[HN Gopher] TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on ...
___________________________________________________________________
TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip
process
Author : mikece
Score : 232 points
Date : 2025-08-05 12:53 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| delroth wrote:
| It's nice to see TSMC's internal security teams are detecting
| these things, but it would be more surprising news if this kind
| of IP theft wasn't happening to be honest...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Only the bad criminals get caught.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| This article was just the headline repeated in various forms with
| some generic filler
|
| So strange
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| When there isn't any info but you have to turn in 400 words to
| your editor/get paid by the word...
| jihadjihad wrote:
| I love that there is the headline, an intro, a heading for a
| section about the iPhone 18, and then _another_ heading titled
| " _TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets_ ", which
| is literally a word-for-word substring of the headline.
| never_inline wrote:
| At least, it doesnt look like chatgptese.
| dortlick wrote:
| There is literally no indication in the article that this has
| anything to do with apple other than them being a potential
| user of the TSMC 2nm process. Strange they tried to connect
| this story to apple.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Yep. It doesn't detail what was stolen, how they were found, if
| they're arrested right now, or who it is suspected they are
| working for. Useless article beyond the headline.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Reminds me of the now-infamous "capacitor plague" [1] of
| 1999-2007 that keeps cropping up in electronics repair.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
| gus_massa wrote:
| I guess you got downvoted because the connection is not
| obvious. The relevant paragraph of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Implications_...
| is
|
| > _[...] A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan
| left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte
| formula for Rubycon 's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began
| working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a
| copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected
| from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the
| formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium
| electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan [...]_
| sgarland wrote:
| TIL! The only time (knock on wood) I ever had a motherboard go
| bad was an MSI from around 2002, due to a blown capacitor. To
| their credit, MSI had great support at the time, and sent me a
| new one after I sent a photo of the blown capacitor.
| voxadam wrote:
| Asianometry has an interesting video on the topic titled _What
| Happened to the Capacitors in 2002?_ [1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/rSpzAVpnXo4
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Industrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against
| these days.
| sneak wrote:
| I frequently wonder what steps SpaceX security has to take,
| given the insane geopolitical significance of reusable rockets
| and cheap access to orbit.
| pythonguython wrote:
| Spacex rocketry tech is subject to ITAR regulations. That
| restricts who they're allowed to contract with, data
| encryption and handling, but altogether those regulations are
| quite bare. It likely wouldn't be enough to stop a state
| actor or rogue employees.
| pc86 wrote:
| I think ITAR is mostly just to stop the outright sale of
| controlled items to foreign entities, not necessarily to
| prevent IP theft or corporate espionage.
| blackguardx wrote:
| I worked on an ITAR-controlled camera once and it was
| drilled into me than even allowing a non-US person to
| view the output images of the camera constituted an ITAR
| violation.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Right, which is all well and good if you're a benevolent
| actor, but ITAR really doesn't do anything at all to stop
| you from intentionally committing (corporate or actual)
| espionage if you want to. There should still be controls
| to prevent you from violating ITAR either accidentally or
| on purpose.
| blackguardx wrote:
| The controls are you go to jail if you get caught. At
| least this is what one is told in the mandatory ITAR
| compliance trainings. That seems to be how the law works
| for most crimes.
| de6u99er wrote:
| I don't think what SpaceX is doing is that hard to replicate.
| There's already competitors launching smaller payloads for
| smaller costs per weight. Just a matter of time until they
| creep into SpaceX's market, while SpaceX tries to build a
| starship inspired by the Futurama rocket.
| sneak wrote:
| It is insanely valuable, both commercially and
| strategically.
|
| If it weren't that hard to replicate, several countries
| (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.
|
| I think you vastly underestimate how difficult rocketry is.
| There's a reason "rocket science" is colloquially a
| metaphor for an extremely difficult and technical task.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| The problem lies in forming and managing such a huge
| organisation that deals with the problem in an efficient
| and lean way, not the technical aspects.
|
| The materials science aspect is a challenge, not to
| produce, but to produce with a sane cost.
|
| The rocket science aspect of things (namely the
| linearisation of the booster model in order to be able to
| be solved in constant time by an MPC) is more or less a
| solved problem.
|
| Coordinating such complex interconnected systems will
| always remain one.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| so it still "rocket science", you saying that the hard
| part is to make it lean and efficient
|
| isn't that what they do in SpaceX????, your comment
| literally counterproductive
| vFunct wrote:
| SpaceX itself replicated the DC-X from the 90's. The
| reason the DC-X was cancelled was because of the
| economics. Reusable rockets are a solved problem, with
| only the economics of it a barrier (see Space Shuttle).
| SpaceX has to rely on their own investor funding for
| Starlink to remain a viable entity.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| The DC-X was stupid, dumb, insane, bunkers, and a waste
| of money and not replicable.
|
| "sure, let's put four RL-10 hydrogen engines on it! They
| are expensive and the worst possible for the low-altitude
| flights we are going to do so some sucker will believe we
| can do multi-stage reusable flights to orbit".
|
| "sure, we don't actually need to go to orbit anyway. That
| was always a dumb idea. Who said we ever wanted to do
| that? No, suborbital is really useful, we promise. And we
| are going to do it with a single stage (using hydrogen)
| cuz we are so smart and the future and everything!"
|
| "sure, let's build a specialized hydrogen tank in a
| stupid shape."
|
| "sure, let's give the whole single-stage low-altitude
| rocket a k00l shape that makes it more expensive."
|
| "People knowing it can't be done shouldn't interrupt
| people doing it wrong."
