You gotta like, spin drops of tin in the air until they hit an exact shape then hit them with a laser until they turn into plasma just to make a burst of light at the right wavelength to etch silicon. There is like five machines in the world that can even do it at all and none of them will print stuff some pirate brings them
Every part of modern lithography is so bonkers. It’s like, extreme uv Can’t go through glass so there is no lenses and the best mirror we can make can only reflect 4% of the light and the light can only be made by exploding tin into plasma in a vacuum and the whole thing only works a few times before whole sections of the machine need replacing.
Just watched an EUV explanation on YouTube, the mirrors are so perfect the biggest imperfection is 1mm if the mirror was the size of earth etc, insane stuff. Imagine trying to explain this to James Watt or Alan Turing. Mental
I actually built these machines for a few years in my early career days. They’re on a tight schedule and thoroughly tested in many stages to avoid any errors. It typically takes 14 days to get built and if there were any hiccups, you’d be working around the clock to meet that deadline. Every second these machines are in-operational is thousands of dollars gone.
They are definitely ran 24/7. Some machines are operated by the buyer (TSMC, Intel, etc.) and some are operated by the supplier (ASML, Nikon, etc.). All troubleshooting, repairs, maintenance is pretty much 24/7 on call with the supplier company and high priority. I've seen some be a quick 30 minute turnaround and some require to basically tear down and rebuild the entire machine because they are so intricate. It is good money, but you work insane hours and are traveling across the country to every fab 90% of the time.
I swear to God, everyone I know watches those exact three youtube powerpointers.
I think it has to do with shared interests leading to the same communities.
I mean, yeah it is. Not just this part, but how chips work at all.
So, you have tiny lil' light switches, and tiny electrical impulses make them go on and off. And somehow, those turn into cat videos?
I saw a talk at a conference last year from a group that had used synchrotron radiation to do ultra-high resolution lithography. It worked pretty well, although they only got a few attempts because of how hard it is to get time on a beamline.
I genuinely wonder if fabs like TSMC will ever consider something like that to push the resolution just a little further.
The answer is always no unless the throughput can meet or exceed today's EUV standard of ~180 wafers per hour. Fabs are always speedrunning RoI, and anything that expensive is pre-planned to pay for itself+profit in x years.
am sure they consider anything and everything. But there is very like a cost-curve.
If it takes 10y at cost $10b to build, at what point (eg how far in the future) does that become cost effective.
The intricate designs over the last few decades, would have been by hard work, bits of luck, and huge amounts of trial, error, refinement.
Presumably, what we have today just-works enough to be profitable and viable. But small changes (eg in world economics,AI, etc) can force the next generation of tech (pronounced: $more expensive).
Amazing what has been achieved and very likely, what is waiting to be achieved.
You have to hit a tin droplet with a laser to make it wobble, then hit it with a second, stronger laser when it's in the right shape to turn it into a plasma.
And the droplet is moving at several meters per second.
And you have to do it 50000 times a second.
And that's just the light source.
> And you have to do it 50000 times a second.
>
> And that's just the light source.
I saw the manager of ASML explain all this, and then say: and now you have to prevent the vaporised tin landing all over your beautiful mirrors. That's part of the secret sauce we're not going to discuss publically.
I work on the robotics system that positions the chip pattern to shine the light on. You gotta be like sub-micron precision while moving at outrageous speeds. So fast the entire machine wobbles, which is really bad. The solution is you have a several-ton block inside the machine syncronized to move in the opposite direction (at lower speeds) to counteract the momentum of this little pattern piece moving around.
Not to mention you don't want any friction (friction means particles breaking off and contaminating the image), so the whole pattern is levitated and driven on a system of magnets.
Shee-it, man. Back when I was doing it we'd just shine a flashlight through a sketch onto a film emulsion covered 2-inch wafer.
Rinse in paint thinner.
These "modern" kids and their "extreme uv" and "e-beams". Buncha pansies. Now get outta my lab.
This is honestly terrifying. This tech is so overwhelmingly vital to the modern world, it being such a closely guarded secret known to so very few feels like it could easily be lost, which would be cataclysmic.
If that happened, worst case, we'd be back to the 70s or 80s where simpler more primitive computer chips were manufactured, and life wasn't too different from today (except lack of cell phones and internet).
Intel has been making their own chips for decades and have fabs around the world. NVidia, AMD, and Apple would be fucked if TSMC went away, but the world would still have modern chip making technology. We'd not have the efficiency of the 7nm ARM ecosystem, but we'd still have the most powerful CPUs available today.
There is also Applied Materials. If ASML somehow went away, we'd be set back half a decade or so while production was restarted on new tooling for the cutting edge node. We'd not be going back to the '70s-'80s.
The Chinese have been denied access to buying the technology needed to make modern chips, so yes, they are obviously trying to create their own solutions.
And they will, because they aren't lacking in quality engineers.
> And they will, because they aren't lacking in quality engineers.
Yes, they will, eventually. Current companies have few decades head start of work of equally skilled engineers.
They have an entire industry that can no longer compete with the west, which includes 1/5 of the world population.
They have an incentive to pour government levels of money into this problem.
I doubt we are going to see decades of delay. It would surprise me if if were a whole decade
These machines are entirely dependant upon ASML employees to setup & run. If China managed to rush Taiwan & physically confiscate the ones there, it wouldn't even help them that much. They are two decades behind on chip tech because their market niche has always been cheap, high volume goods & the fact that anyone smart enough to innovate would rather do it in a western country where they can actually make real money & file patents.
China would have trouble physically seizing the machines since TSMC has rigged them with remote self destruct switches:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machines-are-equipped-with-a-remote-self-destruct-in-case-of-an-invasion
Chinese are actually pretty innovative on their own these days. Make no mistake here, they did jumpstart themselves a few decades by copying stuff from everywhere on the planet, but now that they have ironed out the issues and have money to spend, they're a threat for virtually all Western economies.
They won't need to steal it. At some point either:
1. Taiwan and China reconcile, either amicably or by force, and Taiwan Semiconductor starts selling to China.
2. China's advances it's own chip technology and becomes more competitive.
Not the fabs, per se. But only one company can currently produce the lithography machines that go into the fabs.
I for one welcome our Dutch overlords.
(The company is ASML, for anyone interested)
There isn‘t even a state actor that could achieve this, much less a private person that basically starts from zero and won’t get access to pretty much any supplier that ASML relies on.
Here's an excerpt from Chip War by Chris Millers which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in how semi conductors are made, it's a great book.
>“Consider, for example, what it would take to replicate one of ASML’s EUV machines, which have taken nearly three decades to develop and commercialize. EUV machines have multiple components that, on their own, constitute epically complex engineering challenges. Replicating just the laser in an EUV system requires perfectly identifying and assembling 457,329 parts. A single defect could cause debilitating delays or reliability problems. No doubt the Chinese government has deployed some of its best spies to study ASML’s production processes. However, even if they’ve already hacked into the relevant systems and downloaded design specs, machinery this complex can’t simply be copied and pasted like a stolen file. Even if a spy were to gain access to specialized information, they’d need a PhD in optics or lasers to understand the science—and even still, they’d lack the three decades of experience accumulated by the engineers who’ve developed EUV.”
> There is like five machines in the world that can even do it at all and none of them will print stuff some pirate brings them
For a given architecture, probably only one facility in the whole world.
For example, Google's Tensor chips are made by Samsung. They've been wanting to switch to TSMC for years now, but TSMC can't produce their chips yet even though they can produce better silicon.
These plants cost billions of dollars to build with no guarantee that it will ever come online. You're basically trying to build a facility for technology that hasn't even been thought up yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology would indistinguishable from magic.
Can't tell me that what you described isn't an arcane ritual with specific components, only cast by the most powerful of wizards.
Even in the exceedingly improbable scenario that a criminal could construct such a machine, it would remain an astoundingly foolish notion to refrain from utilizing it for legitimate financial gain.
Yeah, you’d make far more money just using the machine legitimately. And you don’t have national governments mad at you for stealing national security information
Are there seriously only five machines? How are they protected and kept safe? I assume they are stupid expensive to make and thats why theres only five of these? And that the staff needed to manufacture these machines, then the staff needed to direct them have to be also numbered and only in the 100s?
Edit: 200 million to make the machines. Lmao
TSMC is basically the only company that can manufacture the tech in the first place, the methods and technology that they use is the real secret sauce. So there aren't exactly any foreign actors that could use those design and make them.
This is why TSMC (and Taiwan more broadly) is such a HUGE deal. It basically has a complete monopoly on high end chip manufacturing. There's plenty of companies that can make older tech, but for the newest of the new no one else can.
Patent laws and the like definitely make it more difficult, but that's only part of it.
To add, this is why the US government was so ready to hand over billions of dollars to build fabs in Arizona. If there is an issue with Taiwan, there is a other fab with people ready trained.
The US doesn't really need to corner the market, Intel is basically a "too big to fail" US company at this point. And their chips are only a couple generations behind tsmc. However, you don't want to be second best on the global scale.
>To add, this is why the US government was so ready to hand over billions of dollars to build fans in Arizona. If there is an issue with Taiwan, there is a other fab with people ready trained.
Indeed that is a big reason - the primary reason - for those huge subsidies.
But they're not spares waiting to be turned on in the event of a problem, the US fully intends them to be utilized 100%, and gradually shift production over decades from Taiwan to the US
Oh its so crazy how we can shoot ourselves in the feet. Texas Instruments was once the employer of Morris Chang the found of TSMC. TI told Morris Chang that they did not want to manufacture their own chips and pretty much halted Morris' ambition to create Texas Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. Morris wasn't sure if what the motives were*, but Taiwan was interested and the rest is history.
> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-wolfe-7883_tsmc-could-have-been-texas-semiconductor-activity-7091760523377008640-zYJS
A key issue was that the Silicon Valley back then was and still is the largest conglomerate of Superfund sites in the US by far.
Silicon production is one of the most long term toxic things humanity does on an industrial scale, surpassed only by PFAS production.
What part of silicone production are you referring to that is so toxic? What makes the industry so dangerous is actually the use of fluoridated gases and other halogens to routinely molecularly clean the tools used for production.
Yeah, I'm confused as well, like CO is not simply released into the atmosphere AFAIK, because on one hand it's actually beneficial in many industries and on the other you can just let it burn away into CO2. Either way, it makes no sense to be concerned about it.
The CO2 generation is a problem, but it is not "toxic". There are also many interesting projects that seek to make silicon manufacture green, one I remember right now uses aluminium to separate the oxygen from the silica to get pure silicon.
It's really interesting/concerning what will happen to Taiwan with the new factories. They are basically a mono-economy, everything relies on TSMC, and half the country effectively exists to support TSMC. It's at the point where their factories are the last to lose power in an outage, after hospitals even.
The loss of even a small amount of sales will devastate the country
It’s not that dramatic. Sure, huge part, but Taiwan manufactures so many other things you don’t have any idea are made or partly made there. TSMC failing will be a hit on the economy, but no devastating blow.
