Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab
(tomshardware.com)484 points by rbanffy 5 days ago
484 points by rbanffy 5 days ago
Indeed. It's just bullshit, propaganda.
There's simply no real reason we can't have a deep and robust manufacturing base in America. Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
If you're reading this statement I just made and want to instinctively disagree with me, start by interrogating your own opinion. Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term? What "well everyone knows" facts are you using to create that opinion that you don't have any first hand relationship to.
> Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term?
Not saying I necessarily disagree with you, but just to give an example, the US has considerably better labor practices and labor laws than China. It's not perfect but there are protections about making sure people are paid what they're owed, how much you are allowed to work someone, safety protocols, etc. All of those things could, in theory, cost more money and make labor more expensive.
Compare this to nations that don't have the same work protections, where they can pay people peanuts and have them work much longer shifts with effectively no protection (e.g. Foxconn in China [1]).
This might translate to decreased cost, and Americans have made it excruciatingly clear that we're apparently fine with slave labor as long as it doesn't happen within the US.
[1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/chinese-workers-foxc...
Just calling out that worker protections and increased labor costs seem to be the result of workers making more money. As the work force becomes wealthier, they _need_ less money, and their standards rise. This means their labor becomes more expensive and they demand safer workplaces. They demand more time off. This happened in the USA and is currently happening in China and other low-labor-cost nations.
I think the person you responded to is right. The USA can and should restore its manufacturing base, for many reasons. The whole country would greatly benefit from the return of blue-collar jobs.
I don't have sources for this, but the info is out there.
Also, there are a lot of nuances around this topic that I'm not getting into here. Just want to acknowledge that...
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. China's revolution is about delivering for workers. I don't get where ppl are coming up with "slave labor" when it is American allies possibly operating in China's SEZ that are doing the bad stuff.
It's also simultaneously sanctimonious sounding when development is very difficult and America sacrificed three generations to industrial capitalism, stole half a continent of land, and used slaves to do our own development depending on how you count inputs to the process.
I like the idea of made in America and bringing manufacturing self sufficiency to the US. But I don’t like the idea of reducing dependency on Taiwan, which makes it so that the world may ignore their plight in face of increasing aggression from China. The CCP is an authoritarian dictatorial government that seeks illegitimate control over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other areas. They need to be stopped and the solution isn’t to remove incentives to defend those areas.
Protecting Taiwan would mean WWIII. I hope the West and the Taiwanese figure this out ASAP and start moving as many people as possible out of there, and destroy all the fabs.
China is building more warships than the rest of the world combined. And NATO can't even recruit enough people to man their existing fleet.
But it seems the West is a victim of its own propaganda so there's no political will.
These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.
Until 2027, yes.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-repo...
"TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."
Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".
Would be interesting if China uses drones with technology from Taiwan to invade Taiwan.
what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?
"Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O from the compute die. That thing is the packaged 'CoWoS' system, where CoWoS==Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, that eventually gets attached to a 'normal' PCB.
What I've always wondered was, how is it possible to do this process (or well, the less advanced version of it, for smaller/older chips) cheaply/at massive scale, for those ICs that cost a few cents in bulk?
Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.
But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...
I'm making an educated guess but probably the cutting of chips from the wafers, placing them into the appropriate ceramic socket types (DIP, BFGA, SMD etc), soldering the line wires from chip to pin, encasing the chip, etc.
Believe it or not, sending them overseas just to be put in a box actually can be cost-effective. Like with those pears: "grown in Argentina, packaged in Thailand, sold in UK" https://www.birminghamfoodcouncil.org/2022/01/16/part-i-pear...
I think "packaging" here refers to the process of putting the silicon die in its plastic casing and connecting the die's pad to the case's pins, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging
The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales.
So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.
Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.
So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
Marine shipping is just about the most fuel efficient way of moving things between any two places, by a lot. A 100,000 dwt ship can get 1050 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. It takes about a teaspoon full of fuel to move an iPhone sized device across the pacific when I ran the numbers last.
