Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

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>If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing

TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.

this semiwiki article point that out.

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/29364...

"TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few."

TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.

bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.

When TSMC was founded, they were not in foundry as services business. UMC actually invented it and TSMC joined the game later. Some people said UMC made the wrong decision to invest in China too early. That effort took too much of UMC's resource. TSMC focused their resource in Taiwan and was able to move forward faster in technology when compare to UMC. When UMC made the move to China, Taiwan government were not happy, so I believe government direct resource to TSMC in retaliation to ensure TSMC has the edge. it is no wonder TSMC won the technology race.

Just wondering if in the light of this announcement and the China's attempts at taking over the TMSC control, wouldn't it be better if TMSC relocated their HQ to Europe?

Not saying they should move completely, but to strategize to limit their operational risks. I am sure they'd receive some nice grants from EU.

China taking over TSMC control. How, exactly? China isn't looking to invade Taiwan any time soon, unless America puts bases in Taiwan first. And an invasion of Taiwan would immediately result in the destruction of TSMC, thus invasion is not a viable strategy to gain TSMC.

Seems to me like a scenario where a pro-china party moves Taiwan closer to China, until it is essentially re-integrated, is basically inevitable if China continues to grow at its current pace.

The pro-China party lost resoundingly in the last election. The Taiwanese are not keen on being reintegrated.

That is probably next step, but not for the concern of China. It may come from the pressure of government, if EU pushes a little bit. It is extremely hard for China to sneak the TSMC. It is a big ecosystem. The only way to take control is invasion, but that would lead to WWIII and is almost impossible to get the original TSMC. It would be destroyed during war. And, the market would be shared by other companies.

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