tool Struggles
___________________________________________________________________
TSMC's 3-Nm Push Faces Tool Struggles
Author : cubefox
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-04-26 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eetimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eetimes.com)
| anthomtb wrote:
| _TSMC is getting help from customer Nvidia in lithography.
|
| The "cuLitho" software and hardware is moving expensive
| operations to Nvidia GPUs, which will help TSMC deploy inverse
| lithography and deeper learning, according to C.C. Wei._
|
| This jumped out as interesting to me. How would this relationship
| work? Is it like, "hey Nvidia, send us a few of those shiny GPU's
| and some engineers and we'll knock a few bucks off your wafer
| price"? Or more like, there is a division at TSMC that uses GPU's
| for process improvements, and they choose their vendor
| independent of any customer relationships?
| Lramseyer wrote:
| Probably some Physical Design engineers who looked at the
| problem, and realized that it was a complex geometry problem
| that could be sped up buy parallelized computing. So they
| called up Synopsys (probably not TSMC) and were like "can you
| port this to CUDA?" The reason NVIDIA is taking credit for it
| is because Synopsys isn't know for its ability to deliver great
| software, and the folks at NVIDIA realistically probably wrote
| it.
| Keyframe wrote:
| It cuts deeper. Morris Chang is a hero of Jen-Hsun Huang and
| relationship goes way deeper than customer-vendor relationship.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-x7PdnvCyI
| retskrad wrote:
| It's funny how when Jony Ive and Steve Jobs were at the helm,
| Apple users always said performance wasn't everything and what
| truly matters is the complete package. Nowadays, it has flipped.
| The company's competitive advantage is their best in class chips.
| Every year I try high-end Windows laptops and Android phones and
| they are great to use but their performance aren't up to par and
| I always go back to Apple.
| xxpor wrote:
| In the mobile market though, perf can directly translate into
| battery life.
| davnicwil wrote:
| Yeah, and it's important in the laptop market too.
|
| The top line performance of the M chips is obviously
| fantastic _per se_ , but probably more important for most use
| cases is that performance also being delivered reliably and
| dependably for a day (ish) on a single charge.
|
| The combo of those two is a massively bigger win for most
| people than simply a little bit of extra incremental perf Vs
| the last gen, or whatever.
| carlmr wrote:
| If you ask me user-facing performance was always a priority.
| iPhones always feel snappier than Android to me. Android phones
| often have a noticeable lag when scrolling, the apps take
| longer to open, the screen freezes more often.
|
| Even with higher performing chips on some Samsung phones, the
| iPhone always feels faster.
|
| Most consumers don't care about how performant the chip is, but
| they do care about visible performance.
| ajross wrote:
| > If you ask me user-facing performance was always a
| priority.
|
| Go compare a Mac in 1998 vs. a garbage-tier shopping mall
| Windows machine. Apple almost died for a reason.
| hooverd wrote:
| Samsung just makes ungodly slow Android UIs. I have stock
| Android on my Pixel 5 and I haven't noticed any slowness.
| joshstrange wrote:
| That may be true but here is the issue. An iPhone is an
| iPhone is an iPhone for the most part, the same cannot be
| said for Android. I don't have a Pixel but I have a Samsung
| phone to test with that makes me want to pull my hair out
| but a similarly old iOS device doesn't. The older iOS
| device might be slower than a new one but it still
| outperforms the Samsung.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > the same cannot be said for Android. I don't have a
| Pixel
|
| It's a little silly to criticize their argument, then.
| Android is not a uniform experience because it runs on
| everything. Your Raspberry Pi can boot Android with the
| right drivers. It certainly won't be your "iPhone is an
| iPhone is an iPhone" experience, but that's because the
| AOSP exists. It's reductive and a non-argument.
|
| Now, you _also_ don 't need to go build a fresh AOSP
| image or install GrapheneOS to argue in good faith. That
| being said, if you have to make vendors look like the
| boogeyman to win an online argument about cell phones,
| you're likely building a case that works equally well
| against Apple.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > That being said, if you have to make vendors look like
| the boogeyman to win an online argument about cell
| phones, you're likely building a case that works equally
| well against Apple.
|
| Samsung is the top/biggest Android manufacturer from
| everything I can find online and all the other non-Pixel
| phones are equally trashy (full of crapware, reskinned
| apps, etc). The Pixel is almost a rounding error in North
| America coming in at ~2% vs Samsung at ~30% and Apple at
| about ~54% [0]. I think it's perfectly fair to judge the
| OS based on the biggest install base.
