TSMC is killing it. I feel like it would be a strategic investment for the US to take a much larger stake in it and hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside with Intel waning.
Most of the IPs are US owned (by Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, NXP, Apple, Broadcom, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM etc). It's just the manufacturing capacity and fabrication facilities.
Intel holds some shares on European based ASML which is the crucial partner for TSMC. The US could even force both ASML and TSMC to not sell products to Huawei even though Huawei was paying a lot of money. The US can effectively kill TSMC anytime.
I don't think mass-scale in-house semiconductor manufacturing is really critical as much as having the tech and the IPs are. Also the US has enough influence on manufacturing, and enough emergency manufacturing capacity already in place. I think public cloud (AWS, GCP, and Azure) is more critical today than mass production semiconductor manufacturing.
If that happened and the US had to replicate these fabs from scratch that could set computing power in the western world back 5 to 10 years. This seems like a large and growing matter of national security for the US, especially the further behind Intel falls.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factor...
The magic behind TSMC's success, is their huge quantity of semiconductor engineers, that they employ to achieve their yield. It's because the photo-lithography devices from ASML are so finicky, that you need to babysit them.
Which means that you need a lot of engineers. And they must also be relatively cheap. Otherwise, you burn through your budget. Which is also something that Taiwan can provide, since the exchange rate is more favorable for this work.
For the American foundry to work, they must employ a lot of engineers. And engineering labor in the United States is expensive.
Hence, the US foundry may operationally work, but it will be a commercial failure.
Let look at an imaginary world where China gets immediate undamaged physical control over all of Taiwan including the TMSC factories, machinery, and staff.
Do you think the machinery will work? Do you think the staff will work? Do you think that TSMC will be able to get the materials it needs for production? Do you think TSMC will be able to run any of the software they need for their operations?
Every step in the manufacturing process is hideously complicated, has huge complicated dependencies, and many extremely sensitive steps that could be sabotaged in very subtle ways.
Here’s a story:
1987--Radioactive contamination of a semiconductor factory
No IBM SER historical review would be complete without mentioning the "Hera problem." During the year 1986, there was an anomalous increase in LSI memory problems. Electronics in early 1987 appeared to have problem rates approaching 20 times higher than predicted. In contrast, identical LSI memories being manufactured in Europe showed no anomalous problems. Because of knowledge of the radioactivity problem with the Intel 2107 RAMs, it was thought that the LSI package probably was at fault, since the IBM chips were mounted on similar ceramic materials. LSI ceramic packages made by IBM in Europe and in the U.S. were exchanged, but the European computer modules (with European chips and U.S. packaging) showed no fails, while the U.S. chips with European packages still failed at a high rate. This indicated that the problem was undoubtedly in the U.S.-manufactured LSI chips. In April 1987, significant design changes had been made to the memory chip with the most problems, a 4Kb bipolar RAM. The newer chip had been given the nickname Hera, and so at an early stage the incident became known as the "Hera problem."
By June 1987, the problem was very serious. A group was organized to investigate the problem. The first breakthrough in understanding occurred with the analysis of "carcasses" from the memory chips (the term carcasses refers to the chips on an LSI wafer which do not work correctly, and are not used but saved in case some problem occurs at a future time). Some of these carcasses were shown to have significant radioactivity.
Six weeks was spent in the manufacturing process lines, looking for radioactivity, and traces were found inside various processing units. However, it could not be determined whether these traces came from the raw materials used, or whether they were transferred from the chips themselves, which might have been contaminated earlier in their processing. Further, it was discovered that radioactive filaments (containing radioactive thorium) were commonly used in some evaporators. A detailed analysis by T. Zabel of some of the "hot" chips revealed that the radioactive contamination came from a single source: Po210 This isotope is found in the uranium decay chain, which contains about twelve different radioactive species. The surprising fact was that Po210 was the only contaminant on the LSI chips, and all the other expected decay-chain elements were missing. Hundreds of chips were analyzed for radioactivity, and Po210 contamination was found going back more than a year. Then it was found that whatever caused the radioactivity problem disappeared on all wafers started after May 22, 1987. After this precise date, all new wafers were free of contamination, except for small amounts which probably were contaminated by other older chips being processed by the same equipment. Since it takes about four months for chips to be manufactured, the pipeline was still full of "hot" chips in July and August 1987. Further sweeps of the manufacturing lines showed trace radioactivity, but the plant was essentially clean. The contamination had appeared in 1985, increased by more than 1000 times until May 22, 1987, and then totally disappeared!
Several months passed, with widespread testing of manufacturing materials and tools, but no radioactive contamination was discovered. All memory chips in the manufacturing lines were spot-screened for radioactivity, but they were clean. The radioactivity reappeared in the manufacturing plant in early December 1987, mildly contaminating several hundred wafers, then disappeared again. A search of all the materials used in the fabrication of these chips found no source of the radioactivity. With further screening, and a lot of luck, a new and unused bottle of nitric acid was identified by J. Hannah as radioactive. One surprising aspect of this discovery was that, of twelve bottles in the single lot of acid, only one was contaminated. Since all screening of materials assumed lot-sized homogeneity, this discovery of a single bad sample in a large lot probably explained why previous scans of the manufacturing line had been negative. The unopened bottle of radioactive nitric acid led investigators back to a supplier's factory, and it was found that the radioactivity was being injected by a bottle-cleaning machine for semiconductor-grade acid bottles. This bottle cleaner used radioactive Po210 material to ionize an air jet which was used to dislodge electrostatic dust inside the bottles after washing. The jets were leaking radioactivity because of a change in the epoxy used to seal the Po210 inside the air jet capsule. Since these jets gave off infrequent and random bursts of radioactivity, only a few bottles out of thousands were contaminated.
Edit: The amounts involved with the above are minuscule. The above really fits in with “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25277054 — I am imagining all the complicated equipment to detect this type of problem in a modern IC facility (I have a little experience with environmental radiation detection and while the physics seems “simple”, the equipment is not.)
Ziegler, James F., et al. "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)." IBM journal of research and development 40.1 (1996): 3-18.
Yes to all of those questions. Even if it took a year to re-establish dependencies in sourcing of materials, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do it.
There can easily be plenty of critical knowledge employees who don't like the idea of their homeland now being occupied and would rather migrate to Singapore or Australia or something.
China clearly needs these people, otherwise they would already have a factory of their own going.
At that point, China would have little to gain and lots to lose. Unlike Hong Kong which was handed to them, Taiwan claims to be a sovereign state.
It's highly unlikely that China can take over Taiwan without doing immense damage to the island due to the required military force. So the move might work to hinder the US from benefiting from Taiwanese based operations, but it will be more of a destruction than a takeover.
It's a bit premature to assume it's a "done deal".
Hard to steal a plant.
I believe that TSMC have already received a ban on selling to Huawei -- https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-10-16/tsmc-wont-sell-chips...
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.h...
Still, I think there's a pretty reasonable argument to be made about our dependence on foreign entities for such critical infrastructure. Intel seems to be falling behind pretty quickly.
That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-arizona-fab-investmen...
Taiwan will never let that happen. Having TSMC's expertise stay where it is is a matter of national security for them, since it gives them a bargaining chip to force the US to come to their aid if the worst happens.