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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Morris Chang (founder of TSMC)'s speech a year ago touched on 3 huge advantages Taiwan uniquely has. Having a whole, well-knit-together country with such intense knowledge & specilaization in making chips is something that would be extremely hard to recreate anywhere else. A community of practitioners is key. https://interconnected.blog/morris-chang-global-semiconducto...

The United States had extreme success growing really good chip designing talent with the digital foundry model. We simply gave college students & others access to the means of production. Something we see eFanless/Google/Skywatdr kind of doing these days, with free chipmaking (at 130nm). But how we get good at making the foundries, create a body of expertise in not chip design but chipmaking, at any level of density... hard problem.

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The first two points are at best opinion and and worst nationalism, neither are facts.

Chang is very well known for making these kinds of statements that make no sense.

It isn't that his point isn't true, it's just that it is tautological. It's sort of like saying cars are more useful in country X than country Y because country x has roads. On the one hand: yes. On the other hand: it used to be that no country had roads, so obviously this is a problem with a solution. The country has roads, because it has cars.

What? I am reading the English translation and it seems based in truth to me.

1. The US of course has technical talent. However the vast majority would rather work in in the higher margin software industry, not hardware. If I am intelligent/hard-working enough in America to understand the physics behind semi-conductors, I would rather apply that to prop trading than Intel.

2. Manager-employee customs are vastly different across cultures. What is institutionalized in Japan is harassment in America. If he says Taiwan has a sufficiently different culture, I believe him.

Do people just forget that intel has fabs all over the world with that expertise as well?

The ones where it has not been successful at making their own chips using their own designs? Those fabs?

Well, they are not the cutting edge anymore, but are still a powerhouse.

No, they were a power house. We will know if they still are a powerhouse if a year from now we no longer have these kinds of discussions.

Since TSMC reached 7nm and 5nm first (and it will be years before Intel reaches parity with 5nm technology, and TSMC is expected to reach 3nm by that point...), its obvious for us to be focused on what TSMC/Taiwan is doing that we in the USA aren't.

TSMC seems to have achieved a sizable technological lead over Intel, that will perpetuate for the next few years or even decade.

It's not clear to me that onshoring would be without utility if it's not on the current node. Surely there are vast improvements to security and defense concerns to be had through onshoring even if it's (conservatively) 3 years behind the cutting edge.

There's also a good possibility that this would be useful in the market as well if it solves some supply chain issues. Car manufacturers won't need 3nm tech for quite some time, if ever. Hobbyist boards like the Pi have been hard to get for months now. Graphics cards that were 2-3 years old were going for huge premiums up until recently as well. All in all it seems as if there would be at least some markets for chip tech that isn't on the bleeding edge.

USA has plenty of older fabrication labs, and most of our critical technology is probably on 22nm or 40nm nodes (or older).

US Military equipment is pretty famously on old nodes / older technology for reliability and supply chain purposes for example. And its probably entirely domestic (Micron, Intel, GloFo).

The need for higher-end nodes is almost a "luxury" factor. There's a benefit if the latest iPhones were brought onshore and were US-made. This is for economic reasons (less economic disruption if China attacks Taiwan), even if it leads to slightly higher costs.

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I know that TSMC is pissed off at the "culture clash" in Arizona (one of these "on shore" US fab-labs) however. I can pretty much imagine a "Gung Ho" (1986 movie) situation occurring there. It doesn't look like the Arizona fab-lab will be complete in time, and TSMC is blaming US worker culture.

> USA has plenty of older fabrication labs

Do we? The current, continuing semiconductor shortage argues otherwise.

I mean, the fact that a "switching regulator" can go out of stock borders on the absurd unless those fabs are busy producing stuff with higher margins.

https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Taiwan-Maintains-E...

"North America" is producing 2,623,000 wafers per month in 2020. In 2014, North America was producing 2,245,000 wafers/month.

And remember: wafers are raw silicon. Since geometry continues to shrink (22nm, 14nm, 10nm, 7nm, 5nm), even here in the USA, each wafer is making more and more transistors.

In any case, the issue is one of demand. COVID19 stressed the fab-labs like never before, requiring semiconductors to make laptops, cellphones, cameras and many other components. The car-manufacturing shutdown followed up by the rapid production increase was also a problem.

By all measures, the worldwide supply of chips has increased. Its just that demand has outpaced supply.

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It really does seem like the "cryptocoin" industry is eating up a lot of our production capacity. But also the rise in deep-learing platforms (GPUs/TPUs), SSD storage, and other transitions to semiconductors.

Bet against the US if you like, but it's a losing bet.

Onshoring will happen. In the US. In China. in the EU. And likely in Russia too.

This has become a national security issue, and at least in the US, we are resolved to make it happen.

Taiwan / TSMC are allies. The solution is rather simple: convince them to build a lab in Arizona. Lo and behold: TSMC is building a lab in Arizona.

The debate is largely over. We're just dealing with the details / qualms right now. Culture clashes as Taiwanese business managers are learning that US workers have a different culture than they expected (and vice versa).

Taiwan / TSMC doesn't like it, but they probably recognize it as necessary. We USA folk have to be reminded though that this technology belongs to another country, we're merely "hosting" them.

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There's also some other knock on effects: Japan is asking TSMC to build a factory within Japan (after all, if USA gets a fab, shouldn't Japan deserve one?). TSMC likely doesn't want to spread itself too thinly around the world.

This overall discussion isn't about one-or-two key / emergency factories being built around the world. That has already happened.

The overall discussion is "how much" should TSMC spread itself around the world and build redundant supply chains?

This is not about fabs. This is about expertise. A TSMC fab in Arizona is nowhere close to being enough to satisfactorily address our security concerns with respect to critical infrastructure. We won't stop until we can stand up the entire supply chain using domestic intellectual capital. In fact, we aren't going to stop until that domestic intellectual capital not only exists, but is safely redundant.

None of the other nations will stop at a domestic fab either btw. This issue is not going away, and I suspect the EU is as determined to stand up a domestic supply chain as we are.

And don't even get me started on China. We can assume they are probably much further along than is generally known. Because they always are.

They are not just "allies." The Taiwanese gov't had heavy handed intervention from its inception to what it is today. IMO, this has little to do with "culture" and more to do with the gov't protecting jobs and keeping their know-how and infrastructure in Taiwan.

Morris Chang's point is that TSMC is able to draw upon Taiwan's very best talent, as the country's most attractive employer. Likewise, Samsung is among the most prestigious Korean employers. In contrast, where does Intel rank among US employers?

Except that we had articles like this one, telling us about severe and not easily solved problems at Samsung: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31064080

Samsung still has overwhelming access to talent-base & are a top employer. I don't know how loyal employees are or not, what the experience is like from the inside. They could make bad products but most people's first pick. That a company can mismanage & make bad business decisions doesn't necessarily mean people would prefer working elsewhere in the country.

I thought Samsung had an absolutely horrible reputation as an employer.

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