|
| [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-
| share/mobile/north-...
| smoldesu wrote:
| > I think it's perfectly fair to judge the OS based on
| the biggest install base.
|
| And not the designer of the OS? I guess that's fair
| enough, but you should be mad at Samsung then. Google
| licenses Android to thousands of manufacturers, and all
| of them can modify it. That's a non-argument though, like
| I was saying. Again, you don't need a Pixel to argue in
| good faith here, you're just being mad at the entirely
| wrong party.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Ahh, I apologize, I misunderstood the point you were
| making. "Android" is not to blame for "Samsung"'s
| implementation of it, I agree. What I was trying to say
| originally (and I'll admit I think we got off-track) is,
| more or less, that Android is not 1 "thing", it's a bunch
| of things and some of them are not well done
| (Samsung/etc) and other are better (Google) but the
| inconsistency taints the whole OS for me.
|
| I'm coming at this both as a user and as a developer. My
| iOS apps or web pages generally have a bug or they don't
| across all of iOS, the same is not true for Android. I
| pay for BrowserStack first and foremost so I can test my
| app on the exact make/model/OS of Android that a user has
| who reports an issue (or that comes from Sentry). There
| are differences in the iOS versions but I've rarely been
| bitten by that whereas I have been for Android a number
| of times (normally due to Samsung vs Google vs Other,
| even if they are all the "same" Android version).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Responsiveness definitely matters. It's something that users
| perceive even if they can't name it specifically.
|
| On that note, it might've just been my imagination, but I
| swear that OS X 10.5/10.6 had a different responsiveness
| profiles on PowerPC and Intel Macs. Somehow Core 2 Duo Macs
| that on paper and in benchmarks outstripped the single core
| PPC G5 Macs they replaced quite significantly on every metric
| felt noticeably less responsive with more frequent
| beachballing. Really weird.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If you ask me user-facing performance was always a
| priority._
|
| You're absolutely correct, every major Apple architectural
| change has been motivated in large part by performance.
|
| For example, the MacUser cover introducing PowerPC was "
| _FASTEST EVER!_ PowerPC Macs * Five Times Faster *
| Outperforms Pentium ". Apple was effectively forced to move
| to Intel because IBM fabrication caused PowerPC to fall
| behind performance goals. And of course, performance
| continues to be a primary motivation behind the move to Apple
| Silicon.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Performance per watt, not pure performance.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That's an important part of the performance story, but
| Apple wouldn't have switched architectures without a
| clear leap in pure performance even if performance-per-
| watt was better. Apple waited to transition
| desktops/laptops to Apple Silicon until they could
| demonstrate a definitive performance advantage over
| Intel.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| How has it flipped? Apple is still constantly talking about how
| performance isn't everything and it's about the complete
| package: iOS, MacOS and the accessory and app ecosystem.
| caycep wrote:
| It's not like the Windows laptops are great on the design part
| either, witness all the threads complaining about Windows 11...
| wmf wrote:
| Everyone will tout performance when they're ahead in
| performance but that's not why customers are really buying. If
| the iPhone was slower than Qualcomm people would still buy
| iPhones. Likewise with Macs.
| cubefox wrote:
| There are simply diminishing returns from increased
| performance. Smartphones already feel pretty responsive for a
| while now, e.g. in terms of app start-up time.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I disagree, the whole package is still my top priority, it's
| just that Apple is winning in performance (aside from
| GPU/graphics) and UI/UX right now. I think Apple has stumbled
| on UI/UX in the past fews years but I still feel they are
| leagues ahead of the competition. Windows and Android still
| drive me crazy and feel substantially worse in UI/UX than
| anything Apple has put out.
| LeanderK wrote:
| my girlfriend recently had ads in the browser from microsoft
| urging her to use bing for a month to earn a few dollars in
| amazon credit. I was baffled how you can cripple the UX of
| your flagship product without any respect to it, and in such
| a cheap, tasteless way.
| airstrike wrote:
| so install firefox + uBlock Origin for her?
| flangola7 wrote:
| The ads are in the browser interface itself
| LeanderK wrote:
| also I wasn't really talking as if there's not fix for
| it, but the sabotage of MS on the UX of their flagship
| product. It feels cheap and not pleasant to use if you're
| bombarded with ads and stupid cortana-stuff.
