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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

TSMC is absolutely killing it, but Samsung is catching up too.

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.

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Hasn’t Samsung been having serious yield issues with their newer processes? I think I remember reading the their 8nm yields were horrible around the time of the RTX 3000 series launch.

Wow, 116 billion $ investment. Where this goes? High salaries? Expensive minerals? What makes it as expensive as small country's GDP?

That's over 10 years, or just over $10B in CAPEX and R&D per year. That sounds a lot, but the company routinely spends $20B-$30B in CAPEX every year. In comparison, Samsung's annual marketing budget (advertising, sales promotion and incentive) easily exceeds that amount.

That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.

State of the art chip fabs require some of the most advanced technology we've developed, the purest materials we can produce, and the most stringent environments we can maintain.

Exactly. Fabs have air quality restrictions that make surgical rooms look like trash dumpsters, relatively, as far as cleanliness goes.

EUV patterning, of which TSMC bit the bullet on early, adds another huge cost to an already crazy expensive manufacturing process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUVL

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