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >If it weren't that hard to replicate, several countries
| (and Bezos/Blue Origin) would have replicated it by now.
|
| There is a 100% chance multiple countries/companies will
| have replicated it in the next decade. If SpaceX never
| existed, they likely would have achieved it at the same
| pace regardless.
|
| This is the same with EVs. If Tesla never rose, the world
| EV market outside of Tesla would have seen precisely the
| same rise.
|
| There is a tendency to attribute the early movers with
| innovation in the inevitable, where we all stand on the
| shoulders of others and just reach a little higher.
|
| As to the rocket science misnomer, that's a space race
| hangover where an engineering role was extremely public
| and celebrated, but in actual reality "rocket science" is
| a mediocre field with miserable pay and high
| unemployment.
|
| As to how valuable it is, "insanely"? The world has a
| fairly finite launch need, such that SpaceX made a whole
| new business -- Starlink -- to make work for their
| capacity. Economically the space launch business is
| relatively minuscule.
| dagw wrote:
| _If Tesla never rose, the world EV market outside of
| Tesla would have seen precisely the same rise._
|
| would have seen the same rise _eventually_. I know from a
| friend that worked R&D at a major car company that Tesla
| really lit a fire under then and 'forced' them to push
| their own EV experiments from proof of concepts to
| commercial product much faster than they where originally
| thinking about doing it.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The EV ventures of most automakers are massive money
| losers (just as it always has been for Tesla outside of
| selling green credits and subsidies). But for sure they
| all rushed to get there not because the EVs themselves
| were valuable, but because of the insanity of the capital
| markets where Tesla is valued at a trillion dollars at a
| 200x P/E, while the rest of the market is at like a 7-14x
| ratio. Everyone wanted some of that irrational hype.
| jmpman wrote:
| I question your EV take. Tesla proved a business model,
| the technology and path from niche sports car to the best
| selling car on earth, and now on to the lowest cost per
| mile robotaxi. Simply knowing that a solution exists and
| is financially viable, is enough to motivate the
| competition.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Tesla proved a business model
|
| Through almost all of Tesla's existence, its business
| model was ironically the sale of gasoline vehicles.
| Because, of course, Tesla's entire business model relied
| upon selling green credits to incumbent ICE vehicle
| makers.
|
| So it didn't really prove much of a business model,
| effectively being parasitic.
|
| >the technology and path from niche sports car to the
| best selling car on earth,
|
| The _overwhelming_ bulk of the technology advancements
| that enable modern EVs -- from advances in batteries to
| cameras to sensors to embedded controllers and CPUs -- is
| thanks to the smartphone industry. Modern EVs owe
| infinitely more to those than they do to anything Tesla
| did.
|
| >knowing that a solution exists and is financially
| viable, is enough to motivate the competition.
|
| I think of this much like compact fluorescents. Remember
| those? We all rushed to transition, and then they were
| absolutely demolished in every metric -- efficiency,
| colour, and most importantly the amount of environmental
| contamination when disposed -- by LED lights. I feel like
| we're going to feel the same about early EVs.
|
| >now on to the lowest cost per mile robotaxi
|
| Is this a serious comment?
| trogdor wrote:
| > The overwhelming bulk of the technology advancements
| that enable modern EVs -- from advances in batteries to
| cameras to sensors to embedded controllers and CPUs -- is
| thanks to the smartphone industry.
|
| Would you point me to a source where I can read about
| this?
| pc86 wrote:
| This comment has big "I could build a better SpaceX I just
| don't want to" vibes.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| If only _my_ dad had an emerald mine then _I 'd_ be the
| billionaire rocket scientist CEO
| pc86 wrote:
| https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-
| min...
|
| TLDR: It's nonsense.
| relaxing wrote:
| Funny how many words it takes to say Elon's dad in fact
| own a stake in an emerald mine, invest in Elon's
| business, and give Elon an incredibly privileged
| upbringing.
| pc86 wrote:
| There's a lot of unanswered questions from the article
| which is seems anyone with even mediocre skills as a
| journalist should be willing and able to answer.
|
| It mentions the mine "collapsed" in 1989. Does that mean
| literally? Just financially? Was there an insurance
| payout? Did everyone lose their investment? Did Errol
| Musk own 1% or 90%?
|
| * In quoting another article, it does say: "Errol Musk,
| an engineer, owned a small percentage of an emerald mine
| and had a couple of good years before the mine went bust
| and wiped out his investment."
|
| Elon graduated from college less than 10 years later but
| says he was $100k in debt. Was he actually in debt? Did
| he spend years paying that off or did he (or someone
| else) pay it off shortly after in a lump sum or very
| quickly?
|
| His dad provided $20k of a $200k seed round for Zip2, was
| the rest also from friends and family or more
| institutional investors? Did his dad receive equity for
| that or was it a gift?