|
| I really don't like the painting of business leaders as
| heroes, but here it feels a little bit appropriate: I bet
| steve jobs would have fired you on the spot for this. And
| the managers under him would have never dared to do this
| and still don't.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The people building these things aren't using them (at
| least not in the standard user configuration)... or they
| don't have the ability to stop these things from going out.
| cubefox wrote:
| I thought Google had generally great UI, even if Apple might
| be a bit better.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Are you comparing with similar cost devices?
| sigmar wrote:
| >At present, we believe N3 yields at TSMC for A17 and M3
| processors are at around 55%
|
| What does that "55%" refer to precisely? Wafer yield? Isn't 55
| quite low?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Isn't 55 quite low?
|
| When Samsung lost Qualcomm as a customer for 4nm Snapdragon 8
| Gen 1 chips, Samsung's yield was said to be about 35%.
|
| https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-foundry-4nm-yield-sna...
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| you didn't read the whole line
|
| > 55% [a healthy level at this stage in N3 development], and
| TSMC looks on schedule to boost yields by around 5+ points each
| quarter.
| wmf wrote:
| 55% of the dies on each wafer are good. That does sound like
| low yield.
| [deleted]
| neltnerb wrote:
| Seems the server went down real fast.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230426182003/https://www.eetim...
| cubefox wrote:
| It seems to be back
| ginko wrote:
| 3 Newton-meter?
|
| edit: This was a comment on the incorrect capitalization in the
| title. SI units are case sensitive 1 Nm != 1 nm. HN should really
| stop the autocapitalization of titles.
| helf wrote:
| [dead]
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| This is a small thing, but it's a bit of a pet peeve --
| capitalization matters in SI units. A capital N is a newton, the
| unit of force. In the EE Times headline the N is correctly
| lowercased to spell "nm" -- nanometers.
|
| See also: "mHz" being used to mean "megahertz" when it actually
| spells "millihertz". It's rarely ambiguous, but it's still wrong.
| epolanski wrote:
| "Nm" is the unit of measurement of torque.
| airstrike wrote:
| HN "fixes" capitalization upon submission... but if the user
| goes back and edits the title ex-post, it respects those
| capitalization decisions.
|
| OP probably doesn't know that or did not notice the
| capitalization
| cubefox wrote:
| It seems I can't edit it anymore now.
| amalcon wrote:
| It's a little more problematic than usual in this case because
| a Nm would then be a newton-meter, which is a joule, which is
| not only common in general but relevant to electronics.
| npunt wrote:
| In case one is using this info to make purchasing decisions, 3nm
| is a big improvement from today's leading edge 5nm process in
| speed, density, and power consumption [1]. We've been on 5nm
| variants for about 4 years now, and though each year brought
| gains, they were more incremental.
|
| In Mac terms, this means M2->M3 will be bigger step up than
| M1->M2. Apple also delayed their next-gen raytracing GPU from
| last year, so it's likely that will come in as well. However with
| the difficulties of manufacturing, and Apple prioritizing
| iPhones, it's not clear whether we'll get any M3 Macs this year.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
| cubefox wrote:
| Transistor density doesn't really matter by itself. What
| matters is that density influences speed, power consumption,
| and price. Historically all these have improved exponentially
| with exponentially increasing transistor density [1]. Yet:
|
| > Power and Performance were the first two metrics to "fall
| off" the Moore's Law curve. Transistor power reductions slowed
| nearly 20 years ago--each successive node generally reduced
| active and standby (leakage) current, but not at the 2X
| reduction per node. Transistor performance gains slowed shortly
| after; again, each node is generally faster, but not by 2X.
|
| Moreover:
|
| > Where Moore's Law has slowed or even reversed, however, is
| the cost per component. Doubling density used to cut the cost
| per transistor in half, which was the primary enabler of the
| electronics revolution. Moore's Law meant we'd get twice the
| number of transistors (which were faster and less power-hungry)
| for the same cost.
|
| > As the chart (Fig. 2) shows, this began slowing at the 40-nm
| node, and virtually stopped when the industry moved to FinFETs.
| New nodes enable "close-to-Moore" chip-size scaling, but this
| is nearly completely offset by exploding wafer-fabrication
| costs. Various analyses show fabricated wafer costs increasing
| 3-5X over the 28-nm node, with 5-nm wafer costs approaching
| $18K each.
|
| There is also the fact that SRAM scaling has almost stopped
| with TSMC's N3 [2].
|
| [1] https://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-
| automation/artic...
