* Completes construction of the building shell. Next step is all of the electrical, sewage, HVAC and related infrastructure to build the clean rooms inside, and then only once that is done, start bringing in fab equipment.
It won’t be by the time the fab is up and running. Of course, I find that easy to forgive- when booting up a completely new locale, start with what you know.
It will also be comming online on a wave of excess silicon capacity fuelled by the then-current silicon drought. On a possibly drier climate, competing for water resources.
As long as the supposed topic of this thread (TSMC put up a building, but so far it has no fab equipment inside) is so irrelevant, can I ask something off topic but slightly related?
SMIC is supposedly shipping 7nm chips now. There was a big national security thing to prevent SMIC from getting access to ASML EUV steppers. Does their 7nm process mean they now have made their own EUV gear? Or did they get ASML steppers after all? It seemed weird for such a critical technology to stay single sourced from just one company for so many years.
This is correct, there is an article (I think on the semianalysis) that summarises the process - they are using multi-patterning as TSMC did with their N7 7nm process.
The real shocker is that they've been pumping out 7nm commercially since at least a year, which is a feat that most thought was still a ways ahead. It means that they are far more capable than previously thought.
>The real shocker is that they've been pumping out 7nm commercially since at least a year, which is a feat that most thought was still a ways ahead. It means that they are far more capable than previously thought.
This seems like a real failure in intelligence gathering. How do you think this happened?
Not quite. A lot of the research on EUV was in collaboration with various national laboratories and universities. They were far from the only ones thinking it could be done. The Chinese themselves wanted to give it a shot before ASML proved it was possible.
It's mostly that ASML's competition generally wasn't keeping up. They have a monopoly even on last-gen DUV. Canon and Nikon didn't keep up and couldn't afford to work on EUV.
What? Where do you get this? The US DOE and EUV LLC a consortium of loads of companies like Intel and IBM spent well over a decade investing in EUV research including many methods like electron beams and using a synchotron. ASML was late to the party and joined EUV LLC after a lot of the research had been done.
And the laser needed to make EUV machines work is from Cyner, ASML bought this company.
I disagree with the Asianometry video. SMIC is not 4-6 years behind, they are at most 3 years behind. They have been operating this node commercially for at least a year, and TSMC came out with N7 in 2018. It's more than likely also that they have been producing at appreciable volume for the Chinese government before then - see Chinese supercomputers not showing up on Top500 as corroboration, but being credibly rumoured to be at the top 2 spots.
The note about economic competitiveness is bizarre. If TSMC was more economical than SMIC, Minerva would have went with TSMC. And it's clear they are not selling at a loss, because their earnings report <28nm category has been increasing profit.
I suggest sticking to the SemiAnalysis report, honestly. Asianometry has no additional information, and the video lacks some of it. The rest is going beyond or against the information we have.
> SMIC is supposedly shipping 7nm chips now. There was a big national security thing to prevent SMIC from getting access to ASML EUV steppers.
What's the logic behind the national security thing of SMIC shipping 7nm?
By national, which nation is being referred here?
I thought technology competition is the best kind of capitalism, right? How is it a national security thing that your competitor is catching up? Isn't that a good thing that capitalism is actually working?
To simplify things a bit, the west has been using globalized capitalism where tech created in the west benefits the whole world but China has been following a more mercantilist style of capitalism where Chinese tech mostly benefits China. Once the US finally realized this they started slowing China down, like restricting EUV.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, but what is true is that China is increasingly engaging in trade wars against countries that do things they disapprove
For instance, China has stopped buying a lot of stuff from Australia because of politics
So yeah, I wouldn’t want to rely on China for chips (or anything really, though that is impossible nowadays)
> engaging in trade wars against countries that do things they disapprove
> China has stopped buying a lot of stuff from Australia because of politics
They disapprove?
That's a fundamentally flawed gloss over an otherwise simple fact: Australia takes a political stance that fundamentally treat China as an enemy, the same way as what the West's stance towards USSR, at a moment China has not taken any political stance like USSR towards the West.