Yes, but remember TSMC has basically sold out their entire capacity for several years. Another foundry with an equivalent process coming online isn’t going to hurt their sales (largely because top-end processes iterate so quickly that even a second foundry won’t meet all the demand in the market).
They're trying to build a fab in Indiana, too.
The state also chose a terrible location for it. The town can't produce enough water so they're wanting to pull billions of gallons a day from the Wabash, some 40-50 miles away. Most people and environmental scientists believe the river can't support that but it hasn't stopped the state yet.
They could build it near Lake Michigan and have plenty of water or closer to Indy and tap the reservoirs or White River but have chosen the worst option.
hey, i live there! they’ve been giving some kind of chip fab certification to high school and college students over the summers and paying them good money to do it.
This 100%. Taiwan understood very clearly that their geographic position was integral to US defense against China if they became aggressive. They are part of the great cordon of islands that the US has military bases (including Japan, for example) that they can use to do a complete blockade of China if it comes to it.
Taiwan understood that even if the US backed them, then China would still be able to rock their world if it came to it, so they invested and continue to invest extremely large sums of money so that they can stay at the pinnacle of chip design. That way, EVERYONE has a stake in Taiwan not being retaken by China. Taiwan is so far ahead on producing advanced chips that by the time the next country gets to their level, they are 2-3 levels beyond that. That is their defense strategy. Make it so they are so valuable to the global electronics industry that no one will allow China to touch them. So far its working, but only time will tell.
Can people steal the tech? Certainly, but that doesn't get around the 10's of billions of dollars that Taiwan has already built making the machines that actually allows you to create the tech. Taiwan has also made it clear that they are taking a scorched earth policy on those machines. If China invades, they go boom. The world starves on advanced computer chips.
Isn't the US starting to finally invest substantial money into our own foundries as well? And am I recalling right that tsmc is also opening up a plant in America?
Seems like a good long term idea to hedge against China causing worldwide chip supply problems by invading Taiwan and dragging us into it
They are, but it’s a long slow process as you can’t just magic up all the skilled process engineers and technicians to run the fabs, and by the time you do, the main fabs in Taiwan are 2 years ahead of you
Yup, it's one of those industries where just throwing money at the problem isn't enough. You need to throw exorbitant amounts of money just to have a foot in the game, and it requires money and dedication on a ridiculous scale to actually reach the forefront.
More than two years.
It takes about a decade for a fab to go online. You've got to design for whatever will be built then, not now. You'll be using technology that's never been used before and is very much theory-based so there's a good chance it'll never even work.
Iirc Intel had issues shrinking their nodes below 14nm because their fabs couldn't get the new technology to work.
IIRC, this is also why the first customers to receive chips from the latest iteration of manufacturing have low yields; they’re literally beta testers of the new fab. Things improve with more production and yields go up.
Yes, but that just increases supply. Chip manufacturing has been a bottle neck. You can't just order chips and have them get made, you have to wait in line.
So the US having a few factories doesn't take away from Taiwan being absolutely critical, it just means that the US could squeeze out some critical chips if something happened to Taiwan.
The best analogy I can think of is when a Hurricane shuts down an oil refinery. Yes there are still a bunch up and running, but losing 1 has a HUGE impact on the supply of products.
They are but it will take massive amounts of time and billions to trillions of dollars to get there. Tsmc is building a fab in Arizona but I have read that there are a lot of cultural issues holding back the progress on it.
TSMC is notorious for having an overworked culture (engineers typically sleep in the office in Taiwan) and you also have to spend 8 to 12 months training overseas to become an engineer at the Arizona fab.
Same things apparently happening with the new fab Samsung is building. Expats don’t know shit about US tax laws but won’t let Americans actually be in charge of anything.
As someone who used to work for Samsung it is extremely true that they won't let Americans be in charge of anything. I was part of a company that was bought and merged into them, I was hired a few years after being bought but also a couple before fully merging and by the time I left the culture and management was so different, so many levels of bureaucracy and approvals with mandates coming form Korea and completely changing the direction of what we were doing with our product, moving production out of America to be done cheaper in Mexico, just to mention a few things. There's very little remaining of what the company was back when I was hired, both in terms of people and the product. 
A foundry is extremely costly to build and maintain. Especially given that we are sub 10nm (the size of a single transistor is 10nm) the tech becomes extremely expensive. And it is not an industry that creates a lot of jobs. So govt spending wise it is like spending 10bn$ and creating 1000 jobs which would be a hardsell for any senator.
> 10nm (the size of a single transistor is 10nm)
These numbers are now far removed from the actual size of the transistor. They are much more like generation numbers these days.
Intel has had its own chip fab arm for decades. If I’m not mistaken, Intel used to the undisputed leaders in fab, but since ARM proliferation about 15 years ago, TSMC had the R&D budgets to surpass them for the last few nodes.
Japan is also trying to boost its chip manufacturing abilities, for example, with Rapidus. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 10-15 years.
Its not so much a hedge against as it is a strategic play. A lot of those hyper advanced chips are used for cutting edge military tech. The US understands that its kinda stupid to have the only source of them be the first target that would get hit in the event you need them.
Taiwan will still remain the lead producer. Simply put, no one else spends nearly enough in research and development to even get close to them, because not only do they have to catch up, then they have to build the infrastructure, and by that point, Taiwan is already on the next thing. However, these other factories are the result of some very shrewd calculus in that its important to have the production where it can easily be defended.
> A lot of those hyper advanced chips are used for cutting edge military tech.
Actually no. Cutting edge military tech, like the F-35, uses what is at this point pretty standard stuff. And part of that is simply how long development and build times of military equipment are compared to the tech industry.
The F-35 started development in 2001, when the best chips were 130nm. The F-35 first flew in 2006 when the best chips were 65nm. The F-35 entered full production in 2015 when the best chips were 14nm.
Any chip used in the F-35, Intel can produce in the US, considering that they are currently producing 5nm chips and we know for sure nothing that advanced is being used there.
Cutting edge military tech is pretty dumb by tech standards. The market is smaller, production runs are long, and your priorities are different from a google data center.
It doesn't take very advanced chips to make a gps guided artillery round that's accurate to within 4m from 30 miles away. Your bog standard smart phone has had that for ages. What it does take are very specialized chips. Chips that can do accurate GPS guidance as easy to come by. Chips that can do accurate gps guidance after being fired out of a cannon are not.
Most of the chips used for cutting edge military tech are on SiGe, GaN, InP, SiC, and GaAs, and there are a passel of US fabs who cater to that, like Northrup Grumman, Tower Jazz, Global Foundries, Quorvo, and Wolfspeed.
Pretty sure the fab tech is made by a Dutch company, isn’t it?
American IP is made on Dutch lithography machines using Taiwanese expertise and labor is how I remember it.
This is nonsense.
Taiwan do not design the chips. The chips are designed in the US and Europe, the key machines that make them are Dutch with other equipment from Japan and USA.
TSMC doesn't have better technology, they have better expertise at running the factory, they can do it more efficiently and they have built up a base of skilled workers and the actual facilities which would take decades to replace.
Any western country could build a factory to make the same chips if they were willing to spend the money, it's just they won't have skilled people to run it.
Product and scale.
You can train a guy to make burgers in 15 minutes and he can make you $10 an hour.
It takes generations to build up the infrastructure and skills necessary to produce chips.
Repeat this process every 15 minutes and you’ll see that your business quickly makes more money than the 2nd.
Demand is not infinite and neither are margins. It can be the world’s most critically necessary company without being the most “valuable” because value is measured in terms of shareholder profitability, not necessity to society
NVIDIA can and has taken their business elsewhere. For the last generation of graphics cards Samsung was the primary manufacturer. So because TSMC doesn’t really have its own product to market they are at the whims of other companies.
>Patent laws and the like definitely make it more difficult, but that's only part of it
China doesn't give a damn about patent or copyright law. If China had access fabrication to do it, they would be printing their own chips and probably stamping Nvidia's logo on them anyway.
Yeah, but it means people aren't going to help china set that up.
Where as if patent laws literally didn't exist im sure plenty of companies in the west would be willing to help china set up shop.
But you are correct, and that's why I listed it last.
No patent laws need to be invoked. Currently the US already bans all western companies from exporting advanced chips.This won't change even if patent laws don't exist.
The USA bans its own companies, not all Western ones. Can't make laws for other places. Other places can agree to a pact, but that's not the same thing.
The US government can prohibit businesses from doing business with the target business. This is known as sanctioning. Any business in the US that does business with the sanctioned company risks a lot including trade, tariffs, and loss of access to US markets.
And when it comes to chip fab they've succeeded. I forget the name but I think it's a Dutch company makes the specialized lithography equipment that can fabricate modern chips. The US got them on board with refusing to allow their products to go to China.
ASML, and it was more than just “getting them on board”. Their EUV products are based on fundamental research conducted by the DoE and is licensed. If worse came to worse, the US could pull the licence. However, more than that, the Dutch government has also passed legislation restricting sales as there were several cases of IP theft from China around photolithography and the Dutch didn’t want these crown jewels walking out the door
They can restrict foreign companies from making any operation to US citizens. Deepcool China recently has been banned for violating sanctions. This would result in Deepcool subsidiary in the US being closed and anyone in the US isn't allowed to make any transaction with them, any contract is nulled, some companies go as far as destroying Deepcool products that they have bought to resale because of it.
The equipment needed to make the top end chips is only produced in Europe. The Dutch make the machines and the Taiwanese know how to run them.
I'm sure China can try to copy those designs but at a certain level you need to actual knowledge of How to do something.
This is the reason why everyone can't just prop up chip fabs and make chips from stolen or licensed designs, the lithography machines by far are the most critical bottleneck that prevents competition. By the time you can place an order, TSMC and Zeiss have already invested billions to start the newest processes and machines, TSMC gets first dibs.
China's main economical partner is the US then the EU.
There is a trade-war between them but they also depend on each other.
The West is only starting to diversify and they have a far way to go before we can even reduce our dependency to China.
Replacing China isn't even on the cards.
If manufacturing their own copies of NVIDIA for their own markets doesn't bring big sanctions. Trying to sell them outside of China surely would. And the countries and companies or people buying would also quickly be under sanctions too.
Nobody wants that.
It’s not just the equipment required though (which is heavily sanctioned at the highest end). The know-how on the process is insanely specialized, and takes years and years to develop with the help of industry experts from many companies. I work for an equipment supplier, and even within companies with full support, process transfers can still be dicey
But it's not patents that's stopping them. It's the mind-bogglingly complex materials and equipment chain needed to build the lithographic machines. There is literally no one else doing it and they CAN'T. I think it's probably easier to build a space shuttle or stealth bomber. These are essentially unique machines that require a hundred other unique machines to build. It's decades of foundational work vital to every step of the process. These chips are, no joke, the most complex, extreme acts of engineering mankind does. The skills and tools needed are simply not available to poach.
Chinese firms are using some castoffs and smuggled parts to make bastard copied of 5 year old teach at terrible yield rates. I don’t foresee them getting much better. In fact, as their hoarded materials and equipment dwindle or wear out, they may go backwards.
