Chinese semiconductor industry

pmc said:

US granting of $57b does not matter when through stock and credit markets Microsoft, Google and Apple can access trillions.
Why US need three operating systems?. Make it one operating system and direct stock market to firms that built and run FABS. it is stock market that is not functioning properly. Why give $1T valuation to Tesla when it can barely make 500K production of basically uniform vehicles and that with external help after 16 years.

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What you say, must be connected to the reality on the ground in the US.

The reality is that those companies will not invest into manufacturing, because they make more money from software and services.

The only way American companies will invest into hardware making capabilities, only if the government subsidizes it.

Stock buy backs, software, inflating the stock price because CEO pay is connected to that, that is the US today.

It works.

Then they buy all that stuff from China by running the printing presses.

Having access to capital markets for US companies to tap into that for capital spending, that is a few generations ago. It is year 2022, not the 1980's or 1960's.

What you are saying, in the US just don't exist anymore.

Here is a famous story, from the past.

Once, at a dinner party, the president, Barack Obama, asked Steve Jobs, how to have the iPhone manufactured in the United States?

Steve Jobs flatly rejected that, saying those jobs are not coming back.


Since then, nothing has changed, other than the trend of US industrial capabilities being hollowed out.

That is why these reports of TSMC building foundries in the United States is kind of interesting. They are trying to reverse those entrenched trends. Will it work? Probably not.

They got to build it, they have to staff it (which is not easy today with the labour storage), then it has to be run at a profit, when the biggest customer is fighting a trade war with yourself. Who thought that would have an impact on operations and orders and cash flow.

If this is what they are trying to do sounds likely to fail, well, it probably will.

No American company would want to do this. Build a fab on its own. The government has to show them the money first.

TSMC at Arizona will run about as well as Samsung at Texas. More expenses, difficulties keeping the factory loaded, and never having enough demand to justify being anything better than two processes behind. Like I told you, by the time TSMC at Arizona with 5nm is up, TSMC in Taiwan might be using 3nm.

gelgoog said:

TSMC at Arizona will run about as well as Samsung at Texas. More expenses, difficulties keeping the factory loaded, and never having enough demand to justify being anything better than two processes behind. Like I told you, by the time TSMC at Arizona with 5nm is up, TSMC in Taiwan might be using 3nm.

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There's also no demand in the US. They're going to have to ship the wafers to China for packaging into functional chips. Then these chips stay in China for assembly on PCBs. Then these PCBs stay in China for assembly into products.

FairAndUnbiased said:

There's also no demand in the US. They're going to have to ship the wafers to China for packaging into functional chips. Then these chips stay in China for assembly on PCBs. Then these PCBs stay in China for assembly into products.

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But Apple has ordered its contractors to divert production to other countries like India and Vietnam.

henrik said:

This is good chance for Huawei and xiaomi to displace samsung in a big way in the mid range smartphones. This will hamper samsung's cash flow.

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@henrik Hence the Return of The King in 2023, Huawei has a flair for dramatics and we may see a Trilogy rivaling that of J.R.R Tolkien...lol

henrik said:

But Apple has ordered its contractors to divert production to other countries like India and Vietnam.

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These are less productive especially for anything that isn't hand assembly. They don't have semiconductor packaging facilities that can handle chiplet assembly, 3D integration, heterogeneous packaging, wafer bonding etc except for a single Intel facility in Vietnam that is clearly not going to be taking external orders.

They don't have their own packaging IP so they'll need to pay royalties to foreigners or have only foreign owned packaging facilities when they do get them.

They don't have PCB plants with anywhere near the scale that China does.

They also only have foreign demand. Vietnam's trade exceeds it's entire GDP value while for China it's a small 30%. China has a domestic market, Vietnam and India don't due to lack of population and money respectively.

And then, finally, they'll need to be both cheaper and more productive than Chinese suppliers, and those suppliers can't be Chinese owned but operated overseas.

To mitigate not able to obtain EUV and continue 2D shrink, 4F2 + HITOC, IGZO capacitorless DRAM, and 3D DRAM+HITOC are all alternatives Chinese fabs are exploring.
Below is recently presented at CSTIC in 4F2+HITOC

hvpc said:

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Is that legit? Or just hype. I can’t tell,

henrik said:

But Apple has ordered its contractors to divert production to other countries like India and Vietnam.

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Only Apple could conceive of the idea that it is safer to manufacture at Vietnam than South Korea or Taiwan. Because Vietnam is much safer from the evil clutches of a militaristic China than either of those countries.

Think Different™.

In reality, of course, it is all about minimizing paid salaries. Better get those safety nets up on the roofs at Foxconn Vietnam.