Imagine that you frequent a bar, often engaging in chat with all sorts of people. For whatever reason (let's for now not mud the discussion on why some countries decide to take the above mentioned political stance) some guys used to chat normally with you, suddenly reject you altogether, and are plotting to label you an unwelcome person to the bar, so that you are disallowed to enter the bar. Would you start picking the weak guys of this small clique and try to thwart this plot?
> I wouldn’t want to rely on China for chips
Sure, but you dont need to, you depend on TSMC.
And you still not answer the simple question.
Given the fact that depending on China for advanced chip manufacturing is security issue, why China herself depend on their own chip manufacturer a national security thing for US? Isn't that a thing has nothing to do with US national security?
> Australia takes a political stance that fundamentally treat China as an enemy
Australia spent decades gearing their economy to China’s [0]. The fury that erupted due to Xi’s string of fuckups, from trade disputes [1] to domestic meddling [2] to security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3] was significant enough that its people chose to incur economic pain for self preservation.
> some guys used to chat normally with you, suddenly reject you altogether, and are plotting to label you an unwelcome person to the bar, so that you are disallowed to enter the bar
Well yes, if they learn you beat your wife at home and then beat up their buddy at the bar all while never buying anyone drinks as they purchase you rounds, you’re going to be told to fuck off.
What's the point economic ties between 2 countries are tied from both ends. Are you suggesting Aus is friendly to CN, as friendly as CN is towards AUS?
I see no point of this in supporting any claim regarding AUS' change of political stance. All things considered, it should be clear that it was AUS that starts to act threateningly towards CN, without CN provoking.
> The fury that erupted due to Xi’s string of fuckups, from trade disputes [1]
to security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3]
Trade disputes was triggered by AUS' political stance. You got cause and effect wrong.
> domestic meddling [2]
This is amusing report. You cannot label natural increasing of influence with intentional political manipulation. That's why Hollywood can affect nation's sentiment and culture, so much so that modern young people are strikingly resemble each other at different countries. The countries affected by Hollywood can censor the movie, but they never claim Washington's "meddling", or that claim is anyway sensible.
But the same thing does not apply the reverse. Or any White countries.
Now you reveal where the white supermacy lives.
> security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3]
Those are domestic issues, let's not mudding the water by mixing international and domestic affairs.
But anyway, these are normal operation taken routinely by any sovereign nations. National security law, sovereign integrity, etc.
> significant enough that its people chose to incur economic pain for self preservation.
What? Where is the logical connection from someone becoming rich with someone else feeling unsafe?
> To simplify things a bit, the west has been using globalized capitalism where tech created in the west benefits the whole world but China has been following a more mercantilist style of capitalism where Chinese tech mostly benefits China. Once the US finally realized this they started slowing China down, like restricting EUV.
To simplify things a bit, the "rich west" has been attempting to impose to everyone that tech created in the "rich west" should just bring benefits to the "rich west".
That's quite ridiculous. Chinese tech benefits everyone in exactly the same way Western tech benefits everyone, which is, not as much as you think. The advance in various technologies necessary for China to develop it's infrastructure has allowed manufacturing costs to go down and had allowed goods to be made at a lower cost, and the advances in tech from China aren't meaningfully any differently accessible to, say, someone in the Middle East, than advances in tech from the West.
If anything, the fact that foreign students in Chinese universities almost always go back to their original countries is also a large factor in proliferation of technology outside of China.
All the machines have been pre assembled and tested in Taiwan. The installation should go faster than anticipated.
They try to minimize labor cost in the US. Salary and overtime pay are much lower in Taiwan so they try to use the engineering resource in Taiwan as much as possible.
This is short-sited hysterical nonsense. It is much better to build a fab there than to grow food there.
There is nowhere near a crisis level of water shortage in the Colorado river basin. It’s still well within the planned tiers of the Colorado river compact. AZ’s cut is on par with CA’s. Maybe you’re thinking of NV?
A fab uses significantly less water than a farm, can benefit much better from solar, and should be placed in a place like that receives effectively no natural disasters. About the dumbest place to put this would be somewhere on the San Andreas fault or cascadia subduction zone. AZ, NV, and NM are some of the best places for anything expensive that needs stability environmentally.
One fab uses 10-50k homes worth of water, and this new fab is fed by the Colorado, per the article I linked.
