
Taiwan bucks world trend to be No. 1 in semiconductor equipment spending - Ultramanoid
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2019/06/05/2003716336
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baybal2
New backend house company opening, TSMC fab 18 and upgrades at few minor
fabbers.

If you take fab 18 and ardentec away, you will see that Taiwan did not reverse
the trend, and semi spend keeps going down industry wide for 4th year
straight.

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StudentStuff
Newer nodes are hellishly expensive to develop, ballooning in cost over
previous nodes. Global Foundries and most others are not working on more
advanced nodes than 14nm, leaving just TSMC & Samsung with 7nm fabs. Intel has
10nm kinda crappily working, turning out low end chips that are mostly dead
silicon (due to process issues).

We're definitely hitting a silicon bottleneck, the physical barriers are very
real, and exceedingly costly to attempt to work around. AMD's strategy of
using 14nm chiplets for components that don't scale down well (eg: analog
interfaces, DRAM, etc) is likely to become much more common.

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wil421
Global Foundries has a 12nm for most of the new AMD CPUs.[1] I’ve heard the
difference between processes at different companies is just marketing talk but
I’ll let someone knowledgeable chime in.

[1][https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/microarchitectures/zen%2B)

~~~
Faark
It's more about future developments, and GF seems to have given up on that
front:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17854065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17854065)

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emmelaich
aside: Taipei Times please get a tls site.

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lallysingh
This may have something to do to with making sure mainland doesn't block them.

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pteraspidomorph
They don't seem to stricly rely on the mainland for connectivity, if you look
at [https://www.submarinecablemap.com/](https://www.submarinecablemap.com/)

Although, after a quick check, my own access route seems to touch on Hong Kong
(EU -> US -> Pacific).

~~~
lallysingh
Good analysis! I was thinking more about being accessible to mainland
residents.

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adamzhou
TSMC is selling chips to Huawei under war pressure of the Chinese government.
TSMC should stop the supply.

~~~
adinobro
I'm just curious why you think a Taiwanese company should stop selling to a
Chinese company based on statement/policy of a foreign country?

It is obviously in their best financial interest to sell to Huawei. Why should
they stop?

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thefounder
Because all this "national security" is really about trade not national
security. Trump declared national security on steel, cars and pretty much any
important industry that US didn't lead.

~~~
edraferi
Incorrect. While the Trump administration is more enthusiastic about
aggressive intervention in commerce in general, the recent sanctions are the
culmination of over a decade of bad behavior by Huawei, recognized by many
countries:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei)

~~~
thefounder
How were the mini-vans from Canada a national security threat?

As far as technology is concerned US is using its corporations(Apple, Cisco,
microsoft etc) for espionage as well so there is nothing new here.

~~~
imglorp
I think the assertion is that US has lost core competency at things like steel
and cars, so by making it harder to bring in mini-vans from Canada or
whatever, they're proposing a magic rebirth of those industries in country.
Those are the same competencies we'd need if we wanted to build tanks or
battleships or bombers for another assault on Normandy. Which we don't, that
was important 80 years ago but not now.

The reality of course is probably more like pandering to steel and auto
workers.

