The TSMC Thread

Global Wafers sets up shop in Italy. Good plan B after the Siltronics acquisition fell through.

UMC is hosed.

Since Samsung can’t get its yield up to acceptable levels, they’re going back to “mature” processes (28nm).

That’s in UMC’s alley. There’s going to be a glut in non-advanced chips.

UMC is getting US government subsidies to set up shop in Detroit making auto chips.

Does your neck hurt from the whiplash? :giraffe:

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PLA will get bored after @tommy525 only be watching plain-vanilla videos of betel-nut girls and Korean dramas. Just do that for first 3 months. That’ll throw your IP # off their list. :smile:

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I’ve
Advanced it’s only tik tok for me nowadays
I never watch Korean soaps

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I don’t consider that sn advancement.

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Morris Chang says, US fabs are a waste of money.

They did everything they could to increase productivity in the Oregon fab, but it wasn’t enough.

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Yes, related news on its Camas, WA fab.

When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. opened its first U.S. factory in 1998, it occupied a small piece of its 260-acre property in Camas. Plans called for several more factories on the site, known as WaferTech, which could have been a major new economic engine in the Portland area.

TSMC never built any of those factories, though, and the company’s founder gave a frank explanation this month of why most of WaferTech acreage remains empty…

TSMC’s expansion into Camas a quarter century ago was supposed to be a milestone for the company, and for the region. Instead, it became a morass.

WaferTech stumbled from the start, opening during a down cycle in the chip industry, struggling to work with local utilities and faltering under the complex business relationships TSMC established to fund its first U.S. factory.

“Initially it was chaos. It was just a series of ugly surprises because, when we first went in, we really expected the costs to be comparable to Taiwan. And that was extremely naive,” said Chang, who retired in 2018.

WaferTech’s costs in Camas — which he mistakenly described as being in Oregon during the interview — were 50% higher than in Taiwan, Chang said. And despite the large cluster of chip manufacturers in the Portland area, Chang said WaferTech struggled to staff the factory.

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What else a business guy would say? You gotta love Taiwanese working 50% longer hours for half cost.

Maybe is time tsmc pays a fair price for using American technology?

Did you write this article?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4502206-tsmc-is-likely-finished

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The U.S. in general and the Portland metro area in particular have a fundamental problem with a shortage of engineers with manufacturing expertise and a lack of manufacturing infrastructure. Intel’s move to the Midwest minimized those shortcomings but still may not be enough.

Where the U.S. excels is the brainpower that invented semiconductors in the first place. That’s still there. Once you fall behind in manufacturing knowhow and infrastructure though it’s hard to catch up on brainpower alone. We’ll see.

The brainpower part is also now starting to become a problem in the US too. It’s getting hard to encourage students to do masters and phds in the relevant physics and materials science topics because the foundry business isn’t seen as an exciting or innovative area to work in. IC design is much more popular as that’s where the innovation is now, and jobs are plentiful in the US.

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Barring something happening across the pond to the west, TSMC gonna just be printing money over next few years.

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Taiwan is making inroads into design.

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China stealing ASML’s IP.

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New DRAM FAB GROUNDBREAKING

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oh there she is… she’s kind of been AWOL lately. Maybe her cats got COVID.

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She aint no camera princess like Ma was.

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