The reservoirs are at all time lows, and weather projections say the compact will hit the 'automatically cancel this agreement and enter emergency renegotiation phase' in a few years. I suppose that is a planned tier.
I wonder if this will lead to them losing their edge and lead in manufacturing state of the art chips to the various American manufacturers.
Also, did they take this initiative themselves, goaded into it, or even coerced? I recall reading recently how the US started making demands to foreign semi manufacturers to get details of manufacturing processes, supply chains, customer bases etc.
Investments like these will overwhelmingly favor the US in the long run.
From an American POV: who cares? The country's citizens have terrible health care, no real safety net, rising inflation forcing people to eat more and more processed junk, half the population has collapsed (negative growth, drugged up with painkillers etc.) and a cause of this is spending a notable chunk of the national budget on the military which defends places like Taiwan instead of solutions that improve the problems above.
I drove past this on the 303 Phoenix bypass a few weeks ago. I figured out immediately what it was, no signs required.
Great for Arizona! Great to manufacture more chips in the US.
I don’t expect global supply chains to continue to exist in their current form when the US loses reserve currency status and paying for the US Navy to ensure the safety of global ship traffic ceases. As a US tax payer, it infuriates me to have military bases in so many countries, but on the other hand our Navy has clear value, at least in my opinion.
48 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadSo it’s quite a ways away from being operational.
Probably for mid-range chips I guess.
I'm more concerned that it's a 1d building.
Terribly far from the kind of "complete" which would be relevant news here.
SMIC is supposedly shipping 7nm chips now. There was a big national security thing to prevent SMIC from getting access to ASML EUV steppers. Does their 7nm process mean they now have made their own EUV gear? Or did they get ASML steppers after all? It seemed weird for such a critical technology to stay single sourced from just one company for so many years.
http://www.monolithic3d.com/blog/the-quad-patterning-era-beg...
But I’m curious if someone knows the details.
The real shocker is that they've been pumping out 7nm commercially since at least a year, which is a feat that most thought was still a ways ahead. It means that they are far more capable than previously thought.
This seems like a real failure in intelligence gathering. How do you think this happened?
Not really. They acquired Cymer for their EUV tech.
It's mostly that ASML's competition generally wasn't keeping up. They have a monopoly even on last-gen DUV. Canon and Nikon didn't keep up and couldn't afford to work on EUV.
And the laser needed to make EUV machines work is from Cyner, ASML bought this company.
Took all the risk? Geez.
China is still working on their domestic EUV machines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQGnwKBxAKk
While stating that SMIC might still be around 4-6 years behind the competition, I was completely shocked to hear it was only that.
The next few years are going to be some very interesting times.
The note about economic competitiveness is bizarre. If TSMC was more economical than SMIC, Minerva would have went with TSMC. And it's clear they are not selling at a loss, because their earnings report <28nm category has been increasing profit.
I suggest sticking to the SemiAnalysis report, honestly. Asianometry has no additional information, and the video lacks some of it. The rest is going beyond or against the information we have.
What's the logic behind the national security thing of SMIC shipping 7nm?
By national, which nation is being referred here?
I thought technology competition is the best kind of capitalism, right? How is it a national security thing that your competitor is catching up? Isn't that a good thing that capitalism is actually working?
First time hearing such claim. Mind to provide to some decently-compiled reports on "Chinese capitalism benefiting China mostly"?
For instance, China has stopped buying a lot of stuff from Australia because of politics
So yeah, I wouldn’t want to rely on China for chips (or anything really, though that is impossible nowadays)
They disapprove?
That's a fundamentally flawed gloss over an otherwise simple fact: Australia takes a political stance that fundamentally treat China as an enemy, the same way as what the West's stance towards USSR, at a moment China has not taken any political stance like USSR towards the West.
Imagine that you frequent a bar, often engaging in chat with all sorts of people. For whatever reason (let's for now not mud the discussion on why some countries decide to take the above mentioned political stance) some guys used to chat normally with you, suddenly reject you altogether, and are plotting to label you an unwelcome person to the bar, so that you are disallowed to enter the bar. Would you start picking the weak guys of this small clique and try to thwart this plot?