|
| Reading through the article again (and a little more
| closely than before) it doesn't seem Elon had "an
| incredibly privileged upbringing" but maybe that's a mix
| of good PR and this now being 40-some years ago? They're
| referred to as upper middle class but if that's all it
| takes to be "incredibly privileged" then 90% of the kids
| born to people reading HN are also incredibly privileged.
|
| Arnold's piece seems to contradict basically everything
| else in the article so I'm not sure what to make of it,
| but it also sounds like he made about $350k profit over
| the lifetime of his ownership in the mine? Certainly not
| nothing but it's not opulence and it doesn't sound like
| most (any?) of that made its way to Elon.
| relaxing wrote:
| > Elon mostly lived with his father, who says he owned
| thoroughbred horses, a yacht, several houses and a
| Cessna. One of their homes was in Waterkloof, a leafy
| suburb of Pretoria that was popular with foreign
| diplomats.
|
| > Wanderlust ran on both sides of the family. On
| holidays, Errol and his kids would travel, he said: to
| Europe, Hong Kong, throughout the United States. Or
| they'd take the plane to Lake Tanganyika [in Zambia],
| where Errol had a stake in an emerald mine.
|
| That sounds more privileged than upper middle class to
| me.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Lots of space technology is classified as weapons subject to
| export control. ITAR has plenty of rules about who can see
| information. US immigration status generally has to be green
| card or citizen, and country of origin and any second
| citizenships are considered.
|
| ("export control" in this sense really doesn't have to do
| with moving a physical object out of the country but sharing
| information, to the extent that a conversation in an elevator
| could be an export violation. most export violations amount
| to emails being sent to the wrong person)
|
| When I worked briefly in defense, for example, there would be
| regular random searches of my stuff as I exited the building
| and security would wander the building and look at what you
| left out on your desk while you went to lunch. Entirely
| seriously they told us not to wear our badge in public if we
| left the building and not to leave our laptops in our cars
| because someone might follow us and steal it. Had colleagues
| who were visiting a foreign country for work have their hotel
| rooms obviously thoroughly and messily searched while they
| were out.
|
| They _also_ do national security missions so there are folks
| there with high clearances.
|
| Thing is that even if you did steal a bunch of information,
| that doesn't mean you could just copy and be successful. Any
| one of a million things can go wrong with a self-landing
| rocket that will cause it to explode, you can't just steal
| the whole system of operation that keeps these things from
| happening.
|
| You couldn't steal all of the secrets of a circus performer
| and suddenly be able to juggle chainsaws while riding a
| unicycle.
| chilmers wrote:
| So, this is admittedly a little tinfoil, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if Musk is happy for some degree of espionage to
| happen. If it looked like there was a possibility of China
| getting this capability first, it would light a fire under
| the US government to give financial and regulatory assistance
| to the Starship program.
| amelius wrote:
| https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/elon-musk-claims-
| pate...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Musk does seem to think in terms of how much money he can
| get from the government for his companies. But to be fair,
| government subsidies are a successful strategy for
| entrepreneurs who want to make a lot of money.
|
| Maybe they shouldn't be? And I think honest people can have
| that debate.
|
| But you can't really argue against the effectiveness of
| government subsidy as a path to prosperity for the guy
| getting the money.
| sockp0pp3t wrote:
| This worked for at least one Burisma employee
| sharpshadow wrote:
| It's primarily in the government interest in subsidising,
| except when it's a corrupted subsidy.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Despite his faults he does seem to care about the actual
| lofty mission statements of his companies more than just
| straight profit. Otherwise, you wouldn't see bizarre
| things like him directing Tesla to open source all their
| patents.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I would say the main element of their success is not really
| in any specific close kept secrets - its in actually
| committing to reusable rockets and keep working until they
| had a working system.
|
| While there are some really nice components and clever ideas
| (Merlin/Raptor engines & very good guidance tech) this all
| really has been doable for decades in less efficient form.
|
| But so far no one other than Space X has been able to win
| against all the naysayers who were so sure only single use
| rockets are ever going to work, get enough funding to build a
| partial RLV & then operate it successfully as a business.
|
| I don't think it depends on any single technology or a set of
| them only they have access to - rather that they have been
| able to persist and see it through, unlike all the other RLV
| projects that never got funding to go past the paper stage or
| very simply not viable (Space shuttle).
| bwfan123 wrote:
| There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but
| classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and
| what happens when employees of one company move to another.
| In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is
| a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an
| employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-
| secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring
| researchers from open-ai, deepmind etc for 100s of millions
| for the knowledge in their heads of the recipes which work
| for making superior LLMs - the knowledge of which is
| empirical and may take years to discover.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-
| Classic-St...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You could also argue that they're hiring people for the
| general expertise they have in developing frontier LLMs.
| Distinguishing trade secrets from general knowledge is
| difficult and employees building the latter to make them
| more valuable to new employers is an explicit policy goal
| of US employment law.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| What is the story?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I imagine SpaceX having pretty fishbowl conference rooms for
| customers in the center of everything, with guest network
| ports just segmented off from the main but using the same
| hardware. Oh man that would stress me out if I was IT. And of
| course the '<Customer name> needs to print something off and
| needs access to the MFCs'. No, you print it out for them,
| like has been discussed and agreed to and keeps with ITAR.