|
| [2] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/iedm-2022-did-we-just-
| wi...
| mdasen wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year
| or two.
|
| A lot depends on how well TSMC, Samsung, and Intel execute.
| Intel's roadmap has had Intel 4 happening in 2023, but it's
| possible that Meteor Lake will be pushed back a bit and it's
| looking like Intel won't be making high-end Meteor Lake
| processors. Intel also has RibbonFET and 20A on its roadmap for
| 2024/2025. If TSMC can't meet Apple's 3nm demand in 2023, it
| seems likely that only Apple will have 3nm processors in late
| 2023. Given that it was 2 years between Apple shipping 5nm and
| AMD shipping 5nm, it's not out of the question that AMD wouldn't
| get 3nm until late 2025 - and TSMC wasn't having trouble meeting
| Apple's 5nm demand in 2020. That leaves a ton of time for Intel
| to close the gap.
|
| If TSMC is having so much yield trouble with 3nm, it seems
| reasonable to think that TSMC might not be able to keep up its
| advantage. Of course, one could also argue that Intel's roadmap
| might simply be bluster. That's why I think it will be
| interesting to see how this will play out. TSMC has done very
| well over the past decade while Intel has faltered. If Intel is
| able to get RibbonFET and 20A out in the next couple years, Intel
| might regain a nice lead.
|
| If Intel can get its 20A out in 2024, it seems like that would
| put them solidly in the lead again and put a damper on both AMD
| (generally) and data-centers moving to ARM. AMD has seen a huge
| rise in part due to Intel's fab issues offering them a huge lead.
| ARM processors have also seen an opening via Intel's fab
| weakness. If Intel gets back to having superior fabrication, we
| might get to a market where Intel takes back the gains that ARM
| and AMD have seen in some areas.
|
| But a lot of this depends on how well companies execute over the
| next couple years. Roadmaps are one thing. Processors in people's
| hands are another.
| samus wrote:
| We are getting closer and closer to physical limitations of
| current microchip technology. Even TSMC starting to slip
| schedules is not really surprising.
| cubefox wrote:
| When they are really getting close to physical limits,
| generational improvements will also be smaller. Then it is
| probably easier for others to get close TSMC. Currently being
| (e.g.) two years behind TSMC means being also substantially
| behind in performance. But when improvements slow down, such
| a two-year lag may not be so substantial anymore in terms of
| performance.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| Can someone help me understand something about these
| "roadmaps", the roadmaps that go out 5+ years and define the
| path of transistor shrinkage?
|
| What I don't understand is... what's preventing a chip fab from
| leapfrogging a transistor size? Why must there be a gradual
| process, planned year by year?
|
| If one manufacturer has even a modest lead, can they use this
| lead to invest in two generations down the line, to keep their
| lead cemented?
|
| Does the technology that supports X nm transistors become an
| input to building X-1 nm transistors? Or is each new generation
| like starting all over again?
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| In the 70s and 80s, these leapfrog events would sometimes
| happen. One fab would find a way to get a huge lead and
| others would go bust. A chip would have 10 or so masks and a
| wafer might take a week to go through the fab before you
| could fully test it.
|
| Nowadays there are 80+ masks and a wafer takes 4+ months to
| go through the fab. There may be 100k process parameters to
| tune, and if any one of those gets too far off your yield
| goes to zero. Finding process improvements is more difficult
| with these slow iterations and everything is so tiny now it
| is a miracle the chips work at all. Gradual improvement is
| all that is left.
| 988747 wrote:
| [dead]
| _hypx wrote:
| This is something I've noticed for a while now: All of the major
| semiconductor manufacturers use the same set of tooling. In
| particular, they all use EUV lithography machines from ASML. So
| how can any one company maintain any sort of sustained lead? As a
| first order approximately, all of them should have the same level
| of fabrication capabilities. If TSMC tries to push too fast,
| they'll run into major challenges. And if they figure something
| out, their competitors should match them in short order.
| npunt wrote:
| Semiconductor tooling is of a level of complexity that there's
| a huge amount of skill, institutional knowledge, process, and
| some art in getting them doing what you want _at yields that
| pay off_ and _on fast schedules_. Lead is maintained by having
| all of that. They 're also extremely expensive ($10b+ to get to
| leading edge node), which is a huge barrier to entry and just
| about requires nation-state help, as is the case in Taiwan,
| Korea, and the US.