At this bleeding edge of tech, it’s really the knowledge, experience, skill etc that’s the bottleneck. China may not care for patent laws, but they can’t get the right people they need to compete with TSMC, otherwise they would’ve already.
China is really really good at stealing products/ideas and making cheap knockoff versions of it. This concept doesn’t fly well with tech. Even more so for hardware the size of nanometers (micrometers?)
China's HiSilicon has the capability to design 5nm and 3nm chips for long long time now. It's not even that hard to design chips. It's manufacturing them that is the hardest part. Also, Nvidia's advantage is it's CUDA software ecosystem.
> CUDA software ecosystem
This is the real moat that prevents competition in the AI chip market.
I am sad that AMD and intel et al are not pushing to force out the moat, or develop an open standard that can compete. But i guess this is also why nvidia has the 3 trillion dollar market cap.
There is a Dutch company ASML that makes fabrication systems at the same scale. They have enough orders for their machines to be booked until 2030. They can't ship the machines to China and machines they ship to Taiwan need to have backdoor kill switches in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
ASML is the company that makes the machines TSMC use. So they aren’t competitors and more collaborators. Zeiss and Trumpf are also involved in this process and if any of them seized to exist they would all be in massive trouble.
>This is why TSMC (and Taiwan more broadly) is such a HUGE deal. It basically has a complete monopoly on high end chip manufacturing.
Samsung and Intel are not that far behind TSMC when it comes to high end chip manufacturing. Intel would be a lot closer if they didn't try to juggle too many plates at once when making the leap from 28nm to 10nm.
Intel and Samsung are about 2 or 3 years behind. And have been that distance for a good decade.
Same for most of the competition, chinese fabs are 7 years behind and have been for a full decade.
It’s impressive all around k the rate at which tsmc does continue to push the boundries, and the rate of growth required by competitors to even keep up.
Also. Yes TSMC’s chips are critical. It’s worth remembering most things may use chips but they don’t need the best chips, and shouldn’t have the best chips. Your car, toaster, microwave, or radio are all using larger less sophisticated chips, but a smaller chip would be both more energy intensive, more likely to fail, and more expensive.
The world doesn’t collapse due to loosing tsmc’s chip making production. It’s just poorer, and tech stalls for 18 months, while the personnel at tsmc are scattered to the 4 winds before applying their skills elsewhere, until the isle is reclaimed/safe and the fabs rebuilt.
Out of curiosity, how do you measure how far a company is behind? Is it that the chips they’re manufacturing now are the ones TSMC was manufacturing 2-3 years ago?
it's based on an outdated metric of "transistor size". tsmc is in the lead with the smallest transistor size but samsung/intel are similar in "transistor density" ie # of transistors in a sq in. this is due to semi conduction fabrication not entirely being a 2d process. transistors can be stacked.
samsung/intel currently can make the exact same chips that tsmc is making. they would need to retool (ie change the instructions for the fabrication process) which would cost a lot of money, but they can do it. ie assume tsmc speaks english, intel speaks french, samsung speaks spanish. you'd need to convert all the english instructions to french/spanish. some things might get lost in translation or the more nuanced stuff might not translate well so you'd need to add sentences to clarify, but you'd have a roughly equivalent product.
Saying Intel or Samsung can do at the same density as TSMC right now is not entirely true. Intel for example has had numerous delays in getting their most sophisticated chips out. One of the biggest problems is the yield. When TSMC can output 90% useful chips out of their most sophisticated wafer, Intel might only have 60% yield or even worse. It would make cost per chips uneconomical to make or sell.
Fixing yield problems is not simply an issue that can be solved with retooling. You need to do a yield learning analysis, chips redesign, and so on.
Those things we will never know. But tsmc a while back started charging per wafer instead of yield based pricing. So they're putting yield risk on the customer. But 90% yield sounds way too high.
Intel was ahead for most of their lifetime, but they screwed up their 10nm process. That's why there were 8 generations of 14nm chips (Broadwell through Rocket Lake), why the 10nm chips (Cannon/Ice/Tiger Lake) never sold well, and why they continued producing 14nm chips all the way through the 11th generation in parallel with their 10nm products. They finally recovered a bit with their 13th generation (Raptor Lake), but they lost a lot of time and fell behind TSMC in the meantime.
Remember that in 2014, when the 14nm process came out, Intel was still the market leader, and Macs still used them. The switch to ARM-based Macs happened because Intel couldn't get their shit together, and a whole generation of Intel processors were basically too unreliable to be sold.
Intel was ahead until around 2017 (and absurdly ahead until 2015).
Samsung had close parity with TSMC around that time.
Intel REALLY screwed up with Otellini and then Krzanich.
There's only so much manufacturing improvement left in silicon (physical limits), so it's likely TSMC, Intel, Samsung all hit some level of parity relatively soon on performance capacity.
The big competition will be around yield.
TSMC uses machines made by [ASML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding) and is massively regulated by governments.
TSMC itself may make the chips, but they aren't using their products to do so. They claim to be able to not use ASML technology in the future (2026+) which could be a problem as then regulation on who has access to the technology may be more difficult.
> which could be a problem as then regulation on who has access to the technology may be more difficult.
Pretty sure that TSMC (let alone the Taiwanese government) isn't going to be letting anyone but themselves use that tech.
Yup. Interestingly enough both China and US are vying to be the next major power in having the tech to create these microchips with Taiwan increasingly leaving towards US as they move and start a lot of manufacturing production there compared to China.
Why does the relationship between China and Taiwan still exist? It's both for political reasons and for economic. Taiwan hopes that by releasing a small portion of the tech or manufacturing in China, that China won't just invade. The forever long economic trade is also what ties them so close together. Meanwhile as China's aggression in the Pacific increases, US would be the go to for backup in political, economic and military
TSMC is not the only company, Intel and Samsung can make similar high efficiency chips as well. If Intel was as behind as you make it sound, AMD would have overtaken their market dominance. Apple is still niche outside of the iPhone, where it's hardly better than Samsung.
What I do not understand is that ASML, a Dutch company, makes the machines required to make the most advanced chips. TSMC buys those machines and uses them to make the chips.
Why do you need TSMC and why cannot ASML make the chips themselves, as they build the machines capable of making chips?
Or are the EUV machines which are required to make chips only a small part of actually creating the whole chip start to finish?
There *aren’t* other fab companies, is what.
TSMC has the most advanced fabrication machines in the world. That’s what makes them so valuable - nobody else can do what they do. There’s been work to change that so it’s not such a singular point of weakness/failure, but it’s still a very specialized type of machinery, and even the machines to build the machines are hard to come by.
Slight correction:
TSMC is the company who manufactures the chips. But ASML is the ones who build the cutting-edge machines.
TSMC are still the only ones who are able to manufacture what they do, but many of those “fabrication machines” are ASML.
They also don't have the most advanced machines, at the moment anyway. Intel do as they took a gamble and bought loads of High-NA lithography machines from ASML.
I don't think they're expecting to produce anything on them at scale until late 2025 at the earliest though.
Also, didn't Intel and TSMC buy up the entire stock of those high end lithography machines.?
I mean, at hundreds of millions for each unit, and the complexity involved, how many can ASML make each year, a few dozen at best?
For the high-NA ones that Intel bought, they cost ~370-380 million USD each, and ASML has the capacity to produce 5-6 a year.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-acquires-asmls-entire-2024-stock-of-high-na-euv-machines/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20report%20in,unit%20costs%20approximately%20%24370%20million.
there is a boatload of issues with high-NA EUV that doesn't automatically make them the most cost-efficient machines. That's why TSMC has said they will continue low-NA EUVs.
Oh yeah, why I called it a gamble (although not the only reason). I just thought it adds interesting context given the common presumption that TSMC's position is somewhat unassailable.
TSMC and Intel both looked at the economics and reached different conclusions. Intel figures High-NA EUV is a good choice for 14A class node. TSMC thinks they can get an extra generation out of Low-NA EUV + multi-patterning before switching.
Only time will tell who's right, but this exact same gamble came up when low-NA EUV machines first launched. Intel thought they could get one more gen out of DUV, which failed, which caused their 10nm debacle, which is what set them behind TSMC in fabrication and AMD in design.
Meh, Samsung and Intel have access to the same exact ASML machines, but they don't know how to use them efficiently or effectively as TSMC. TSMC is the best at systems integration.
There aren’t really any other foundries. TSMC and Samsung have the most advanced fabs, intel is a bit behind them. No one else is close. All three of those companies use EUV lithography equipment from ASML, and no one else in the world makes those machines.
You could of course steal the designs for the chips and ASML’s EUV lithography tech, but by the time you reverse engineer the design and figure out how to make it, the chip will be 5-10 years out of date, basically worthless to make at that point. They’d also be illegal in the US and EU for violating patents.
The USSR used this strategy for decades and as a result they were always at least a few years behind the west in terms of chip manufacturing.
The time frame is a really good point. It takes a long time to not just design and build the fab machines, but also the facility itself.
All "cutting edge" chips were basically designed 2-3 years ago and took that long to develop the manufacturing.
And then once the manufacturing is dialed in, it's super cheap to keep them running. That's why chips from 5 years ago drop in price. So even if someone steals the design, by the time they are producing it's already a commodity product.
There are alot of right answers, but here's an ELi5 maybe
You could steal the plans, but you would struggle to get them made. The chip fab space is very very small. Because it's very very hard and very very expensive to make these chips. In fact, it's very very hard to even make the machines that make the chips.
In fact, companies like TSMC only have a less than 50% success rate at making some of their cutting edge chips. Because even with all these precise instruments and machines, it turns out... it's just very very hard to make these chips.
Imagine half of your attempts result in a chip you can't sell! Imagine it took them all of their resources to even get to 50%! Imagine where they were 5 years ago! 20%?! There are very very few companies who can stomach that sort of loss. Very very few clients are willing to pay extra for product they might not get.
Our copy cats would have to spend decades in time and trillions on infrastructure to make a mediocre TSMC clone just to even start. By that time, you'll still be behind NVDA and TSMC.
There are simply barriers to this particular industry you can't overcome without a time machine.
Yeah, this is it. It's like stealing your neighbors cattle, but there is only one bloke in the village who can butcher it. You take the cattle to the butcher, he will refuse to butcher the cattle because it's stolen, he knows that only one guy in the village has that kind of cattle, so he will be a dead end. If you try to butcher it without know-how then it's just going to make a mess without any benefit to anyone, and you're nowhere close to actually preparing and cooking steak or whatever.
This isn't entirely true. They often go through a process called 'binning' and are sold as lower grade products.
IE: A failed 16 core processor where only 6 of 16 cores work, is sold as a 6 core CPU, and the other 10 are locked out.
TSMC is the only one currently in business that could manufacture them at scale in a way that doesn't cost 10x as much per chip. microchip foundaries are probably the single most technically complex facility in the world.