| 'No, they need access, and now. Because I'm a sales guy and I
| won't tell them no' but if they get into/past the MFC, it's
| all on IT and IT being bad at their job/security, not the
| sales guy that demanded they get physical access.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Just knowing how the thing is built doesn't seem to be enough.
| Comac still sources its jet engines from Pratt and Whitney for
| instance, despite many years of trying no local manufacturer
| has been able to build them to the same spec.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Or for analogy, following a recipe doesn't make you a good
| cook.
| chii wrote:
| But it also depends on how precise the recipe is - if it's
| described down to the exact movements the cook needs to do,
| which may be replicated via a machine...
| baggachipz wrote:
| No recipe accounts for ambient temperature/humidity, very
| few for altitude differences, etc. etc. It still takes
| knowledgable tweaks to get just right.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Such recipe could exist.
| adolph wrote:
| At the end of the day, the map won't ever be the
| territory. Typically the properties that makes something
| successful are those which cannot be specified. If it
| were otherwise and those qualities could be specified in
| a reproducible manner, that thing would not be observably
| successful.
| kergonath wrote:
| They exist in the industry, where a small variation of
| one parameter could affect tons of products. Same for
| individual restaurants, cooks know how to set up their
| equipment. For amateur cooks at home it does not matter.
| They do not need that level of consistency, and it would
| get quite expensive.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Or for analogy, following a recipe doesn 't make you a
| good cook._
|
| Following a recipe can you close enough for thousands of
| Door Dash customers to put the original restaurant out of
| business.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I feel like you're reading too deeply into my shallow
| analogy.
| FredPret wrote:
| I'm not sure - what if China can flood the world with
| 80%-as-good-as-the-real-thing knockoffs at half the price
| and put everyone else out of business?
| motorest wrote:
| > Or for analogy, following a recipe doesn't make you a
| good cook.
|
| For an analogy, no one cares if you're a good cook if
| you're able to make a passable burger. Most of the demand
| is not for the best burger money can buy, the just want a
| burger.
| mitjam wrote:
| A relative of mine worked at a medical devices company (brain
| sensors). She told me how small intricacies of the
| manufacturing process were critical to reach good enough
| yield or functioning devices, at all. The critical process
| steps were closely guarded and only a handful employees knew
| how to do them. The devil is often in the details - and the
| moat, too.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Are P&W and Rolls Royce the only companies in the world
| capable of manufacturing high-end jet engines end-to-end?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| No, but they provide the best efficiency/performance for
| the buck. China can produce its own jet turbines, but they
| have to trade off performance or longevity to do it.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks.
| prussian wrote:
| Don't forget GE Aerospace. It gets a bit weirder too since
| you have joint ventures like CFM and Engine Alliance.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Good point. Isn't there also Safran?
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes. Their engines are mostly for military applications,
| tough, so they are less well known of the general public.
| Other than that, they are half of CFM International, but
| again they are not very visible.
| a2tech wrote:
| They don't make them end to end either. Their jet engines
| are made up of parts supplied by thousands of suppliers.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Obviously, but I would imagine that most of the "magic"
| isn't in the supplied components, but in the finished
| product. Otherwise reproduction would be easier.
| prussian wrote:
| Which Comac? I thought they all used GE (CFM for Comac 919)
| or Russian/Chinese sourced engines.
| ta20240528 wrote:
| That's the OP's point: COMAC is using CFM LEAP 1-C engines
| on the C919.
|
| To be fair, they have taken the effort to build the CJ
| 1000A engine - which is on wing testing should the
| tangerine fellow cut them off. But its Plan B at best.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The product I oversee at my job is something that can only be
| built by people who are intimately aware of the process and
| have a strong understanding of the underlying engineering.
|
| We could hand the full project file to a competitor and they
| almost certainly would not be able to build functional units.
| The failure points are fractal, so you need a strong
| intuition about what part you are installing, what qualities
| an ideal part has, what qualities the one in your hand has,
| how you might install it differently because of those
| qualities, and/or how you might change a later process to
| accommodate it. Or if the part should just be junked. The
| process is fraught with seemingly good intuitions that will
| ultimately lead you to failure as well.
|
| These units also cannot be reworked, reused, or repaired, so
| any mistake before finalizing the build junks the entire
| thing.
|
| For extremely low-entropy products, mother nature is
| incredibly unforgiving.
| wyre wrote:
| What product is it?
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's not a high bar... Boeing can't seem to reliably
| manufacture their own designs.
| K0balt wrote:
| This is a bigger issue than most people appreciate, and a
| huge problem for the USA.
|
| There is a specialised trade known as tool and die maker,
| or just die maker
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_and_die_maker) that
| is fundamental to a country's ability to create industrial
| capacity. So far, no automation tool has been able to
| replace their expertise.
|
| Without die makers, you can't build tools that make things,
| you can't build factories, and mass production in general
| is dependent on their skillset.
|
| Right now, the USA only has 50k die makers, and the average
| age of a die maker, including apprentices, is 54. The
| average age of a master die maker is 73, and the average
| age of a journeyman is 62. A master die maker can teach
| about 5 apprentices to the journey man level in a work
| environment, after 2+ years of basic engineering school, in
| about 5-7 years. A journeyman may generally considered a
| master after 10-20 years of experience, depending on the
| nature of their experience.