| dvt wrote:
| That's like saying "all carpenters use the same hammers, how
| can one be better than the other?"--there's a lot more than
| goes into chip manufacturing than just the lithography
| machines. Not to mention that the lithography machines
| themselves are highly customizable and can _technically_ work
| with different optical systems (not just the Carl Zeiss ones)
| and with different wafers (not just silicon ones), so there 's
| a lot of room for experimentation.
| _hypx wrote:
| But we don't live in a world where we expect carpenters to
| double the complexity of their output every 2 years. At some
| point, the theoretic limits of the tooling becomes a thing.
|
| I'm pretty sure you are confused about the optical system.
| All of the lithography machines have the same setup inside
| because only one company makes them (ASML). The next big
| upgrade involves upgrading the optics, but no one has that
| upgrade yet. We know, because again only company makes them
| and they haven't produced them yet.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| https://youtu.be/-EhDlXx3okU?t=203
|
| No, that's not how it works. Dialing in a process is
| extremely difficult, expensive, and iterative, and a fab
| has to do _a lot_ of dialing in to make a billion chips per
| year that each have a billion transistors which will do a
| billion calculations per second for a billion seconds with
| zero errors. Give or take a few orders of magnitude here or
| there. It 's a _long_ tail that has to be chopped off -- so
| long that the number of players capable of chopping it off
| has gone from three digits to 3.
| panarky wrote:
| _> It 's a long tail that has to be chopped off_
|
| Those ASML litho machines are astoundingly complex, with
| more parts and a more complex supply chain than a Boeing
| or Airbus commercial airliner.
|
| So many parts that each part and subassembly must have an
| outrageously long mean time between failure, something
| like 16 years, in order for the entire machine to be
| sufficiently reliable.
|
| No wonder only one company is able to make them.
| dvt wrote:
| > All of the lithography machines have the same setup
| inside because only one company makes them (ASML).
|
| I've definitely read papers where universities fiddle with
| the internals of ASML machines, including the optics, to
| try out different things. I'd imagine R&D departments at
| Intel, Nvidia, etc. probably do the same, but I'm no
| expert.
| davnicwil wrote:
| I am far from an expert, mostly parroting what I've heard from
| actual experts, but I think it gets back perhaps to a similar
| question of why doesn't _ASML_ 'just' start a fabrication
| business since they already have the tools, and at cost no
| less?
|
| The answer to that seemingly no brainer question is the exact
| same reason that TSMC have an edge over other fabs. There's a
| massive, incredible amount of complexity in the fabrication
| process, in particular doing it with economical yields - it's a
| completely separate business really.
|
| In fact it might be the latter that's the least copyable part.
| For sure once competitors see that something is possible, some
| valuable information has been exposed, but doing that
| economically at scale is another matter entirely - and that's
| where there's a business to compete with. That can't simply be
| reverse-engineered or copied because the myriad details of the
| process are incredibly closely guarded IP!
| akiselev wrote:
| Even then getting ASML equipment at cost only saves a few
| hundred million. They'd still be left with almost $20 billion
| in other expenses like the hundreds of millions in robotics
| and material handling equipment (the most precise in the
| world), hundreds of millions in HVAC and electrical equipment
| (heavily specialized to fabs), hundreds of millions in
| chemical cleaning (ditto), hundreds of millions in structure
| dampening, hundreds of millions in doping and chemical vapor
| deposition equipment, all the permitting and civil
| infrastructure to support the fab (water and power), and so
| on and on for a very long list.
|
| The core competency of a semiconductor fab is getting all of
| that equipment to work together. It's more systems
| engineering (in the old school NASA sense) than anything
| else.
| j_walter wrote:
| The tooling is only part of the equation...go read "Chip Wars"
| and it will give you a lot of insight into why TSMC is
| currently the leader. Your statements make a lot of assumptions
| and the landscape of semiconductor manufacturing is a lot more
| complex than you seem to realize.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The leading fabs have a closer relationship with TSMC that gets
| them working machines sooner and deeper knowledge transfer from
| staff. Plus what others have written.
| mdasen wrote:
| First, I'd say that sometimes companies don't use the same
| tooling even if they could. One of the things that gave TSMC an
| advantage was that they did push EUV while Intel didn't. Intel
| did make some investments in EUV, but pushed off the
| commercialization of it. So even when companies ca use the same
| tooling, sometimes people think something is too expensive and
| that they can get more out of something cheaper.
