Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)
Canvas Category OEM : Semiconductor
TSMC pioneered the pure-play foundry business model when it was founded in 1987, and has been the world’s leading dedicated semiconductor foundry ever since. The Company supports a thriving ecosystem of global customers and partners with the industry’s leading process technologies and portfolio of design enablement solutions to unleash innovation for the global semiconductor industry. With global operations spanning Asia, Europe, and North America, TSMC serves as a committed corporate citizen around the world. TSMC deployed 281 distinct process technologies, and manufactured 11,617 products for 510 customers in 2020 by providing broadest range of advanced, specialty and advanced packaging technology services. TSMC is the first foundry to provide 5-nanometer production capabilities, the most advanced semiconductor process technology available in the world.
Assembly Line
TSMC and Synopsys Bring Breakthrough NVIDIA Computational Lithography Platform to Production
TSMC, the world’s leading foundry, and Synopsys, the leader in silicon to systems design solutions, have integrated NVIDIA cuLitho with their software, manufacturing processes and systems to speed chip fabrication, and in the future support the latest-generation NVIDIA Blackwell architecture GPUs. NVIDIA also introduced new generative AI algorithms that enhance cuLitho, a library for GPU-accelerated computational lithography, dramatically improving the semiconductor manufacturing process over current CPU-based methods.
Computational lithography is the most compute-intensive workload in the semiconductor manufacturing process, consuming tens of billions of hours per year on CPUs. A typical mask set for a chip — a key step in its production — could take 30 million or more hours of CPU compute time, necessitating large data centers within semiconductor foundries. With accelerated computing, 350 NVIDIA H100 systems can now replace 40,000 CPU systems, accelerating production time, while reducing costs, space and power.
Nvidia Brings GPU Acceleration to Computational Lithography
Nvidia has built a software library for the acceleration of computational lithography workloads, enabling order-of-magnitude speedups for these workloads when combined with the latest GPU hardware. The library, CuLitho, will be used at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) beginning in June. Accelerating computational lithography has the potential to improve yield, thereby reducing cost per chip. Other benefits include reducing the carbon footprint associated with this workload, faster turnaround and enabling advanced process nodes with tiny feature sizes.
TSMC’s Container Maker is Hidden Jewel of Japan’s Chip Industry
The world’s most advanced and delicately fine-tuned semiconductors wouldn’t be possible without the aid of giant steel storage tanks built by a little-known Tokyo company founded in 1927. Valqua Ltd. makes specialized, super clean containers for storing essential chipmaking chemicals, and it expects to hit its highest sales ever this fiscal year. It’s by far the world’s largest supplier of such tanks, dwarfing a clutch of smaller competitors in places like Taiwan, and providing almost every tank used by the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to Ichiyoshi Research Institute analyst Mitsuhiro Osawa.
How TSMC Keeps Getting Better
The Superior Economics of TSMC’s Giga-Fabs
Inside Intel’s Bold $26 Billion U.S. Plan To Regain Chip Dominance
What’s Harder to Find Than Microchips? The Equipment That Makes Them
We typically associate microchips with the latest and greatest technology, but it turns out that most of the chips that go into the products we use are made with older manufacturing techniques. No one knows precisely what proportion of the world’s microchips is made on used equipment, but Mr. Howe, owner of SDI Fabsurplus, estimates it might be as much as a third.
TSMC is expanding its capacity to make older chips by building a new plant for that purpose in Japan. Intel has no plans to build new capacity for manufacturing older kinds of chips, and continues to concentrate on making bleeding-edge chips, says Lisa Spelman, a vice president in Intel’s data-center group.
Inside TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaking giant building a new plant in Phoenix
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company may not be a household name, but with a market value of over $550 billion, it’s one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies. Now, it’s leveraging its considerable resources to bring the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing back to U.S. soil.
CNBC got an exclusive tour of the $12 billion fabrication plant, or fab, in Phoenix, Arizona, where TSMC will start making 5-nanometer chips in 2024. The company says it will produce 20,000 wafers each month.
The Big Semiconductor Water Problem
Intel Problems
The misplaced optimism is twofold: first there is the fact that eight years later Intel has again appointed a new CEO (Pat Gelsinger), not to replace the one I was writing about (Brian Krzanich), but rather his successor (Bob Swan). Clearly the opportunity was not seized. What is more concerning is that the question is no longer about seizing an opportunity but about survival, and it is the United States that has the most to lose.
Missing Chips Snarl Car Production at Factories Worldwide
Semiconductor shortages may persist throughout the first half as chipmakers adjust their operations, researcher IHS Market predicted on Dec. 23. Automakers will start to see component supply gradually ease in the next two to three months, China Passenger Car Association, which groups the country’s largest carmakers, said Monday.
Chipmakers favor consumer-electronics customers because their orders are larger than those of automakers – the annual smartphone market alone is more than 1 billion devices, compared with fewer than 100 million cars. Automaking is also a lower-margin business, leaving manufacturers unwilling to bid up chip prices as they avoid risking their profitability.