|
| We don't have enough die makers to rebuild the industrial
| capacity of the USA, and we can't teach the amount we need
| in less than 5-7decades without some kind of major change
| in the process of doing so. And since more than half of the
| master die makers are months from retirement or death, we
| are in an extremely precarious position as a viable
| industrial power.
|
| This is why it is extremely difficult to build anything
| physical in the USA using only USA sourced parts and
| materials. It's almost impossible to even get a decent
| variety of screws and fasteners made here in the USA, and
| we can't easy build the machines to make screws because of
| the critical shortage of master die makers.
|
| If we are to maintain the ability to build and maintain our
| machines, weapons, and critical infrastructure without
| being completely dependent on imported tools, supplies, and
| knowledge, we will have to reinvent the industrial process
| using automation or something similar to compensate for our
| foolish exportation and devaluation of strategic skills and
| capabilities.
| asdff wrote:
| If the average age is 73 that's the issue right there.
| People are refusing to retire at 62 and make room for
| juniors. Then when they finally do retire (73 average
| seems like "dies in office" levels) there are 2 decades
| of missing juniors who haven't been trained in the
| pipeline.
|
| This is the shortcoming with most technical fields. No
| one is incentivized to see the big picture of the
| training pipeline that exists well outside the scope of
| their own company. No one likes juniors but that is their
| future.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The actual killer is the pay and working conditions, and
| the problem is fairly intractable.
|
| If you are smart enough to be a good tool maker, you are
| likely smart enough to be a good 6-figure keyboard-all-
| day worker. Losing a finger (or three) and breathing VOCs
| all day for half the pay is not very enticing.
|
| These industries aren't glamourous for investors either.
| The business proposition sucks, the cost and liabilities
| are intense, and the margins would need to be negative to
| be truly competitive.
|
| And worse than anything, the stuff that comes from China
| is not only 1/10th the cost, _it 's also now better
| quality_.
| bsder wrote:
| The problem is that these jobs are hard and the pay is
| crap.
|
| SmarterEveryDay attempted to make a grill scrubber in the
| US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
|
| tl;dr He did it, but it went very poorly.
| ToDougie wrote:
| Thank you for taking the time to post this. You've
| outlined problems that are absolutely solvable.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| We don't have sensors that can grok the full building process
| that deep human experts have.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Just knowing how the thing is built doesn 't seem to be
| enough._
|
| See perhaps:
|
| > _Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge is knowledge that is
| difficult to extract or articulate--as opposed to
| conceptualized, formalized, codified, or explicit knowledge--
| and is therefore more difficult to convey to others through
| verbalization or writing. Examples of this include individual
| wisdom, experience, insight, motor skill, and intuition.[1]
| An example of "explicit" information that can be recorded,
| conveyed, and understood by the recipient is the knowledge
| that London is in the United Kingdom. Speaking a language,
| riding a bicycle, kneading dough, playing an instrument, or
| designing and operating sophisticated machinery, on the other
| hand, all require a variety of knowledge that is difficult or
| impossible to transfer to other people and is not always
| known "explicitly," even by skilled practitioners._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
| varispeed wrote:
| Building even basic things is difficult. Friend of mine tried
| like dozen companies from around the world to manufacture
| very basic milled aluminium part. None of them could make it.
| Only one company could make 1 or 2 right out of 100.
| helij wrote:
| Sorry, but I find that hard to believe. Part certainly
| wasn't very basic.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I can't remember but I think Lance Air or Epic got split in a
| sale and a company bought the type design/blueprints but ran
| into issues actually manufacturing from them.
| duxup wrote:
| It seems to me companies ... don't care out side some easy to
| do basic things.
|
| But when push comes to shove if manufacturing is cheaper in a
| country where lots of folks want to steal your things. -shrug-
| Short term profits win.
| 93po wrote:
| am i crazy for not caring if a company in a foreign country
| obtains trade secrets and manufactures the same thing? like
| we're all humans and we all want access to whatever it is
| they're building, it seems like more people building the
| thing is a good thing. if that impacts Samsung's profits, why
| do I care? its not like corporations give a shit about me
| duxup wrote:
| I really can't answer that, it's your call if you care or
| not.
|
| I think that the more of a free for all folks stealing tech
| as they wish will push companies who do the development
| work towards more proprietary / DRM and similar solutions
| ... I don't like that.
|
| Allowing people to profit from their inventions /
| investments encourages more such development, and without
| that discourages it or encourages less good options.
| echelon wrote:
| Some countries have all the talent and manufacturing and
| sourcing advantages. Once they take the lead, you might
| never be able to keep up.
|
| Your engineers lose their jobs, your businesses go
| bankrupt, you exit that entire field entirely for your
| entire population. Slowly your ability to do work begins to
| evaporate.
|
| It's happened before and it'll continue to happen.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Slowly your ability to do work begins to evaporate.
|
| To be clear about this, you can still physically do the
| work same as before, it's just become uneconomic/not
| competitive. It's not all bad though. Having another
| country take the bulk of the market leaves you free to
| differentiate and specialize in one or more profitable
| niches that are not being served well by what is now the
| main supplier. You might end up dominating some fraction
| of what's now a vastly bigger market, with improved
| economies of scale that you're free to exploit as well.