To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.
Interesting. Could you give a brief description of how you got that number? Eg. what factors were considered.
Those numbers match what comes up with a quick search:
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo...
That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship.
Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it.
This is how most modern supply chains look like.
Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/dsv-unveils-details-for-ne...
^certainly there's activity in that space
Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?
I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line.
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
Wait, wait. In the context of semiconductor manufacturing packaging does not mean what you think it means. It is not putting the product in a paper box.
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
You seem to be confusing the term packaging...it is not the box, it is how the chips are assembled together to make the final product.
Right, but he assumed he knew a technical term when he didn't, which is unwise.
What does "packaging" mean in this context? I'm a total n00b when it comes to chips.
What comes to my mind is wrapping a piece of electronics in some bubble wrap and cardboard, which doesn't sound that hard...
Made using which process? The article doesn't mention this.
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
The smallest process they've got up and running right now is 4nm, last I checked
So which device will these be for then? I thought Apple stuff are always on the cutting edge node.
Their new stuff is. The iPad mini just moved from the A15 to the A17, The first MacBook with Intel processors had access to a bin that was not generally available yet. The yield was too low for it to work for an IBM, a Sony, or a Fujitsu. But Apple was low volume and high margin.
If I was nervous about a new fab, there’s the iPhone SE, the Apple TV, lots of choices for a less aggressive manufacturing node and less aggressive sales figures. If yield is shit you can still offer a product that isn’t killed by its own success.
I thought Taiwan prohibited export of this kind of know-how? What did I miss?
They have adopted a n-2 type of rule for advanaced tech...but as of yesterday they seem to have relaxed this rule and approved transfer of 2nm from Taiwan fabs to the AZ fab at some point in the near future.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/tsmc-cleared-for-2nm-p...
I keep hearing about a skills gap in the US for fabs, what skills or jobs are actually suffering from this? people with masters in nanotech, compeng, EE?
Perhaps there is a skill gap because nobody actually knows there is a demand? I have no idea what to recommend to people who are trying to choose a college degree.
With my industry in infosec, at least there are certifications one can take, even proper masters degrees these days. In my experience, there is no skills gap in cybersec, despite what CEO's and linkedin-types' sentiment. They just don't want to pay market price for skilled talent. "skills gap" has meant "we need more talent so we can pay less", there is no actual shortage of people who can do the jobs adequately.
Is it different for chip fabrication? and if so, how can regular people work/study to obtain these skills? If I, having read HN for years and reading about the fab process have no clue, how can regular people who don't visit HN?
If you all can help me answer this, I'll try to recruit a few people into pursuing the right career to help meet this demand.
Off topic... Taiwan also machines and heat treats some of the best cutlery steels in the world. Taichung City is famous for this. This is not as delicate a process as producing CPU chips, but it is hard to get right consistently.
Most all major cutlery companies have product lines that are produced solely in Taiwan (Spyderco, Cold Steel, Demko, etc.)
It would be nice to see Taiwanese steel industy move some production to the US as well.
High-quality knives come from proper metallurgy, especially as it relates to proper hardening steps. If you don't get these things exactly right, the best machining on earth is not going to produce even mediocre knives.
The announcement of this plant coincided with the announcement of the Endless Frontier Act and CHIPS for America act, which is what eventually became the bill we call CHIPS and Science Act.
This plant was the foundation that the CHIPS act was built upon. The Secretary of State had to secure an agreement with TSMC to build this fab before the bills could be drafted, as a lot of the recipients of the funding are suppliers for this plant.
It is completely truthful to assert that this is the result of the CHIPS act. Congress agreed to introduce the bills as a result of TSMC's agreement to build the fab in Arizona. If you have to avoid giving Biden credit, then you can point out that it was Trump's SoS who negotiated this original agreement.
