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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

Important detail: This is not GIGAFAB facility.

Only 20,000 wafers per month is between mini- and megafab for TSMC. I suspect the production goes to US defense applications. Pompeo tweeting about it seems to confirm it.

https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1261143980634509318?

>Secretary Pompeo >@SecPompeo

>The U.S. welcomes TSMC’s intention to invest $12B in the most advanced 5-nanometer semiconductor fabrication foundry in the world. This deal bolsters U.S. national security at a time when China is trying to dominate cutting-edge tech and control critical industries.

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> I suspect the production goes to US defense applications. Pompeo tweeting about it seems to confirm it.

It doesn't. Just because he referenced "national security" does not mean this fab will be dedicated to producing chips for DOD contractors.

The DOD has been making a shift to COTS processing hardware over the past couple decades. Part of the national security implications of this fab is preventing supply chain disruption in the event something happens with China. This serves to both guarantee the ability to supply COTS hardware to the DOD and to reduce the impact on the overall economy, making it more difficult for China to hold the US over a barrel by threatening its technology industry.

COTS parts are part of defense supply chain management. Only manufacturer of critical components within 200 km from Chinese border is strategic vulnerability, COTS or not.

I think you and your parent agree with each other.

No, we disagree. I think this fab manufactures almost exclusively to defense even if it manufactures COTS parts. Building small volume fab for 2/3 of the cost of new GIGAFAB makes no sense for commercial purposes.

The cost of the building is minor compared to the cost of the wafer equipment. It is not uncommon to build a Fab but only fill it with a fraction of the equipment capacity. Fabs can be scaled up when demand increases.

The equipment is costly (lithography equipment especially) but everything around them is also very expensive, including building. Huge Class 4 clean rooms, water purification, etc. There are lots of chemicals, acids and their processing involved. There are pipes moving liquid helium, nitrogen etc. Semiconductor fab is essentially a chemical plant.

Seems like the most of the discussion here totally missed that part - that would be no consumer grade chips and likely the prime client would be US military.

20k wafers (perhaps 450mm ones?) with unknown yield (likely 80ish) is quite low. For reference AMD 5700 has die area of ~250mm.

I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would make sense for consumer products.

If the fab is located inside the US, AMD and NVIDIA can bid for many US government contracts that would go for Intel. After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel as supplier for many components.

> I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would make sense for consumer products.

If the consumer product is a toy then sure. If it’s a medical device then it could make sense. It’s all about margin.

> After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel as supplier for many components.

Maybe. If you want millions of chips a quarter then sure. But if you want 1000s a quarter then there are many options, depending on the node I guess. I’m not going to Google a complete list but one obvious example is Texas Instruments.

You can seriously get small run chips made on 7nm in the US? I just don't believe it.

Where in the world can you get small runs of 7nm chips, and why would you want them?

Was 7nm a requirement? I didn’t gather that from the thread.

Small run 22nm is certainly available. These are fabricated in the US, albeit at an Intel site. https://www.mosis.com/pages/intel_sponsored_fab

I mean the article is about them building a 5nm fab in Arizona, so i assume they do need it if they want to build fast AI chips that compete with China should it invade Taiwan.

What’s a fast AI chip? :)

What process node Google uses for TPU, one possibility for an AI chip, is not in the public domain since v1 but it’s very unlikely this chip is on the bleeding edge. Cost/benefit is likely not there for this use case. But only Google knows for sure since they run the cloud and get to define “benefit”.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/10/tearing-apart-google...

As I understand it there are reasons you want to not be behind in process technology as it makes your chips much faster. If your economy wants to keep pace I think this is a clever decision by the US government to entice TSMC to build a 5nm fab in the US.

From what I can see, 450mm is dead. It has been years since I’ve seen any action on this.

It'll be 300mm wafers. No one is doing 450mm wafers because cost-benefit doesn't make sense. Given it's low volume, they're going to reuse tooling that's already available, which means 300mm.

Indeed, 450mm was supposed to be a joke - kind of failed one as there are two responses about it.

This seems like something China might treat as an act of aggression by Taiwan..right? Like, now they are giving China good reason to see Taiwan as hostile, esp. with all their efforts to snuff out Taiwan.

I am sure China likes this. If TSCM is scared of a PRC takeover and trying to move investment out of the country, Well China's messaging is working.

Maybe before Taiwan was sufficiently richer per capita that taking it over had something to do with its wealth, but now it's a almost exclusively a matter of pride and nationalism. If they get control of a deindustrialized husk, they can say "Look at all the US boot-lickers we chased out".

The annexation of Taiwan is about access to the pacific ocean, or to be precise, about minimizing the risk of a blockade and about strategic depth on their eastern border. The communist party is literally playing grand strategy and from their perspective, they are surrounded by enemies. This is not nationalist pride, it is nationalist paranoia.

If it was mostly fear, wouldn't taking over the Philippines or a huge freight capacity west with Belt and Road would be equally good?

It looks like they've been slowly pursuing all three strategies.

It makes a takeover by the PRC easier, as it will blunt the loss of access to high technology.

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