| echelon wrote:
| That's a bit like an exercise left to the reader. Or
| wishful thinking.
|
| We hope that it works out that way, but there's simply no
| guarantee. It's not an economic law.
|
| If the country supplying said thing can have domestic
| companies deliver at lower margin, you're still kind of
| screwed. Their internal competition fills out the niches,
| which they can then export.
| 93po wrote:
| isnt that what tariffs are for?
|
| there's something that rubs me wrong about the argument
| of "we need IP laws because otherwise someone else might
| do the same thing as us, but better, and we won't be able
| to compete"
| khuey wrote:
| Well who are you? Maybe there is no reason for you to care.
|
| TSMC alone is 12% of Taiwanese exports. The entire
| semiconductor industry is 25% of Taiwan's GDP. It's obvious
| why the Taiwanese government and society, to say nothing of
| TSMC's shareholders, would care.
| fidotron wrote:
| Yes, because if you tolerate that you disincentivize
| actually developing the IP in question in favour of
| stealing everyone else's, which leads to nothing being
| developed.
| 93po wrote:
| is it impossible for society to advance without IP laws?
| is capitalism a requirement for advancement?
| flkenosad wrote:
| No. Of course not. This is just something IP holders say
| because they profit.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I work at a tech company and I'd rather have other
| countries pay my company to do it, rather than do it
| themselves with less-than-US salaries
| amelius wrote:
| Compartmentalize your company. Make sure people from one
| compartment are unaware about things people from other
| compartments are doing. Don't transfer/hire across compartment
| boundaries.
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| This is such a bad idea.
| amelius wrote:
| Care to say why? Security always comes at a cost ...
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| You don't need to deliberately create silos in order to
| secure a project. We've had people working on top secret
| projects and while people may not have known the
| specifics the company was kept up to date on the progress
| and outcomes of the project. We brought people in from
| other teams after an extra vetting process and additional
| NDA specific to that project.
| amelius wrote:
| With industrial espionage, NDAs aren't going to cut it
| ...
| xxpor wrote:
| For the vast vast majority of companies, their success
| comes down to culture and execution rather than "the tech
| secret". You can't really steal that.
|
| I will grant you, the specific case of TSMC is definitely
| in the rarer case where there are true tech secrets.
| nunez wrote:
| Apple does this.
| amelius wrote:
| Apple is great because their hardware and software is so
| well integrated.
|
| If they compartmentalize their hardware and software
| departments, we might as well split them into a hardware
| and a software company.
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| Most companies aren't Apple.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Locally in Taiwan, there's growing suspicion that the 2nm process
| technology was leaked to Japan's Rapidus.
|
| People are questioning whether the technology was leaked to
| Rapidus through Japanese equipment suppliers.
| AnonMO wrote:
| make no sense since Rapidus 2nm process is from IBM.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| idk which shocking, Japanese company try to steal TSMC or IBM
| have 2nm process out of nowhere
| speed_spread wrote:
| "Out of nowhere" would be a stretch. IBM may not have mass-
| market volume anymore but they kept up the production chain
| to build mainframes (and I would guess other "specialty"
| products) for institutional customers.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Intel struggling to reach that level while still
| producing mass chips, Texas instrument is not even close
| to that level while being No 2 on US in many many years
|
| and You tell me that this guy have bleeding edge tech
| without telling people??? and suddenly build that in
| Japan??? seems like bullshit since US literally need to
| make TSMC come to the US
|
| if IBM can build that, US Gov don't need to suck a TSMC
| d*k
| protimewaster wrote:
| IBM has been publicly working toward 2nm since at least
| 2021, though, so it doesn't seem like it's coming from
| nowhere. Unless this is a completely different 2nm
| development, here's a presser about it from 2021, titled
| "Introducing the world's first 2 nm node chip"
| (https://research.ibm.com/blog/2-nm-chip)
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| You only read first line of my comment????
|
| I can claim that I have working solution for 2nm too
| tomasphan wrote:
| What's going on big guy? Maybe take a break from
| commenting
| trynumber9 wrote:
| IBM has kept researching in Albany. They license
| manufacturing technology to other parties even if they gave
| up trying to build their own fabrication facilities a
| decade ago.
| re-thc wrote:
| > since Rapidus 2nm process is from IBM
|
| Unless it has great yields with 0 issues, there's always
| things to learn from. It's also possible the IBM process
| isn't what it seems and there's more to it.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| We can make hypersonic missiles.
|
| I still want to get a look at China's. Right down to the
| metallurgy.
| simpleintheory wrote:
| The original link from Nikkei Asia that the 9to5mac article is a
| repost of has some more information and less generic filler:
|
| Link: https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/tsmc-fires-
| worke...
|
| Archive: https://archive.ph/ta1kq
| sgarland wrote:
| Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung's fab
| in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives
| in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The
| supposed reason was better security, though it's unclear to me
| why they couldn't globally apply whatever rules they wanted to
| enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to
| use a remote endpoint. The throughput was absolutely terrible,
| like < 1 MBps. My department had some large files, so that was
| fun.