I agree that the CHIPS Act was likely contingent on someone showing semiconductor manufacturing could actually be onshored. I’m not sure I buy that TSMC’s investment was contingent on an Act that was contingent on them investing in the first place. It’s not like TSMC was ever going to get a check to just reimburse themselves. Even now, their subsidies are only for new plans.
Intel, on the other hand, is a great example of a how a company dependent on the government funding for semiconductor manufacturing behaves. Heck, look at the Foxconn debacle; companies prefer incentives up front.
If you remember, TSMC had the immediate fear of losing ~15% of their revenue with the Huawei export ban. I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced their decision to cozy up to America.
Half of the works are from Taiwan All machines were imported to build the factory. USA can't do anythings without immigrants. China was able to develop its own chip factory without immigrants and without buying machines (because USA blocked the 'free market')
USA lost.
My guess is no, it won't. This is US taxpayer money being used to increase the manufacturing capacity available to the market so that the US has domestic manufacturing when stuff goes sideways. A similar thing regularly occurs with auto manufacturing and manufacturing in country A usually frees up capacity for other countries, resulting in slightly lower prices.
What could happen is that once the US has manufacturing capacity it decides to tariff imported chips, causing your country to retroactively do the same. This is decades away, and the US has a problem sourcing chips it can trust right now, so it's not currently on the radar. It's not something I'm going to worry about.
Viewed through a pessimistic eye, the US finally is realizing that its arms production critically relies on chip production and it can't says its chips are US made when selling arms on the market. A change in mindset like this typically takes a generation and so even though this change in weapons really happened around the turn of the century, the people in power have mostly retired and the new generation now understands this reality.
How hard will this be to scale to up 50% of Taiwan production into the US?
Hard, given how many Taiwanese workers they had to bring in, and how all the dies has to go back to Taiwan for packaging.
There's just such a big shift between parties right now that when the current admin is done, you're not gonna know what to expect with the next. Especially with something that's more policy (purchase orders) than law (taxes). Better to just codify the benefits.
If memory serves me right, it's the Apple S8 chip used in their watches, built on a 7nm process.
They'll be flown from the US to Taiwan for packaging, at least until packaging services exist here. Then they'll be flown to China, Southeast Asia, India, or possibly Brazil for final assembly into an iPhone or computer, at least until lower cost assembly plants are built here or someplace cheaper like Mexico.
I'm not interested what Apple says. What they do in FB is so many posts they posting what ever they like even posts of almost naked women and girls, looks like prostitution in FB. They are saying is their right to do that and their policy. It is disgusting thing in my point of view. Used to be postings of my friends now is totally disaster.
Maybe this is the discussion worth having. Taiwanese engineers competed to get into TSMC. Their management practically lived in the factory to solve production issues when needed. The local workers in the Arizona factory said the pay was pretty good per another comment. Yet somehow we thought that we were slaving the labors? What is the fundamental difference here? Personally, if I were a worker who could find just a service job that pays $30K a year or less, I'd kill to work for TSMC for $50K+/year and learn everything I can about chip manufacturing in my capacity. It would be proud to do it, and I wouldn't mind some overtime.
And I'm not sure why this got downvoted. Not that it matters, but I'm very curious about why people were not happy with the questions. My fundamental belief is that if someone chose to accept an offer and then work hard, it's not slavery but free will. But well, I guess American culture is interesting in the regard. If I study STEM hard in school, I'll be a "teacher's pet" or a nerd who knows only "how to cram". On the other hand, if I free throw under a hoop 4000 times a day, I'm DA man and it's worth the highest praise on the level of "have you seen the LA of 4:00am". Or if I'm a banker or a startup employee who worked 100hr+, I'm building the future of the US, yet if I worked in a fab 996 on my own will, I'll be a slave?
Seems like this is actually happening.
I saw so many predictions of how this couldn't happen and "yeah but" ... but it seems to be happening for the most part.