Comment by enragedcacti 4 days ago
The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as packaging partner Amkor's facility in Arizona won't be ready until 2027*. I'm not sure the cause of the delta but it could be in part because Fab 21 got back on schedule rather impressively following earlier delays.
* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025
> Shame they did not match each other in completion time.
Why?
If the packaging facility was ready early it would have sat idle losing money.
If it's ready late, products from the fab can obviously easily be shipped off to be packaged.
Tight coordination of timelines adds needless cost when there is an easy alternative.
Yeah definitely unfortunate. That said, I'm guessing the overall cost of overseas packaging is really tiny, otherwise Intel would've made a great customer since they are already packaging TSMC N6, N5, and N3 in New Mexico for their Arrow Lake CPUs.
It basically rounds down to $0 if you’re willing for it to be slow. A single shipping container can fit millions of chips
This is not adversarial thinking. Ukraine would be delighted to hit one container with all Russia's advanced chips going to e.g. Vietnam or China to be packaged and sent back.
This is a massive supply chain weakness and presumably will be addressed as soon as possible.
Just because something fits in a single shipping container doesn't mean it'll be sent out in a random single shipping container via the lowest bidder.
It just illustrates it is really quite cheap and so won't be that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
(Also not certain the GP's comment is necessarily correct even.)
The hardest part is making the chips, no?
Packaging facilities cost ~20% of a fab, right?
Naively, I'm assuming packaging is also not as complicate and difficult as fabrication.
Surely if they can build a fab in the US, they can build packaging facilities, too.
Rome wasn't built in a day.