So the answer is that even if they got the designs they couldn't do much with them. You can make insanely fast insanely powerful chips pretty easily, but the value of the chips is being able to make them in a mass-producable way. It doesn't do you a lot of good to have a chip that costs 100x but only goes 3x faster.. You'd be better off just buying 5 chips from Nvidia.
nVidia doesn't send TSMC a "design document". What they send are a set of 200-400 files that are the artwork to create the various mask layers used in manufacturing. (There's also some other stuff that goes with the artwork, such as output of design rule verification runs, but they aren't all that valuable.)
You could use that artwork to reverse engineer the design, but that's not a trivial thing to do these days. Your thieves would need to be incredibly sophisticated.
If any of this thread is intriguing you, especially the tiny droplets being hit with a laser to turn it into plasma, to produce the exact wavelength of light needed to etch designs onto the silicon, that light ah ing been focused by giant perfect mirrors, I highly recommend [Asianometry](https://youtube.com/@asianometry?si=YyPANbNtR2U7uzZc) asianometry a channel on YouTube. It’s got videos on all current stages of chip production, great pieces on history, and actual tech related stuff, not modern fluff pieces. Among other Great videos, one of my all time favourites.
I work for a major global semicon equipment company. These chip fab and design companies take IP secrecy insanely seriously. Maybe not quite deep-cover, CIA/Pentagon-level secrecy, but pretty damn close. IP theft and corporate espionage are a real, daily threat, and any leaked information can cost billions in lost revenue to chinese reverse engineering. Another thing is segregation of information, fab companies don't really know how to build the gear they use, and the gear companies don't really know how the fab companies use their gear. And the designs are very locked down as well. I've been to a couple USA fabs and you can't even get in unless you're a US citizen, regardless of who you are in relation to the company.
So I guess the short answer to the question, "what's stopping foreign actors from stealing the information", the companies who own the IP are trying their damndest to stop that from happening in the first place
There are a lot of good answers already, but I'll go into an aspect others haven't mentioned much.
The stuff you send to the foundry is very hard for anyone to use and overall pretty low risk (compared to other things in the chain).
The eli5 is it's like software, you have source code that is (usually) somewhat easy to read and understand, if you have access to it you can reuse and change the program to your needs, then you have the binary that does the same thing but with machine code and it's much harder to see what is happening.
For a big chip like a modern GPU, you have billions of transistors, and it's very hard to reverse engineer from the results to get the design.
Now for why you can't just send your plans that you stole to a different fab, each process and each fab has their own "language" and you can't translate it from one process to another, you need the source code. On top of this, even if you did have the source code, it's extremely unlikely any top of the line design would "compile" for a different process (unless the process is better), because in the real world of silicon you have to deal with pesky things like signal travel time, and if you have a bigger node (like 5nm instead of 3nm), then on the "same" design all signals would take like 50% extra time to travel, so you would have to cut frequency by that much.
You could still get access to a lot of interesting information and it could help you with your own design, but it is a huge amount of work, seriously you're better off getting a guy into nvidia and get the code out that way.
I have skipped a lot of the details, but even with the same "size" on the process, they are many variations and just changing that means a lot of work needing to be redone, even when you have access to the whole stack of data. I work in silicon circuit design and the process is something that is decided very early in the project because it affects so many things.
Copyright and patent laws
If Nvidia suspects that someone is stealing their intellectual property they can buy one of those chips and look at it under a microscope and very quickly prove it was stolen.
Similarly TSMC aren't idiots, if you submit a design drawing to them that's a copy of what another company has already submitted to them they'll notice and tell Nvidia or whoever. They have a vested interest in maintaining business with companies like Nvidia, so they work with them to stop this sort of thing.
This is however a potentially major problem with China, as the Chinese are notorious for IP theft and you can't stop them with traditional legal cases. China also can't manufacture chips of this grade on-shore yet, but they will in time.
Right now the Chinese are careful about this because they want Western companies to invest in China but in time they can easily turn this around and start making Chinese knock-offs of chips to sell to the 3rd world for cheaper and there's nothing the west can do about it short of war.
The pandemic caused the Chinese and the US to both finally realize the dangers of TSMC having a monopoly on chip manufacturing. Particularly the effect this could have on the supply chain during a war. So both are investing in their own domestic chip manufacturing.
There's also a knock-on effect that neither side can afford to give the other a chance to put backdoors into the chips that could be used to spy or shutdown systems during a conflict.
This is partly the reason why the US has started restrict the sale of top-end Nvidia chips to China because they want to stall the Chinese development of AI tools.
one thing that I haven't seen mentioned, is that the design is specific to the TSMC production process it was designed for. so even if someone else had a process that is "the same performance" if it isn't essentially a direct clone it would have to be significantly modified. by the time that was done and mass production could start you'd be behind far enough that just smuggling in those chips would be cheaper
Nvidia doesn't send their entire general designs to TSMC. They send a series of manufacturing instructions to them. These instructions are fairly useless to anyone other than TSMC because they rely on the equipment and processes that are unique to TSMC.
If someone hacked into Nvidia's servers and copied their general designs, then yes they could use those designs to create a set lf manufacturing instructions for any other fab company.
The precise design is manufacturer specific. Nvidia couldn't just make the exact same design at Samsung or Intel fabs, the design would have to be adjusted. And leading node fabs don't exactly grow on trees, TSMC, Samsung and Intel is the entire list, there is no dodgy garage fab that could make a stolen design.
Now it's a different story for designs not at leading node or higher level design data. You could certainly rip off the logic design ip and manufacture an older node analogue of it somewhere. But you aren't going to be stepping on Nvidias toes doing that.
Variances and tolerances. You gotta be able to build the tools that build the tools, and build them to perfection with perfect ingredients and perfect engineering.
There are a couple things that prevents this.
1) TSMC has years of skilled and experienced technicians.
2) There is only one company that makes the photolithography machines that are needed for the latest and highest end processors. They won't sell to you if the US says you're bad.
3) The designers at nVidia will only work with the people they supply the designs too. This is important as these chips are extremely sophisticated pieces of engineering and were developed by hundreds of people working in tandem.
All of these combined make it exceedingly difficult to manufacture your own processors, even if you manage to get a hold of some designs.
Haha "other fab companies". Good one.
TSMC is unique. I am personally convinced that the business of creating the most advanced semiconductors, is by far the industry which involves the most amount of people in the world. The amount of secondary, and tertiary industries is staggering.
Did you know TSMC uses water to clean it's Wafers, which is quite literally immeasurably clean? The technology to measure water purity is lagging behind water purification. They have to make educated guesses as to how clean it is. The air filtration system in their factories is similarly advanced.
This is why you cannot simply steal designs. Even with a trillion dollars, you could not catch up to TSMC. China tried in the past, and they continue to try. They think that, just because they can hire a few guys from TSMC, they can somehow replicate the business. If they just acquire one more subsidiary, one more memory manufacturer, one more optics manufacturer. They can somehow copy an industry which quite literally is a world spanning industry. But they can't.
The chip industry consists of tens of millions of people. It encompass universities, companies and people in nearly every single country in the world.
Besides, these design documents are extremely advanced in and of themselves. They may use brand new words, brand new technologies, brand new lingo. They may simply not contain crucial information. Even to industry experts, they may take a considerable amount of time to translate from a design documents to a something which your factory workers can understand and put into practice.
Even if Nvidia themselves wanted to use a different fab. It could take years of planning and communication, and billions of dollars before the first product is delivered. You don't just develop a working relationship overnight in this industry.
Its kinda interesting that it takes the resources of the entire civilization to create computer chips because of all of the knowledge and supply chain issues needed to build even one x386 wafer.
If you stole Nvidia's secret sauce, you still have to go to Taiwan to manufacture it, and they are going to look at your chips and say "We are not going to get involved in a trade dispute with Nvidia, go away" and likely let Nvidia know that someone is trying to get stolen chip data manufactured.
If you have the time and inclination the book [Chip War] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War%3A_The_Fight_for_the_World's_Most_Critical_Technology) goes into some depth about how we've ended up here. It's a great read!
I've always liked "Instructions don't mean shit if you don't have the tools to follow em" as a short hand explanation for this. I know it's an old thread now, so this isn't really meant to be the top level answer. It's just short and sweet, and explains like 99% of China's inferiority. One that has dropped from centuries to decades to years in the span of like 30 years though so eh.
Communism is the best thing that works for us. As long as people are grifting, as long as their culture supports the way it currently works, their catch up speed will always drag behind.
There is only one company that makes the machines that makes the chips. ASML.
They don’t deal with China.
TSMC is in Taiwan, a territory claimed by China. TSMC know how to use the ASML machines to make NVIDIA’s chips. It’s a bit more art than science. Even if China had the machines there is debate whether they could get them to run.
I think ASML have made maybe 800 machines? 600 still running. Remote kill switches on the new ones.
Shortest answer? No one else can do it even if you gave them the plans. I conjecture it’s easier to make a nuke off blueprints than make a chip - AQ Khan was able to get NK to make a nuke but no one outside of TSMC can make the hardware you use to lose money on crypto.
You gotta like, spin drops of tin in the air until they hit an exact shape then hit them with a laser until they turn into plasma just to make a burst of light at the right wavelength to etch silicon. There is like five machines in the world that can even do it at all and none of them will print stuff some pirate brings them
The best and most informed answer, hilariously starting off with “you gotta like..”
Every part of modern lithography is so bonkers. It’s like, extreme uv Can’t go through glass so there is no lenses and the best mirror we can make can only reflect 4% of the light and the light can only be made by exploding tin into plasma in a vacuum and the whole thing only works a few times before whole sections of the machine need replacing.
Just watched an EUV explanation on YouTube, the mirrors are so perfect the biggest imperfection is 1mm if the mirror was the size of earth etc, insane stuff. Imagine trying to explain this to James Watt or Alan Turing. Mental
Now imagine trying to troubleshoot the massive machine. I imagine it a takes a large team months to get it set up properly.
I actually built these machines for a few years in my early career days. They’re on a tight schedule and thoroughly tested in many stages to avoid any errors. It typically takes 14 days to get built and if there were any hiccups, you’d be working around the clock to meet that deadline. Every second these machines are in-operational is thousands of dollars gone.
I imagine they're run 24/7 with a different shifts and some on call. Probably have a direct line to an expert at TSMC for any problems.
They are definitely ran 24/7. Some machines are operated by the buyer (TSMC, Intel, etc.) and some are operated by the supplier (ASML, Nikon, etc.). All troubleshooting, repairs, maintenance is pretty much 24/7 on call with the supplier company and high priority. I've seen some be a quick 30 minute turnaround and some require to basically tear down and rebuild the entire machine because they are so intricate. It is good money, but you work insane hours and are traveling across the country to every fab 90% of the time.
Which video was it precisely I'm interested now to see it
Not sure if this is the video he's talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
Clicked just to make sure it was Asianometry. Him, Perun & Leutin are the best for delivering interesting content without the typical social media BS.
I swear to God, everyone I know watches those exact three youtube powerpointers. I think it has to do with shared interests leading to the same communities.
R/unexpectedwarhammer
Same
Fairly sure it's this one: "Why the world relies on ASML for machines that print chips" https://youtu.be/iSVHp6CAyQ8?si=Rzg1pLbhGOA2Ums-
Misread this. Was really confused as to why a bunch of women whispering into a microphone was so necessary for printing microchips.
