Chips and Geopolitics
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
-Morris Chang, former chairman and CEO of the world’s largest semiconductor foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 2019.
And he said something similar in 2017 as well. Turns out he foresee all sort of problems when TSMC became the leading Fab for the world.
The 2013 piece [1] on Intel is also interesting. That was when Intel were about to launch their delayed 14nm. It is rather unfortunate Intel decide not to follow through their Custom Foundry.
[1] https://www.semi.org/en/Oral-History-Interview-Morris-Chang
I think Intel tried pretty hard for custom foundry but didn't get much business between IP concerns from competitors and their 10nm failures resulting capacity shortages.
Now, TSMC is at 7 nm, and while the smaller nanometers are important for energy efficiency, and especially for mobile devices with a battery, it doesn’t really increase the clock cycle. Actually, nobody seems to talk about gigahertz clock cycles anymore. It’s all about multiple cores now.
Then, doesn’t this mean that SMIC is now competitive against Intel on desktop computers and laptop computer CPUs? And to be honest, I don’t even know the specs of the chip in my laptop. I don’t think I even purchased the fastest chip anyways.
I cannot agree more. If we learn one thing this year this is it.
IMO only. Not my area. Pinch of salt etc.
Again, I may be misunderstanding your point...but I think the chiplet future is here on some level.
I took it you meant like much smaller components, like ALU from this supplier, DRAM controller from that supplier, cache from another supplier etc, all on separate chiplets, each having to go off-chiplet to speak to the others. I am sure[0] that would cost much power and performance.
[0] serious risk of n00b arse-speak happening here, beware.
One of the funniest stories I heard was about the first copy of the Intel 14nm design rules Altera got from Intel. They were heavily redacted, which is something I had never seen in the foundry business.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-...
Additionally, a contract fab tries to be flexible, easier to design for. They make their libraries & design rules work well with commercial design software. A private fab on the other hand can boost yield & performance by pushing increasingly complex design rules on the design team, and the design team can use customized or internally developed software to make it all work.
So in short, they had the best fab tech in the business but they weren't used to servicing anyone other than themselves.
(thanks for answer though)
Yes, it make perfect sense to optimise for you own yield and performance until TSMC overtake you and you no longer has the volume advantage. In manufacturing volume is everything.
It is also worth pointing out Altera is actually a Subsidiary of Intel. If that is what they were going through you can imagine about the others.
I've seen a tv-documentary about 15 years ago about their fabs. Therein some reporter asked why there was a bend in some bundle of pipes for no apparent reason. They answered that was there because in another factory there was a column there which they had to route around, which didn't exist at this factory. They explained further to not wanting to risk process variation, by building that bundle of pipes straight again. Since then i have been unimpressed by all that high-tech, being so complex, having to cargo-cult around, instead of being able to understand it from first principles and build according to the situation. Not blindly copying something which worked at another place but doesn't apply anymore, because the place and its conditions changed.
But see where it got them?
If it were your $$$billions being spent on a fab, what would you do?
/me lifts hat and bows.
Courtesy of Lilly, Mieze, and Mimi.
I'm actually surprised they didn't go and put a column there, too, just in case.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/127987-deliberate-exce...
> Intel began working on CE! after it had trouble at the 0.5um (500nm) node and refined the process through each successive generation. The green line shows the initial product ramp at its first fab — after an early spike, yields cratered and only recovered over a period of months. Once Intel had Fab 1 working well on 0.5um, it started ramping Fab 2 only to run into new problems. As Copy Exactly! was developed and deployed, the company’s yields synchronized across the various fabs.
Because they don't know enough to predict the process effects of variations in humidity, barometric pressure — or pipe length! — they eliminate those variations instead. Presumably they would learn more if they didn't do that, but they would also take longer to ramp up production. Since they started doing CE! in the 1980s, it's probably not a primary cause of their late-2010s decline.
> Second, at some point every tech company is going to have to make a choice between the U.S. and China. It is tempting to blame the tension between the two countries on Trump, but the truth is that China, particularly under Xi Jinping, has been significantly hardening its rhetoric and actions since before Trump was elected, and has been committed to not just catching but surpassing the U.S. in technology for years. There is a fundamental clash of values between the West and China, and it is clear that China is interested in exporting theirs. At some point everyone will be stuck in the middle, like TSMC, and Switzerland won’t be an option.
If Cold War has taught us anything, it’s that display of force didn’t yield anything. Dialogue and exporting values did. So yes, absolutely: the escalation is Trump’s fault, because of the insufferable rhetoric of his warmongering hawks. Xi Jinping is a way more tactical and dialogue oriented leader (not a positive judgement on official PRC values, of course) that is being defeated by the proverbial pigeon shitting on the board during a game of chess. Decoupling from China is easily sellable as the anti-communist propaganda in the 50s, but the harsh reality is that in today’s world it means recklessly hammering pieces off of the global economy jenga tower, and hoping it will stay up. Dialogue and severely regulated exchange with the potential enemy is the real weapon that could weaken China. Putting human rights on the table when it comes to trade treaties, for example. Instead, there’s a resurgence of scary nationalism that is exactly what brought the world on the brink of collapse 75 years ago. If I had to choose two words, right now, I would go with “brace brace”.
Hasn't this been tried before? What happens if they refuse? We do nothing and just keep talking? The absence of any nationalist impulse is even scarier than your 'scary nationalism'. I would note that China has none of this sort of self doubt.