> I wouldn’t want to rely on China for chips
Sure, but you dont need to, you depend on TSMC.
And you still not answer the simple question.
Given the fact that depending on China for advanced chip manufacturing is security issue, why China herself depend on their own chip manufacturer a national security thing for US? Isn't that a thing has nothing to do with US national security?
Australia spent decades gearing their economy to China’s [0]. The fury that erupted due to Xi’s string of fuckups, from trade disputes [1] to domestic meddling [2] to security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3] was significant enough that its people chose to incur economic pain for self preservation.
> some guys used to chat normally with you, suddenly reject you altogether, and are plotting to label you an unwelcome person to the bar, so that you are disallowed to enter the bar
Well yes, if they learn you beat your wife at home and then beat up their buddy at the bar all while never buying anyone drinks as they purchase you rounds, you’re going to be told to fuck off.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia–China_relations#Ec...
[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3136010/a...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-inf...
[3] https://www.voanews.com/amp/china-a-military-threat-to-austr...
> Australia spent decades gearing their economy to China’s [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93China_rela...
What's the point economic ties between 2 countries are tied from both ends. Are you suggesting Aus is friendly to CN, as friendly as CN is towards AUS?
I see no point of this in supporting any claim regarding AUS' change of political stance. All things considered, it should be clear that it was AUS that starts to act threateningly towards CN, without CN provoking.
> The fury that erupted due to Xi’s string of fuckups, from trade disputes [1]
to security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3]
Trade disputes was triggered by AUS' political stance. You got cause and effect wrong.
> domestic meddling [2]
This is amusing report. You cannot label natural increasing of influence with intentional political manipulation. That's why Hollywood can affect nation's sentiment and culture, so much so that modern young people are strikingly resemble each other at different countries. The countries affected by Hollywood can censor the movie, but they never claim Washington's "meddling", or that claim is anyway sensible.
But the same thing does not apply the reverse. Or any White countries.
Now you reveal where the white supermacy lives.
> security encroachments after breaking its agreement with Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan [3]
Those are domestic issues, let's not mudding the water by mixing international and domestic affairs.
But anyway, these are normal operation taken routinely by any sovereign nations. National security law, sovereign integrity, etc.
> significant enough that its people chose to incur economic pain for self preservation.
What? Where is the logical connection from someone becoming rich with someone else feeling unsafe?
To simplify things a bit, the "rich west" has been attempting to impose to everyone that tech created in the "rich west" should just bring benefits to the "rich west".
If anything, the fact that foreign students in Chinese universities almost always go back to their original countries is also a large factor in proliferation of technology outside of China.
They try to minimize labor cost in the US. Salary and overtime pay are much lower in Taiwan so they try to use the engineering resource in Taiwan as much as possible.
Maybe they'll think twice about building the next one in the middle of a frigging desert during a regional mega drought.
https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta...
There is nowhere near a crisis level of water shortage in the Colorado river basin. It’s still well within the planned tiers of the Colorado river compact. AZ’s cut is on par with CA’s. Maybe you’re thinking of NV?
A fab uses significantly less water than a farm, can benefit much better from solar, and should be placed in a place like that receives effectively no natural disasters. About the dumbest place to put this would be somewhere on the San Andreas fault or cascadia subduction zone. AZ, NV, and NM are some of the best places for anything expensive that needs stability environmentally.
The reservoirs are at all time lows, and weather projections say the compact will hit the 'automatically cancel this agreement and enter emergency renegotiation phase' in a few years. I suppose that is a planned tier.
Also, did they take this initiative themselves, goaded into it, or even coerced? I recall reading recently how the US started making demands to foreign semi manufacturers to get details of manufacturing processes, supply chains, customer bases etc.
Investments like these will overwhelmingly favor the US in the long run.
If America says "JUMP" TSMC says how high.
Great for Arizona! Great to manufacture more chips in the US.
I don’t expect global supply chains to continue to exist in their current form when the US loses reserve currency status and paying for the US Navy to ensure the safety of global ship traffic ceases. As a US tax payer, it infuriates me to have military bases in so many countries, but on the other hand our Navy has clear value, at least in my opinion.