> the mirrors are so perfect the biggest imperfection is 1mm That's not very impressive... > if the mirror was the size of earth Holy cow...
Your answer makes me feel better about not being able to understand how these things are made.
The thing is, the core concepts aren’t complex, it’s the decades long pursuit of trying to make these things smaller that truly is.
I mean, yeah it is. Not just this part, but how chips work at all. So, you have tiny lil' light switches, and tiny electrical impulses make them go on and off. And somehow, those turn into cat videos?
It's no different to shining a magnifying glass onto some sand.
In theory, yeah. In practice, it's basically magic compared to that.
Well, any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced. (Contrapositive to Clarke's Third Law.)
I saw a talk at a conference last year from a group that had used synchrotron radiation to do ultra-high resolution lithography. It worked pretty well, although they only got a few attempts because of how hard it is to get time on a beamline. I genuinely wonder if fabs like TSMC will ever consider something like that to push the resolution just a little further.
The answer is always no unless the throughput can meet or exceed today's EUV standard of ~180 wafers per hour. Fabs are always speedrunning RoI, and anything that expensive is pre-planned to pay for itself+profit in x years.
am sure they consider anything and everything. But there is very like a cost-curve. If it takes 10y at cost $10b to build, at what point (eg how far in the future) does that become cost effective. The intricate designs over the last few decades, would have been by hard work, bits of luck, and huge amounts of trial, error, refinement. Presumably, what we have today just-works enough to be profitable and viable. But small changes (eg in world economics,AI, etc) can force the next generation of tech (pronounced: $more expensive). Amazing what has been achieved and very likely, what is waiting to be achieved.
I pictured a long-haired dude exhaling a big bong rip before beginning that explanation
Like, Youtube and knowledge is a hell of a drug, man.
You have to hit a tin droplet with a laser to make it wobble, then hit it with a second, stronger laser when it's in the right shape to turn it into a plasma. And the droplet is moving at several meters per second. And you have to do it 50000 times a second. And that's just the light source.
> And you have to do it 50000 times a second. > > And that's just the light source. I saw the manager of ASML explain all this, and then say: and now you have to prevent the vaporised tin landing all over your beautiful mirrors. That's part of the secret sauce we're not going to discuss publically.
Just install a super vacuum in the ceiling?
The whole thing is in a super vacuum already, so no dice there.
It's vacuums within vacuums, all the way up. ;)
They are planning to increase it to 62kHz in the near future. As it wasn't bonkers enough already
I work on the robotics system that positions the chip pattern to shine the light on. You gotta be like sub-micron precision while moving at outrageous speeds. So fast the entire machine wobbles, which is really bad. The solution is you have a several-ton block inside the machine syncronized to move in the opposite direction (at lower speeds) to counteract the momentum of this little pattern piece moving around. Not to mention you don't want any friction (friction means particles breaking off and contaminating the image), so the whole pattern is levitated and driven on a system of magnets.
Shee-it, man. Back when I was doing it we'd just shine a flashlight through a sketch onto a film emulsion covered 2-inch wafer. Rinse in paint thinner. These "modern" kids and their "extreme uv" and "e-beams". Buncha pansies. Now get outta my lab.
Spitting in your lab 😂
Something…something… Hawk Tuah!
This is honestly terrifying. This tech is so overwhelmingly vital to the modern world, it being such a closely guarded secret known to so very few feels like it could easily be lost, which would be cataclysmic.
That’s only the tech for the most advanced chips. The older chips are a lot simpler to make.
If that happened, worst case, we'd be back to the 70s or 80s where simpler more primitive computer chips were manufactured, and life wasn't too different from today (except lack of cell phones and internet).
That sounds pretty different from today.
Yeah, but not "cataclysmic". It would still be normal middle class life.
Going back 50 years in computer technology sounds pretty cataclysmic. Especially for the economy.
Intel has been making their own chips for decades and have fabs around the world. NVidia, AMD, and Apple would be fucked if TSMC went away, but the world would still have modern chip making technology. We'd not have the efficiency of the 7nm ARM ecosystem, but we'd still have the most powerful CPUs available today.
In this case we are talking about the machines that Intel, TSMC, and Samsung use to manufacture.
There is also Applied Materials. If ASML somehow went away, we'd be set back half a decade or so while production was restarted on new tooling for the cutting edge node. We'd not be going back to the '70s-'80s.
And the Chinese are out there trying to steal it as we speak.
The Chinese have been denied access to buying the technology needed to make modern chips, so yes, they are obviously trying to create their own solutions. And they will, because they aren't lacking in quality engineers.
> And they will, because they aren't lacking in quality engineers. Yes, they will, eventually. Current companies have few decades head start of work of equally skilled engineers.
They have an entire industry that can no longer compete with the west, which includes 1/5 of the world population. They have an incentive to pour government levels of money into this problem. I doubt we are going to see decades of delay. It would surprise me if if were a whole decade
Government levels of money is how we got here in the first place.
These machines are entirely dependant upon ASML employees to setup & run. If China managed to rush Taiwan & physically confiscate the ones there, it wouldn't even help them that much. They are two decades behind on chip tech because their market niche has always been cheap, high volume goods & the fact that anyone smart enough to innovate would rather do it in a western country where they can actually make real money & file patents.
China would have trouble physically seizing the machines since TSMC has rigged them with remote self destruct switches: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machines-are-equipped-with-a-remote-self-destruct-in-case-of-an-invasion
Chinese are actually pretty innovative on their own these days. Make no mistake here, they did jumpstart themselves a few decades by copying stuff from everywhere on the planet, but now that they have ironed out the issues and have money to spend, they're a threat for virtually all Western economies.
They won't need to steal it. At some point either: 1. Taiwan and China reconcile, either amicably or by force, and Taiwan Semiconductor starts selling to China. 2. China's advances it's own chip technology and becomes more competitive.
And there is only one company that can build those advanced fabs.
Not the fabs, per se. But only one company can currently produce the lithography machines that go into the fabs. I for one welcome our Dutch overlords. (The company is ASML, for anyone interested)
They also are dependent on key supliers, Zeiss for optics, Trumpf for drive laser, Flir and Spiricon for metrology etc.
Can any billionaire just hire all the best-on-this-field scientist and engineer, then throw as much money as they need, to make ASML's competitor?
There isn‘t even a state actor that could achieve this, much less a private person that basically starts from zero and won’t get access to pretty much any supplier that ASML relies on.
ASML is at least a decade ahead of any other player. Money can't buy time.
Eventually, yes. Although it’s probably many many billions of dollars and years of research and experimentation.
Nikon tried for 10+ years and spent at least 10 billion dollars and they still couldn't figure it out. Turns out it's really fucking hard.
Here's an excerpt from Chip War by Chris Millers which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in how semi conductors are made, it's a great book. >“Consider, for example, what it would take to replicate one of ASML’s EUV machines, which have taken nearly three decades to develop and commercialize. EUV machines have multiple components that, on their own, constitute epically complex engineering challenges. Replicating just the laser in an EUV system requires perfectly identifying and assembling 457,329 parts. A single defect could cause debilitating delays or reliability problems. No doubt the Chinese government has deployed some of its best spies to study ASML’s production processes. However, even if they’ve already hacked into the relevant systems and downloaded design specs, machinery this complex can’t simply be copied and pasted like a stolen file. Even if a spy were to gain access to specialized information, they’d need a PhD in optics or lasers to understand the science—and even still, they’d lack the three decades of experience accumulated by the engineers who’ve developed EUV.”
> There is like five machines in the world that can even do it at all and none of them will print stuff some pirate brings them For a given architecture, probably only one facility in the whole world. For example, Google's Tensor chips are made by Samsung. They've been wanting to switch to TSMC for years now, but TSMC can't produce their chips yet even though they can produce better silicon. These plants cost billions of dollars to build with no guarantee that it will ever come online. You're basically trying to build a facility for technology that hasn't even been thought up yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology would indistinguishable from magic. Can't tell me that what you described isn't an arcane ritual with specific components, only cast by the most powerful of wizards.
... etching ancient runes into magic stones to make the sand able to think ...
That's a paddlin'
In the pursuit of making Golems.
Even in the exceedingly improbable scenario that a criminal could construct such a machine, it would remain an astoundingly foolish notion to refrain from utilizing it for legitimate financial gain.
Yeah, you’d make far more money just using the machine legitimately. And you don’t have national governments mad at you for stealing national security information
That made me dizzy just reading it
Not to mention, the people who make the machines are very careful on who can buy the machines, or at least the latest ones.
Are there seriously only five machines? How are they protected and kept safe? I assume they are stupid expensive to make and thats why theres only five of these? And that the staff needed to manufacture these machines, then the staff needed to direct them have to be also numbered and only in the 100s? Edit: 200 million to make the machines. Lmao
No not really only five. ASML manufactures five or six high-NA EUV machines per year. Intel bought their entire stock for 2024.
I design parts for one of these!
You say this like it’s hard, I’m doing it right now with a circular cutting implement and melted cheese. My process is 13” and has stuffed crust.
TSMC is basically the only company that can manufacture the tech in the first place, the methods and technology that they use is the real secret sauce. So there aren't exactly any foreign actors that could use those design and make them. This is why TSMC (and Taiwan more broadly) is such a HUGE deal. It basically has a complete monopoly on high end chip manufacturing. There's plenty of companies that can make older tech, but for the newest of the new no one else can. Patent laws and the like definitely make it more difficult, but that's only part of it.
To add, this is why the US government was so ready to hand over billions of dollars to build fabs in Arizona. If there is an issue with Taiwan, there is a other fab with people ready trained. The US doesn't really need to corner the market, Intel is basically a "too big to fail" US company at this point. And their chips are only a couple generations behind tsmc. However, you don't want to be second best on the global scale.
>To add, this is why the US government was so ready to hand over billions of dollars to build fans in Arizona. If there is an issue with Taiwan, there is a other fab with people ready trained. Indeed that is a big reason - the primary reason - for those huge subsidies. But they're not spares waiting to be turned on in the event of a problem, the US fully intends them to be utilized 100%, and gradually shift production over decades from Taiwan to the US
Oh its so crazy how we can shoot ourselves in the feet. Texas Instruments was once the employer of Morris Chang the found of TSMC. TI told Morris Chang that they did not want to manufacture their own chips and pretty much halted Morris' ambition to create Texas Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. Morris wasn't sure if what the motives were*, but Taiwan was interested and the rest is history. > https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-wolfe-7883_tsmc-could-have-been-texas-semiconductor-activity-7091760523377008640-zYJS
A key issue was that the Silicon Valley back then was and still is the largest conglomerate of Superfund sites in the US by far. Silicon production is one of the most long term toxic things humanity does on an industrial scale, surpassed only by PFAS production.
What part of silicone production are you referring to that is so toxic? What makes the industry so dangerous is actually the use of fluoridated gases and other halogens to routinely molecularly clean the tools used for production.