|
| Beyond that, I'd say that we don't really want companies to
| have giant moats against competition. TSMC can keep an
| advantage as long as it keeps innovating. Having something a
| year before others can be important. Being able to produce
| better yields is important. Qualcomm and AMD wanted to move a
| bunch of their production to Samsung, but were disappointed in
| the yields despite Samsung having "the same process."
|
| > As a first order approximately, all of them should have the
| same level of fabrication capabilities
|
| Yes, but "approximately" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
| Each car manufacturer has "approximately" the same quality and
| value car. Windows/macOS/Linux are all "approximately" the
| same. One could easily reply that fabs are undifferentiated
| products and that is true to an extent, but there's a reason
| why Qualcomm and AMD went back to TSMC tail between their legs.
|
| > if they figure something out, their competitors should match
| them in short order.
|
| Again, I'd say "short order" is doing a lot of heavy lifting
| there. Are we talking a year? Two? Even when companies are
| using TSMC, they often can't get the latest process for a year
| or so after Apple because TSMC can't spin up capacity that fast
| - never mind a competitor that's trying to match TSMC.
|
| I think in basically any industry, it's hard to keep a lead
| unless you continue executing well. Of course, one could argue
| that it's easy to keep a lead - just not over a couple other
| extremely well-run companies. Intel, Samsung, and TSMC have a
| huge sustained lead over basically everyone else. Does that not
| count? It's not like we're seeing lots of companies going
| around grabbing ASML EUV machines and spinning up even 7nm fabs
| because it's "easy". Even 5nm has been around for 2.5 years
| now. In fact, why did AMD wait 2 years to get 5nm if they could
| have simply bought an ASML machine and started printing the
| chips? Ok, I should walk back from hyperbole.
|
| In some ways, I simply agree with you: they can't really have a
| sustained lead without continuing to put in work to stay 3-18
| months ahead of the competition. However, I'd argue that a 6-12
| month lead can be pretty big.
|
| Intel is looking to introduce new stuff like RibbonFET (a
| successor to FinFET) and PowerVia backside power delivery so
| there's a lot more than "just use ASML EUV machines" and there
| is a lot of space for companies to innovate and create leads.
| But we also don't necessarily want companies to have leads that
| are too durable.
|
| I guess: what is offering a durable lead to companies? Even
| companies that have well-differentiated products don't really
| survive well without continuous improvement. Some leads are
| more durable than others, but the investment and knowledge can
| be a durable lead.
|
| Heck, look at TSMC's efforts to build a US-based plant. It
| isn't "just ship them a machine to print chips." They're
| struggling to make it work despite the fact that there's
| literally nothing to "figure out" in terms of the technology.
| They're already producing 5nm chips. Why can't they just start
| doing that in the US? It's just ASML machines and knowledge
| they already have! If TSMC can't figure out how to make 5nm
| chips in the US easily, why would it be easy for another
| company to be able to produce 5nm chips at a different place
| just because they could similarly buy ASML equipment and
| "figure out" whatever TSMC has figured out?
|
| There's a lot more than just being able to order from the same
| parts bin.
| _hypx wrote:
| > First, I'd say that sometimes companies don't use the same
| tooling even if they could. One of the things that gave TSMC
| an advantage was that they did push EUV while Intel didn't.
| Intel did make some investments in EUV, but pushed off the
| commercialization of it. So even when companies ca use the
| same tooling, sometimes people think something is too
| expensive and that they can get more out of something
| cheaper.
|
| They're all on EUV now.
|
| > In some ways, I simply agree with you: they can't really
| have a sustained lead without continuing to put in work to
| stay 3-18 months ahead of the competition. However, I'd argue
| that a 6-12 month lead can be pretty big.
|
| That's my point. That's about as big of a lead you can get.
| There's nothing one company can do that can't be copied by
| another.
|
| > Intel is looking to introduce new stuff like RibbonFET (a
| successor to FinFET) and PowerVia backside power delivery so
| there's a lot more than "just use ASML EUV machines" and
| there is a lot of space for companies to innovate and create
| leads. But we also don't necessarily want companies to have
| leads that are too durable.
|
| They're all investing in GAAFETs. Their roadmaps look very
| similar.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I heard it's so complicated that they have built up a reservoir
| of institutional knowledge and in-house expertise that would
| take _ten years_ to reproduce. I 've also heard this as the
| reason that if China were to capture Taiwan and TSMC intact
| (however likely that is or not) then they still couldn't run it
| competently without those people, or without those ten years of
| more work. I don't know if it's true or not, that's just what I
| heard.
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