|
| One such file was an Excel file that was more script than
| anything else. We had to have labels in a specific format on
| every machine we owned in the fab, which was something like 250
| of them. The normal stuff like its id number, and also which
| points of contact for a technician and engineer, as well as their
| photos and phone numbers. Manually balancing and re-balancing
| every time a shift gained or lost an employee would've been
| obnoxious, so naturally instead countless hours were spent
| coercing VBA and ODBC to query a DB containing employee info,
| extracting and resizing their headshot, applying all of this to a
| template label, queuing a print job, and repeating. It was pretty
| fun to watch, honestly. I think I also had created a floor plan
| map somehow, and it would do its best to group a given
| technician's assigned machines such that they minimized distance
| traveled during inspections. Anyway, the large file size was due
| to it caching the headshots (might have made a hidden tab for
| each? I don't remember) for better performance, as that had
| proven to be a bottleneck.
| gedy wrote:
| Nice ha. Your story reminds me of why I flinch whenever I hear
| "just give them the spreadsheet, engineer, don't argue..."
| hbarka wrote:
| At least they didn't make you use Sharepoint and OneDrive. How
| fun using VBA and ODBC in 2019, proving the mighty Excel will
| go on as the new MS Access.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| This abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of
| esports.
| boredtofears wrote:
| https://excel-esports.com/
| fragmede wrote:
| https://youtu.be/QwNoFOUiSiE
| bombcar wrote:
| Roko's Basilisk or whatever it is should more properly be
| called Excel's Visual Basicilisk - once Excel becomes self-
| aware it is going to punish everyone who tortured it for
| decades.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason
| Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to
| tools they need to automate their work.
| LarMachinarum wrote:
| while I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that
| wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've
| encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary,
| these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but
| their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on
| Excel as their go-to tool for everything:
|
| be it things better done with a database, a word processor,
| a diagramming program, a label generator, a Form editor, a
| markup language, a web page, anything: they had all the
| tools at their disposal but no, no, they felt the odd
| compulsive need to do it with only Excel instead...
|
| ...often leading to problems down the line when the
| limitations of Excel for the use case (for which it wasn't
| made) would show more and more but they wasted already so
| much time and (needless) effort doing it in Excel that they
| would be even more reluctant to the possibility of
| switching to any more appropriate tool for the task.
| tracker1 wrote:
| The VBA hammer is real... it can force any screw, nail,
| staple into any hole you desire.
|
| Until the web version takes over, and you can no longer
| connect to anything real.
| john01dav wrote:
| I doubt that the people who use Excel care enough about
| computers to be deterred by cloud.
| deepsun wrote:
| In hotel industry they need to calculate and set a price
| for each room/night. Typically that's done by solving
| convex optimization (e.g. simplex method) and using
| "shadow values" from it as the price per room.
|
| Lo and behold, not every math package provides "shadow
| values". So you either buy a specialized math tool, or...
| use Excel, that has it built-in.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| Bingo. Working in an automotive OEM the entire company
| works on excel specifically excel vb scripts. No one knows
| why and no one has figured out how we got here. But it's
| slow and steady abuse excel.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| How do you do fellow Germans
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Also how the simplest, fastest and most secure way to send
| someone from another corporation a file for collaboration
| is an encrypted zip and phone in the password.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Maybe we need an IOCCC or Demoscene for Excel
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It just sounds like Mail Merge to me. Which if you were using
| a computer for work in the 90s, you might know something
| about. (It was also convoluted) :)
| jve wrote:
| It is great that particular tools enable employees automate
| stuff and make their work more effective.
|
| From developer point of view I see that the effort would most
| certainly be diverted in another kind of solution.
|
| But yeah, "citizen developer" stuff is a thing that microsoft
| pushes especially in Power Platform / Canvas Apps - one
| programs with WYSIWIG and Excel-like formulas (PowerFX)
|
| But then again I wonder who are the people that can program in
| VBA and chooses excel. Is it the constraint around software
| they can use? An excel being a GUI which you don't have to
| implement? Anyways, a net positive for business.
| skeezyboy wrote:
| where else can you run vba these days?
| mjlee wrote:
| I'm sure the free GUI is the gateway drug, but at this point
| practically everybody in finance uses Excel. You can pass
| files and scripts around and be pretty confident that the
| external auditor will be able to use them.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > it's unclear to me why they couldn't globally apply whatever
| rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead
| of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint
|
| My guess is that they're worried that you'll download data and
| then copy it out of the device while the device is offline. An
| employee could even "lose" the device, giving an attacker
| unbound time to extract data from it.
|
| Another equally likely explanation is that the exec in charge
| of their cloud services gains more prestige due to his solution
| being universally adopted internally, or some other crap along
| this line.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| A common and innovative solution to this problem now, that I
| have seen in other fabs (not semis, but other industries), is
| to put QR codes on each machine. That way the info behind it
| can be dynamic and maintained
| metalman wrote:
| Grandpa worked heat treat at the alegany national forge, where
| they made stuff like the beams for the empire state building,
| periscope tubes, and the 16" guns for the biggest battle ships,
| each thing had to be tempered in a very specific way, and to deal
| with spying and espionage, the charts and instuments used on the
| shop floor were all deliberatly wrong,and the written
| instructions were also wrong leaving the person in charge to know
| how to convert the given instructions into what was actualy done
| through a secret method, not complicated, but essentialy
| impossible to reverse engineer. There is a story of soviet
| engineers who somehow were invited to tour the RR jet turbine
| factory, and were given shoes that had extra sticky soles they
| wore only for the tour, which ewere then used to anyalise the
| metal chips that get picked up from the shop floor..... never
| ends, expected.....even honored
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Could someone help contextualize what parts of this manufacturing
| process are considered the most important and closely guarded
| trade secrets? I'd love to hear some slightly more concrete
| examples.