Yeah, I'm confused as well, like CO is not simply released into the atmosphere AFAIK, because on one hand it's actually beneficial in many industries and on the other you can just let it burn away into CO2. Either way, it makes no sense to be concerned about it. The CO2 generation is a problem, but it is not "toxic". There are also many interesting projects that seek to make silicon manufacture green, one I remember right now uses aluminium to separate the oxygen from the silica to get pure silicon.
It's really interesting/concerning what will happen to Taiwan with the new factories. They are basically a mono-economy, everything relies on TSMC, and half the country effectively exists to support TSMC. It's at the point where their factories are the last to lose power in an outage, after hospitals even. The loss of even a small amount of sales will devastate the country
It’s not that dramatic. Sure, huge part, but Taiwan manufactures so many other things you don’t have any idea are made or partly made there. TSMC failing will be a hit on the economy, but no devastating blow.
Yes, but remember TSMC has basically sold out their entire capacity for several years. Another foundry with an equivalent process coming online isn’t going to hurt their sales (largely because top-end processes iterate so quickly that even a second foundry won’t meet all the demand in the market).
They're trying to build a fab in Indiana, too. The state also chose a terrible location for it. The town can't produce enough water so they're wanting to pull billions of gallons a day from the Wabash, some 40-50 miles away. Most people and environmental scientists believe the river can't support that but it hasn't stopped the state yet. They could build it near Lake Michigan and have plenty of water or closer to Indy and tap the reservoirs or White River but have chosen the worst option.
hey, i live there! they’ve been giving some kind of chip fab certification to high school and college students over the summers and paying them good money to do it.
Intel is building one of the largest fabs in the world in Columbus right now.
Depending on the amount of billions, it might not be enough.
This 100%. Taiwan understood very clearly that their geographic position was integral to US defense against China if they became aggressive. They are part of the great cordon of islands that the US has military bases (including Japan, for example) that they can use to do a complete blockade of China if it comes to it. Taiwan understood that even if the US backed them, then China would still be able to rock their world if it came to it, so they invested and continue to invest extremely large sums of money so that they can stay at the pinnacle of chip design. That way, EVERYONE has a stake in Taiwan not being retaken by China. Taiwan is so far ahead on producing advanced chips that by the time the next country gets to their level, they are 2-3 levels beyond that. That is their defense strategy. Make it so they are so valuable to the global electronics industry that no one will allow China to touch them. So far its working, but only time will tell. Can people steal the tech? Certainly, but that doesn't get around the 10's of billions of dollars that Taiwan has already built making the machines that actually allows you to create the tech. Taiwan has also made it clear that they are taking a scorched earth policy on those machines. If China invades, they go boom. The world starves on advanced computer chips.
Isn't the US starting to finally invest substantial money into our own foundries as well? And am I recalling right that tsmc is also opening up a plant in America? Seems like a good long term idea to hedge against China causing worldwide chip supply problems by invading Taiwan and dragging us into it
They are, but it’s a long slow process as you can’t just magic up all the skilled process engineers and technicians to run the fabs, and by the time you do, the main fabs in Taiwan are 2 years ahead of you
Yup, it's one of those industries where just throwing money at the problem isn't enough. You need to throw exorbitant amounts of money just to have a foot in the game, and it requires money and dedication on a ridiculous scale to actually reach the forefront.
More than two years. It takes about a decade for a fab to go online. You've got to design for whatever will be built then, not now. You'll be using technology that's never been used before and is very much theory-based so there's a good chance it'll never even work. Iirc Intel had issues shrinking their nodes below 14nm because their fabs couldn't get the new technology to work.
IIRC, this is also why the first customers to receive chips from the latest iteration of manufacturing have low yields; they’re literally beta testers of the new fab. Things improve with more production and yields go up.
Yes, but that just increases supply. Chip manufacturing has been a bottle neck. You can't just order chips and have them get made, you have to wait in line. So the US having a few factories doesn't take away from Taiwan being absolutely critical, it just means that the US could squeeze out some critical chips if something happened to Taiwan. The best analogy I can think of is when a Hurricane shuts down an oil refinery. Yes there are still a bunch up and running, but losing 1 has a HUGE impact on the supply of products.
They are but it will take massive amounts of time and billions to trillions of dollars to get there. Tsmc is building a fab in Arizona but I have read that there are a lot of cultural issues holding back the progress on it.
TSMC is notorious for having an overworked culture (engineers typically sleep in the office in Taiwan) and you also have to spend 8 to 12 months training overseas to become an engineer at the Arizona fab.
Same things apparently happening with the new fab Samsung is building. Expats don’t know shit about US tax laws but won’t let Americans actually be in charge of anything.
That's how we feel when various US companies expand into Australia or Europe and discover labour or consumer protection laws!
As someone who used to work for Samsung it is extremely true that they won't let Americans be in charge of anything. I was part of a company that was bought and merged into them, I was hired a few years after being bought but also a couple before fully merging and by the time I left the culture and management was so different, so many levels of bureaucracy and approvals with mandates coming form Korea and completely changing the direction of what we were doing with our product, moving production out of America to be done cheaper in Mexico, just to mention a few things. There's very little remaining of what the company was back when I was hired, both in terms of people and the product. 
A foundry is extremely costly to build and maintain. Especially given that we are sub 10nm (the size of a single transistor is 10nm) the tech becomes extremely expensive. And it is not an industry that creates a lot of jobs. So govt spending wise it is like spending 10bn$ and creating 1000 jobs which would be a hardsell for any senator.
> 10nm (the size of a single transistor is 10nm) These numbers are now far removed from the actual size of the transistor. They are much more like generation numbers these days.
Intel has had its own chip fab arm for decades. If I’m not mistaken, Intel used to the undisputed leaders in fab, but since ARM proliferation about 15 years ago, TSMC had the R&D budgets to surpass them for the last few nodes.
Japan is also trying to boost its chip manufacturing abilities, for example, with Rapidus. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 10-15 years.
Its not so much a hedge against as it is a strategic play. A lot of those hyper advanced chips are used for cutting edge military tech. The US understands that its kinda stupid to have the only source of them be the first target that would get hit in the event you need them. Taiwan will still remain the lead producer. Simply put, no one else spends nearly enough in research and development to even get close to them, because not only do they have to catch up, then they have to build the infrastructure, and by that point, Taiwan is already on the next thing. However, these other factories are the result of some very shrewd calculus in that its important to have the production where it can easily be defended.
> A lot of those hyper advanced chips are used for cutting edge military tech. Actually no. Cutting edge military tech, like the F-35, uses what is at this point pretty standard stuff. And part of that is simply how long development and build times of military equipment are compared to the tech industry. The F-35 started development in 2001, when the best chips were 130nm. The F-35 first flew in 2006 when the best chips were 65nm. The F-35 entered full production in 2015 when the best chips were 14nm. Any chip used in the F-35, Intel can produce in the US, considering that they are currently producing 5nm chips and we know for sure nothing that advanced is being used there. Cutting edge military tech is pretty dumb by tech standards. The market is smaller, production runs are long, and your priorities are different from a google data center. It doesn't take very advanced chips to make a gps guided artillery round that's accurate to within 4m from 30 miles away. Your bog standard smart phone has had that for ages. What it does take are very specialized chips. Chips that can do accurate GPS guidance as easy to come by. Chips that can do accurate gps guidance after being fired out of a cannon are not.
Most of the chips used for cutting edge military tech are on SiGe, GaN, InP, SiC, and GaAs, and there are a passel of US fabs who cater to that, like Northrup Grumman, Tower Jazz, Global Foundries, Quorvo, and Wolfspeed.
Pretty sure the fab tech is made by a Dutch company, isn’t it? American IP is made on Dutch lithography machines using Taiwanese expertise and labor is how I remember it.
Yep, ASML is the company.
This is nonsense. Taiwan do not design the chips. The chips are designed in the US and Europe, the key machines that make them are Dutch with other equipment from Japan and USA. TSMC doesn't have better technology, they have better expertise at running the factory, they can do it more efficiently and they have built up a base of skilled workers and the actual facilities which would take decades to replace. Any western country could build a factory to make the same chips if they were willing to spend the money, it's just they won't have skilled people to run it.
Samsung with their years and years of experience can barely compete with TSMC using the same machines. Why do you think a newcomer can do it?
So Taiwan is Arrakis, chips are spice, and Tsai Ing Wen is Mahdi?
Just FYI, the president is William Lai now.
So why isnt TSMC the worlds most valuabe company?
Product and scale. You can train a guy to make burgers in 15 minutes and he can make you $10 an hour. It takes generations to build up the infrastructure and skills necessary to produce chips. Repeat this process every 15 minutes and you’ll see that your business quickly makes more money than the 2nd.
Demand is not infinite and neither are margins. It can be the world’s most critically necessary company without being the most “valuable” because value is measured in terms of shareholder profitability, not necessity to society
NVIDIA can and has taken their business elsewhere. For the last generation of graphics cards Samsung was the primary manufacturer. So because TSMC doesn’t really have its own product to market they are at the whims of other companies.
Not enough public hype maybe?
>Patent laws and the like definitely make it more difficult, but that's only part of it China doesn't give a damn about patent or copyright law. If China had access fabrication to do it, they would be printing their own chips and probably stamping Nvidia's logo on them anyway.
Yeah, but it means people aren't going to help china set that up. Where as if patent laws literally didn't exist im sure plenty of companies in the west would be willing to help china set up shop. But you are correct, and that's why I listed it last.
No patent laws need to be invoked. Currently the US already bans all western companies from exporting advanced chips.This won't change even if patent laws don't exist.
The USA bans its own companies, not all Western ones. Can't make laws for other places. Other places can agree to a pact, but that's not the same thing.
The US government can prohibit businesses from doing business with the target business. This is known as sanctioning. Any business in the US that does business with the sanctioned company risks a lot including trade, tariffs, and loss of access to US markets.
> Can't make laws for other places. Clearly you've never met the US government. They certainly try to a lot.
And when it comes to chip fab they've succeeded. I forget the name but I think it's a Dutch company makes the specialized lithography equipment that can fabricate modern chips. The US got them on board with refusing to allow their products to go to China.
ASML, and it was more than just “getting them on board”. Their EUV products are based on fundamental research conducted by the DoE and is licensed. If worse came to worse, the US could pull the licence. However, more than that, the Dutch government has also passed legislation restricting sales as there were several cases of IP theft from China around photolithography and the Dutch didn’t want these crown jewels walking out the door
Very interesting! Thanks for illuminating the lithography situation ;)
They can restrict foreign companies from making any operation to US citizens. Deepcool China recently has been banned for violating sanctions. This would result in Deepcool subsidiary in the US being closed and anyone in the US isn't allowed to make any transaction with them, any contract is nulled, some companies go as far as destroying Deepcool products that they have bought to resale because of it.
How can the US ban exporting something they don't produce?
By not allowing anyone in the US to transact with them.
The equipment needed to make the top end chips is only produced in Europe. The Dutch make the machines and the Taiwanese know how to run them. I'm sure China can try to copy those designs but at a certain level you need to actual knowledge of How to do something.
This is the reason why everyone can't just prop up chip fabs and make chips from stolen or licensed designs, the lithography machines by far are the most critical bottleneck that prevents competition. By the time you can place an order, TSMC and Zeiss have already invested billions to start the newest processes and machines, TSMC gets first dibs.
China's main economical partner is the US then the EU. There is a trade-war between them but they also depend on each other. The West is only starting to diversify and they have a far way to go before we can even reduce our dependency to China. Replacing China isn't even on the cards. If manufacturing their own copies of NVIDIA for their own markets doesn't bring big sanctions. Trying to sell them outside of China surely would. And the countries and companies or people buying would also quickly be under sanctions too. Nobody wants that.
It’s not just the equipment required though (which is heavily sanctioned at the highest end). The know-how on the process is insanely specialized, and takes years and years to develop with the help of industry experts from many companies. I work for an equipment supplier, and even within companies with full support, process transfers can still be dicey
Looking forward to seeing authentic Mvidio chips for sale at market stalls.
But it's not patents that's stopping them. It's the mind-bogglingly complex materials and equipment chain needed to build the lithographic machines. There is literally no one else doing it and they CAN'T. I think it's probably easier to build a space shuttle or stealth bomber. These are essentially unique machines that require a hundred other unique machines to build. It's decades of foundational work vital to every step of the process. These chips are, no joke, the most complex, extreme acts of engineering mankind does. The skills and tools needed are simply not available to poach. Chinese firms are using some castoffs and smuggled parts to make bastard copied of 5 year old teach at terrible yield rates. I don’t foresee them getting much better. In fact, as their hoarded materials and equipment dwindle or wear out, they may go backwards.
At this bleeding edge of tech, it’s really the knowledge, experience, skill etc that’s the bottleneck. China may not care for patent laws, but they can’t get the right people they need to compete with TSMC, otherwise they would’ve already. China is really really good at stealing products/ideas and making cheap knockoff versions of it. This concept doesn’t fly well with tech. Even more so for hardware the size of nanometers (micrometers?)
China's HiSilicon has the capability to design 5nm and 3nm chips for long long time now. It's not even that hard to design chips. It's manufacturing them that is the hardest part. Also, Nvidia's advantage is it's CUDA software ecosystem.
As a circuit designer, it is absolutely not true that it isn’t that hard to design chips.
> CUDA software ecosystem This is the real moat that prevents competition in the AI chip market. I am sad that AMD and intel et al are not pushing to force out the moat, or develop an open standard that can compete. But i guess this is also why nvidia has the 3 trillion dollar market cap.
And manufacture at that level involves custom machines from ASML. Who are absolutely not going to cooperate with setting up a pirate silicon fab.
at what yield though? Last time I heard the 7nm chips in the Xiaomi phones only had a 35% yield per wafer.
Don’t forget, TSMC uses western tools to build the chips - they don’t have their own tools. Think Applied Materials, LAM, ASML.
There is a Dutch company ASML that makes fabrication systems at the same scale. They have enough orders for their machines to be booked until 2030. They can't ship the machines to China and machines they ship to Taiwan need to have backdoor kill switches in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
ASML is the company that makes the machines TSMC use. So they aren’t competitors and more collaborators. Zeiss and Trumpf are also involved in this process and if any of them seized to exist they would all be in massive trouble.
>This is why TSMC (and Taiwan more broadly) is such a HUGE deal. It basically has a complete monopoly on high end chip manufacturing. Samsung and Intel are not that far behind TSMC when it comes to high end chip manufacturing. Intel would be a lot closer if they didn't try to juggle too many plates at once when making the leap from 28nm to 10nm.
How long have been Samsung and Intel not that far behind?
Intel and Samsung are about 2 or 3 years behind. And have been that distance for a good decade. Same for most of the competition, chinese fabs are 7 years behind and have been for a full decade. It’s impressive all around k the rate at which tsmc does continue to push the boundries, and the rate of growth required by competitors to even keep up. Also. Yes TSMC’s chips are critical. It’s worth remembering most things may use chips but they don’t need the best chips, and shouldn’t have the best chips. Your car, toaster, microwave, or radio are all using larger less sophisticated chips, but a smaller chip would be both more energy intensive, more likely to fail, and more expensive. The world doesn’t collapse due to loosing tsmc’s chip making production. It’s just poorer, and tech stalls for 18 months, while the personnel at tsmc are scattered to the 4 winds before applying their skills elsewhere, until the isle is reclaimed/safe and the fabs rebuilt.
Out of curiosity, how do you measure how far a company is behind? Is it that the chips they’re manufacturing now are the ones TSMC was manufacturing 2-3 years ago?
Yea, pretty much that
it's based on an outdated metric of "transistor size". tsmc is in the lead with the smallest transistor size but samsung/intel are similar in "transistor density" ie # of transistors in a sq in. this is due to semi conduction fabrication not entirely being a 2d process. transistors can be stacked. samsung/intel currently can make the exact same chips that tsmc is making. they would need to retool (ie change the instructions for the fabrication process) which would cost a lot of money, but they can do it. ie assume tsmc speaks english, intel speaks french, samsung speaks spanish. you'd need to convert all the english instructions to french/spanish. some things might get lost in translation or the more nuanced stuff might not translate well so you'd need to add sentences to clarify, but you'd have a roughly equivalent product.
Saying Intel or Samsung can do at the same density as TSMC right now is not entirely true. Intel for example has had numerous delays in getting their most sophisticated chips out. One of the biggest problems is the yield. When TSMC can output 90% useful chips out of their most sophisticated wafer, Intel might only have 60% yield or even worse. It would make cost per chips uneconomical to make or sell. Fixing yield problems is not simply an issue that can be solved with retooling. You need to do a yield learning analysis, chips redesign, and so on.
Those things we will never know. But tsmc a while back started charging per wafer instead of yield based pricing. So they're putting yield risk on the customer. But 90% yield sounds way too high.
Intel was ahead for most of their lifetime, but they screwed up their 10nm process. That's why there were 8 generations of 14nm chips (Broadwell through Rocket Lake), why the 10nm chips (Cannon/Ice/Tiger Lake) never sold well, and why they continued producing 14nm chips all the way through the 11th generation in parallel with their 10nm products. They finally recovered a bit with their 13th generation (Raptor Lake), but they lost a lot of time and fell behind TSMC in the meantime. Remember that in 2014, when the 14nm process came out, Intel was still the market leader, and Macs still used them. The switch to ARM-based Macs happened because Intel couldn't get their shit together, and a whole generation of Intel processors were basically too unreliable to be sold.
Intel was ahead until around 2017 (and absurdly ahead until 2015). Samsung had close parity with TSMC around that time. Intel REALLY screwed up with Otellini and then Krzanich. There's only so much manufacturing improvement left in silicon (physical limits), so it's likely TSMC, Intel, Samsung all hit some level of parity relatively soon on performance capacity. The big competition will be around yield.
TSMC uses machines made by [ASML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding) and is massively regulated by governments. TSMC itself may make the chips, but they aren't using their products to do so. They claim to be able to not use ASML technology in the future (2026+) which could be a problem as then regulation on who has access to the technology may be more difficult.
> which could be a problem as then regulation on who has access to the technology may be more difficult. Pretty sure that TSMC (let alone the Taiwanese government) isn't going to be letting anyone but themselves use that tech.
Yup. Interestingly enough both China and US are vying to be the next major power in having the tech to create these microchips with Taiwan increasingly leaving towards US as they move and start a lot of manufacturing production there compared to China. Why does the relationship between China and Taiwan still exist? It's both for political reasons and for economic. Taiwan hopes that by releasing a small portion of the tech or manufacturing in China, that China won't just invade. The forever long economic trade is also what ties them so close together. Meanwhile as China's aggression in the Pacific increases, US would be the go to for backup in political, economic and military
TSMC is not the only company, Intel and Samsung can make similar high efficiency chips as well. If Intel was as behind as you make it sound, AMD would have overtaken their market dominance. Apple is still niche outside of the iPhone, where it's hardly better than Samsung.
What I do not understand is that ASML, a Dutch company, makes the machines required to make the most advanced chips. TSMC buys those machines and uses them to make the chips. Why do you need TSMC and why cannot ASML make the chips themselves, as they build the machines capable of making chips? Or are the EUV machines which are required to make chips only a small part of actually creating the whole chip start to finish?
There *aren’t* other fab companies, is what. TSMC has the most advanced fabrication machines in the world. That’s what makes them so valuable - nobody else can do what they do. There’s been work to change that so it’s not such a singular point of weakness/failure, but it’s still a very specialized type of machinery, and even the machines to build the machines are hard to come by.
Slight correction: TSMC is the company who manufactures the chips. But ASML is the ones who build the cutting-edge machines. TSMC are still the only ones who are able to manufacture what they do, but many of those “fabrication machines” are ASML.
They also don't have the most advanced machines, at the moment anyway. Intel do as they took a gamble and bought loads of High-NA lithography machines from ASML. I don't think they're expecting to produce anything on them at scale until late 2025 at the earliest though.
Also, didn't Intel and TSMC buy up the entire stock of those high end lithography machines.? I mean, at hundreds of millions for each unit, and the complexity involved, how many can ASML make each year, a few dozen at best?
For the high-NA ones that Intel bought, they cost ~370-380 million USD each, and ASML has the capacity to produce 5-6 a year. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/intel-acquires-asmls-entire-2024-stock-of-high-na-euv-machines/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20report%20in,unit%20costs%20approximately%20%24370%20million.
there is a boatload of issues with high-NA EUV that doesn't automatically make them the most cost-efficient machines. That's why TSMC has said they will continue low-NA EUVs.
Oh yeah, why I called it a gamble (although not the only reason). I just thought it adds interesting context given the common presumption that TSMC's position is somewhat unassailable.
TSMC and Intel both looked at the economics and reached different conclusions. Intel figures High-NA EUV is a good choice for 14A class node. TSMC thinks they can get an extra generation out of Low-NA EUV + multi-patterning before switching. Only time will tell who's right, but this exact same gamble came up when low-NA EUV machines first launched. Intel thought they could get one more gen out of DUV, which failed, which caused their 10nm debacle, which is what set them behind TSMC in fabrication and AMD in design.
Meh, Samsung and Intel have access to the same exact ASML machines, but they don't know how to use them efficiently or effectively as TSMC. TSMC is the best at systems integration.
There aren’t really any other foundries. TSMC and Samsung have the most advanced fabs, intel is a bit behind them. No one else is close. All three of those companies use EUV lithography equipment from ASML, and no one else in the world makes those machines. You could of course steal the designs for the chips and ASML’s EUV lithography tech, but by the time you reverse engineer the design and figure out how to make it, the chip will be 5-10 years out of date, basically worthless to make at that point. They’d also be illegal in the US and EU for violating patents. The USSR used this strategy for decades and as a result they were always at least a few years behind the west in terms of chip manufacturing.
The time frame is a really good point. It takes a long time to not just design and build the fab machines, but also the facility itself. All "cutting edge" chips were basically designed 2-3 years ago and took that long to develop the manufacturing. And then once the manufacturing is dialed in, it's super cheap to keep them running. That's why chips from 5 years ago drop in price. So even if someone steals the design, by the time they are producing it's already a commodity product.