|
| How easily could another company replicate this process if they
| knew all the key details? It was my understanding that access to
| photolithography machines was one of the major obstacles in
| replicating chip manufacturing processes.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Could someone help contextualize what parts of this
| manufacturing process are considered the most important and
| closely guarded trade secrets?
|
| There's _way_ too many fine details to even begin to list.
| Modern chip fabbing is the closest thing on the planet to
| actual dark magic, and the difficulty only rises exponentially
| with every new fabrication node. Literally any part of this
| could be considered a "trade secret" if it's not already
| described publicly as part of patents, academic research or
| both.
| epistemovault wrote:
| So even if someone steals the secret sauce, does that mean they
| can actually cook the same dish?
| amelius wrote:
| No, but if you want to cook the same dish it sure helps to have
| the secret sauce.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Gee, I wonder which nation-state actor was orchestrating this...
| bilbo0s wrote:
| They claim it was Japan.
|
| More specifically, Rapidus.
| karakot wrote:
| I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? Why
| not just a state or a country? USA is not a nation-state, or
| UK, or India, or Russia, etc. Does your question imply that
| none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and
| only nation-states can do it?
| matthewbauer wrote:
| Hard to know what OP meant, but I took it as an oblique
| reference to China.
| karakot wrote:
| Well, is China a nation-state or a multi-national state, or
| essentially just a country(state)? English is my third
| language, so I just wonder do I miss some nuance here.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| New Jersey is a state. I do not think that they have the
| wherewithal to attempt such. Scotland is a country, but I
| don't think their occupiers would allow them to try. Granted,
| it is an awkward term, and I too wish there was a better one.
|
| >Does your question imply that none of these countries are
| capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do
| it?
|
| It's not clear to me that Russia can summon the ambition. But
| point conceded.
| theodric wrote:
| Serious props to TSMC for having the processes in place to catch
| this or figure it out, sacking the alleged bastards, announcing
| the insider breach publicly (and accepting the consequences of a
| moment of corporate vulnerability, but at the same time showing
| their transparency and commitment to protecting client IP), and
| further not allowing mere job loss to be the end of the story. I
| had no particular opinion about TSMC, but my respect for them has
| moved up a notch now.
| ge96 wrote:
| My probably-racist sounding comment or nationalistic is my
| concern for software being owned by a certain entity and then
| this group is going to be used for the foundation of AI with our
| military, it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
|
| edit: in this case someone pointed out it's a different nation so
| I'm surprised
| quyleanh wrote:
| They said [1] in article but put iPhone 18 chip process just for
| clickbait... Disappointed.
|
| [1] No details have been shared on the nature of the information
| obtained. It is likely that it relates to the 2nm process in
| general rather than anything specific to Apple's A20 chip.
| amelius wrote:
| Funny thing is that Apple doesn't know how to make an iPhone.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| How big are all of the design files for a modern chip? 10MB?
| 100gig? Billions of transistors, but surely a lot of compressible
| redundancy.
|
| Not that I think you can just plug in a thumb drive and download
| as you please, but just a sense of scale on how much data
| describes the design.
| seanw444 wrote:
| > Not that I think you can just plug in a thumb drive and
| download as you please
|
| Why not? It's just data, and a thumb drive stores data. As long
| as it fits.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I meant that plugging in a thumb drive and downloading the
| company jewels is sure to be noticed. I was hoping for
| something a tad more clandestine. USB storage devices on my
| corporate laptop are auto mounted as read only and need
| policy exceptions to be able to write.
| j_walter wrote:
| This was not just from a thumb drive as that is very
| tightly controlled at TSMC (they did catch someone right
| away before it got leaked). The employees were caught
| printing info and removing it from the company (caught due
| to magnetic ink setting off the metal detectors) as well as
| using phones to take pictures of their laptop info while
| connecting from offsite. Taking pictures of remote laptops
| is a more covert way, but both employees were caught
| through suspicious pattern analysis and review of access
| logs of people right before they quit the company.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| TSMC practices compartmentalization. The entire recipe is
| never stored in one place.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| I'm confused about the iPhone 18 part; I assume that it would
| just be one of their usual processes, possibly with a few tweaks.
| j_walter wrote:
| The iPhone 18 part is for clicks...it really has nothing to do
| with the iPhone 18 and everything to do with TSMC's N2 process.
| mathiaspoint wrote:
| Hard to feel bad for Apple when a lot of this is about locking
| customers out of their own devices and then cheaping out with
| contract manufacturing. I almost want to cheer on the employees
| doing this.
| chasil wrote:
| Have we topped Micron?
|
| https://www.freethink.com/the-changing-world-order/chinese-i...
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