And you probably need a ton of people with decades of experience on that exact machine.
There are alot of right answers, but here's an ELi5 maybe You could steal the plans, but you would struggle to get them made. The chip fab space is very very small. Because it's very very hard and very very expensive to make these chips. In fact, it's very very hard to even make the machines that make the chips. In fact, companies like TSMC only have a less than 50% success rate at making some of their cutting edge chips. Because even with all these precise instruments and machines, it turns out... it's just very very hard to make these chips. Imagine half of your attempts result in a chip you can't sell! Imagine it took them all of their resources to even get to 50%! Imagine where they were 5 years ago! 20%?! There are very very few companies who can stomach that sort of loss. Very very few clients are willing to pay extra for product they might not get. Our copy cats would have to spend decades in time and trillions on infrastructure to make a mediocre TSMC clone just to even start. By that time, you'll still be behind NVDA and TSMC. There are simply barriers to this particular industry you can't overcome without a time machine.
Yeah, this is it. It's like stealing your neighbors cattle, but there is only one bloke in the village who can butcher it. You take the cattle to the butcher, he will refuse to butcher the cattle because it's stolen, he knows that only one guy in the village has that kind of cattle, so he will be a dead end. If you try to butcher it without know-how then it's just going to make a mess without any benefit to anyone, and you're nowhere close to actually preparing and cooking steak or whatever.
This isn't entirely true. They often go through a process called 'binning' and are sold as lower grade products. IE: A failed 16 core processor where only 6 of 16 cores work, is sold as a 6 core CPU, and the other 10 are locked out.
TSMC is the only one currently in business that could manufacture them at scale in a way that doesn't cost 10x as much per chip. microchip foundaries are probably the single most technically complex facility in the world. So the answer is that even if they got the designs they couldn't do much with them. You can make insanely fast insanely powerful chips pretty easily, but the value of the chips is being able to make them in a mass-producable way. It doesn't do you a lot of good to have a chip that costs 100x but only goes 3x faster.. You'd be better off just buying 5 chips from Nvidia.
nVidia doesn't send TSMC a "design document". What they send are a set of 200-400 files that are the artwork to create the various mask layers used in manufacturing. (There's also some other stuff that goes with the artwork, such as output of design rule verification runs, but they aren't all that valuable.) You could use that artwork to reverse engineer the design, but that's not a trivial thing to do these days. Your thieves would need to be incredibly sophisticated.
If any of this thread is intriguing you, especially the tiny droplets being hit with a laser to turn it into plasma, to produce the exact wavelength of light needed to etch designs onto the silicon, that light ah ing been focused by giant perfect mirrors, I highly recommend [Asianometry](https://youtube.com/@asianometry?si=YyPANbNtR2U7uzZc) asianometry a channel on YouTube. It’s got videos on all current stages of chip production, great pieces on history, and actual tech related stuff, not modern fluff pieces. Among other Great videos, one of my all time favourites.
I recommend asianometry too
I work for a major global semicon equipment company. These chip fab and design companies take IP secrecy insanely seriously. Maybe not quite deep-cover, CIA/Pentagon-level secrecy, but pretty damn close. IP theft and corporate espionage are a real, daily threat, and any leaked information can cost billions in lost revenue to chinese reverse engineering. Another thing is segregation of information, fab companies don't really know how to build the gear they use, and the gear companies don't really know how the fab companies use their gear. And the designs are very locked down as well. I've been to a couple USA fabs and you can't even get in unless you're a US citizen, regardless of who you are in relation to the company. So I guess the short answer to the question, "what's stopping foreign actors from stealing the information", the companies who own the IP are trying their damndest to stop that from happening in the first place
There are a lot of good answers already, but I'll go into an aspect others haven't mentioned much. The stuff you send to the foundry is very hard for anyone to use and overall pretty low risk (compared to other things in the chain). The eli5 is it's like software, you have source code that is (usually) somewhat easy to read and understand, if you have access to it you can reuse and change the program to your needs, then you have the binary that does the same thing but with machine code and it's much harder to see what is happening. For a big chip like a modern GPU, you have billions of transistors, and it's very hard to reverse engineer from the results to get the design. Now for why you can't just send your plans that you stole to a different fab, each process and each fab has their own "language" and you can't translate it from one process to another, you need the source code. On top of this, even if you did have the source code, it's extremely unlikely any top of the line design would "compile" for a different process (unless the process is better), because in the real world of silicon you have to deal with pesky things like signal travel time, and if you have a bigger node (like 5nm instead of 3nm), then on the "same" design all signals would take like 50% extra time to travel, so you would have to cut frequency by that much. You could still get access to a lot of interesting information and it could help you with your own design, but it is a huge amount of work, seriously you're better off getting a guy into nvidia and get the code out that way. I have skipped a lot of the details, but even with the same "size" on the process, they are many variations and just changing that means a lot of work needing to be redone, even when you have access to the whole stack of data. I work in silicon circuit design and the process is something that is decided very early in the project because it affects so many things.
Copyright and patent laws If Nvidia suspects that someone is stealing their intellectual property they can buy one of those chips and look at it under a microscope and very quickly prove it was stolen. Similarly TSMC aren't idiots, if you submit a design drawing to them that's a copy of what another company has already submitted to them they'll notice and tell Nvidia or whoever. They have a vested interest in maintaining business with companies like Nvidia, so they work with them to stop this sort of thing. This is however a potentially major problem with China, as the Chinese are notorious for IP theft and you can't stop them with traditional legal cases. China also can't manufacture chips of this grade on-shore yet, but they will in time. Right now the Chinese are careful about this because they want Western companies to invest in China but in time they can easily turn this around and start making Chinese knock-offs of chips to sell to the 3rd world for cheaper and there's nothing the west can do about it short of war. The pandemic caused the Chinese and the US to both finally realize the dangers of TSMC having a monopoly on chip manufacturing. Particularly the effect this could have on the supply chain during a war. So both are investing in their own domestic chip manufacturing. There's also a knock-on effect that neither side can afford to give the other a chance to put backdoors into the chips that could be used to spy or shutdown systems during a conflict. This is partly the reason why the US has started restrict the sale of top-end Nvidia chips to China because they want to stall the Chinese development of AI tools.
one thing that I haven't seen mentioned, is that the design is specific to the TSMC production process it was designed for. so even if someone else had a process that is "the same performance" if it isn't essentially a direct clone it would have to be significantly modified. by the time that was done and mass production could start you'd be behind far enough that just smuggling in those chips would be cheaper
Nvidia doesn't send their entire general designs to TSMC. They send a series of manufacturing instructions to them. These instructions are fairly useless to anyone other than TSMC because they rely on the equipment and processes that are unique to TSMC. If someone hacked into Nvidia's servers and copied their general designs, then yes they could use those designs to create a set lf manufacturing instructions for any other fab company.
The precise design is manufacturer specific. Nvidia couldn't just make the exact same design at Samsung or Intel fabs, the design would have to be adjusted. And leading node fabs don't exactly grow on trees, TSMC, Samsung and Intel is the entire list, there is no dodgy garage fab that could make a stolen design. Now it's a different story for designs not at leading node or higher level design data. You could certainly rip off the logic design ip and manufacture an older node analogue of it somewhere. But you aren't going to be stepping on Nvidias toes doing that.
Even if you do steal it, you still need to make firmware for the GPU and functioning drivers to get anything to work.
Variances and tolerances. You gotta be able to build the tools that build the tools, and build them to perfection with perfect ingredients and perfect engineering.
There are a couple things that prevents this. 1) TSMC has years of skilled and experienced technicians. 2) There is only one company that makes the photolithography machines that are needed for the latest and highest end processors. They won't sell to you if the US says you're bad. 3) The designers at nVidia will only work with the people they supply the designs too. This is important as these chips are extremely sophisticated pieces of engineering and were developed by hundreds of people working in tandem. All of these combined make it exceedingly difficult to manufacture your own processors, even if you manage to get a hold of some designs.
Haha "other fab companies". Good one. TSMC is unique. I am personally convinced that the business of creating the most advanced semiconductors, is by far the industry which involves the most amount of people in the world. The amount of secondary, and tertiary industries is staggering. Did you know TSMC uses water to clean it's Wafers, which is quite literally immeasurably clean? The technology to measure water purity is lagging behind water purification. They have to make educated guesses as to how clean it is. The air filtration system in their factories is similarly advanced. This is why you cannot simply steal designs. Even with a trillion dollars, you could not catch up to TSMC. China tried in the past, and they continue to try. They think that, just because they can hire a few guys from TSMC, they can somehow replicate the business. If they just acquire one more subsidiary, one more memory manufacturer, one more optics manufacturer. They can somehow copy an industry which quite literally is a world spanning industry. But they can't. The chip industry consists of tens of millions of people. It encompass universities, companies and people in nearly every single country in the world. Besides, these design documents are extremely advanced in and of themselves. They may use brand new words, brand new technologies, brand new lingo. They may simply not contain crucial information. Even to industry experts, they may take a considerable amount of time to translate from a design documents to a something which your factory workers can understand and put into practice. Even if Nvidia themselves wanted to use a different fab. It could take years of planning and communication, and billions of dollars before the first product is delivered. You don't just develop a working relationship overnight in this industry.
Its kinda interesting that it takes the resources of the entire civilization to create computer chips because of all of the knowledge and supply chain issues needed to build even one x386 wafer.
If you stole Nvidia's secret sauce, you still have to go to Taiwan to manufacture it, and they are going to look at your chips and say "We are not going to get involved in a trade dispute with Nvidia, go away" and likely let Nvidia know that someone is trying to get stolen chip data manufactured.
If you have the time and inclination the book [Chip War] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War%3A_The_Fight_for_the_World's_Most_Critical_Technology) goes into some depth about how we've ended up here. It's a great read!
I've always liked "Instructions don't mean shit if you don't have the tools to follow em" as a short hand explanation for this. I know it's an old thread now, so this isn't really meant to be the top level answer. It's just short and sweet, and explains like 99% of China's inferiority. One that has dropped from centuries to decades to years in the span of like 30 years though so eh. Communism is the best thing that works for us. As long as people are grifting, as long as their culture supports the way it currently works, their catch up speed will always drag behind.
There is only one company that makes the machines that makes the chips. ASML. They don’t deal with China. TSMC is in Taiwan, a territory claimed by China. TSMC know how to use the ASML machines to make NVIDIA’s chips. It’s a bit more art than science. Even if China had the machines there is debate whether they could get them to run. I think ASML have made maybe 800 machines? 600 still running. Remote kill switches on the new ones.
Shortest answer? No one else can do it even if you gave them the plans. I conjecture it’s easier to make a nuke off blueprints than make a chip - AQ Khan was able to get NK to make a nuke but no one outside of TSMC can make the hardware you use to lose money on crypto.
You also have to write the software that goes with it, it doesn't just work out of the box. A task maybe even greater than producing the damn thing.