Big money that cause inflation found their way into semiconductors

Pure-play foundries including TSMC, UMC and VIS have raised their 8-inch wafer fabrication quotes by 10-20% recently to reflect their tight capacities, according to industry sources.

Another reason is huge wall we'll hit very soon. So companies want to pile more cash to try to hold on last possible processes longer.

AMD and TSMC

Over the past year, AMD's investment volume at TSMC has increased significantly. In the beginning of 2019, the monthly production volume was only about 2,000 to 3,000, which is not even the top five customers. The average monthly production volume this year has increased to 7,500 to 8,000. The number of films will grow to above 16,000 next year. It is estimated that the number of films produced in the second quarter of next year will surpass Apple, becoming TSMC’s largest customer for the first time, accounting for more than 20% of revenue.

According to AMD plan, its latest fourth-generation EPYC server processor "Genoa" (referring to the product code) is determined to be unveiled next year. It is a Zen 4 architecture and will be produced in 5nm. The supply chain said that the new product was originally planned to be put into production in the second half of 2021. In order to advance TSMC's 5nm production capacity, it may conduct risky trial production in the fourth quarter of this year and launch mass production in the first half of next year.

As for the mass production of the new Ryzen 5000 series processors in 2021 and the accelerated processor Ryzen 5000 APU series, they will still be produced on a 7nm process. According to the progress, it is estimated that 5 and 7 nanometers will enter the peak of mass production in the second and third quarters of next year.

AMD product line in 2022 will fully adopt the 5-nanometer process.

https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/4750592

Something is up with TSMC 5nm and also 7nm+ processes, as they significantly lag compared to their previous plans. Also AMD changed Zen 3 slides to no longer feature 7nm+.

In fact due to TSMC issues AMD can enter hard period if Zen3 will be only 3-5% better than previous generation as invester and management want to significantly increas processor sales while not being able to keep same progress in performance.

Intel desktop retail CPUs sales staggering fall

YoY fall reaches 70% in EU, around 55% in US and up to 80% in some Asian countries.

Long OEM contracts keep company afloat, but they will start to expire this fall.

After announcement about 12 months delay industry insiders started to talk that no 7nm will be used for desktop and server high performance CPUs till 2024 at least.

Huge issue of Intel 7nm is the heat dissipation, transistors leakage and EUV steps.

To lower leakage on smaller transistor they need to move from FinFET but it instantly makes number of defects around 10x from previous, as it is new approach and much more complex.

This is also reason why TSMC management instead fakes the new silicon processes keeping simple and large transistors and paying more to PR and press coverage.

Electricity issues

Data centers are on course to consume 15% of the world’s electricity by 2025, according to Applied Materials Inc., the world’s largest maker of chip equipment. Those giant warehouses of computers currently suck in about 2%, the company said.

“AI has the potential to change everything,” said Applied Materials Chief Executive Officer Gary Dickerson speaking in a prerecorded remote keynote for the industry’s Semicon West conference. “But AI has an Achilles’ heel that -- unless addressed -- will prevent it from reaching its true potential. That Achilles heel is power consumption. Training neural networks is incredibly energy-intensive when done with the technology that’s available today.”

Idea is to move to some custom silicon, but issue is that such investment is very risky as new or wastly improved existing approach will require dumping all and everything of existing rack mounted hardware.

It remains to be seen whether unsatisfactory yield rates at Samsung Electronics' 5nm EUV process may affect the launch of Qualcomm's next-generation flagship 5G mobile chip series, according to industry sources.

Nice.

TSMC 3nm

• 15% better transistor density compared to 5nm (instead of 66%)
• up to 10-15% performance improvement with same energy consumption
• or 20-25% less energy consumptionwith similar performance
• TSMC will still use completely unsuitable for such norms FinFET approach

TSMC turned into marketing monster making one fake new process after another.

They have big money and lead for now, but this train can go into deep trench.

And changes are fully opposite to TSMC management predictions

Battle for ASML secrets and people will be epyc

Major thing that China needs to destroy any US competition is access to knowledge of ASML and their close suppliers.

It will be huge battle of special forces, lot of special agreements with people travelling on private jets, secret kidnappings, cyber attacks and much more.

On EUV

To accelerate the development of EUV lithography technology, ASML invited Intel, Samsung and TSMC to become its shareholders in 2012, raising sufficient funds to support its development of ever-more advanced EUV lithography equipment compatible with both 12-inch and 18-inch wafers.

ASML is now the world's only supplier of EUV scanners, which entail up to US$100 million in unit production cost, and Gudeng is the only Taiwanese maker as well as one of the world's only two ASML-validated suppliers of EUV reticle inner pods for such scanners, with each pod needed to protect, transmit and store each EUV reticle mask.

We have absolute monopoly now that is directly controlled by US and partly by EU.

Why TSMC so wanted to drop Huawei

Actually N7FF+ has big issues and new Huawei chip is the only one using it.

Chinese give more money to companies related to chips production

In 2019, demand from semiconductor companies in Taiwan including TSMC, UMC, VIS, Powerchip, Macronix, Winbond, Micron, ASE/SPIL and Powertech for materials reached an amount of NT$330.6 billion (US$11.22 billion), accounting for 22% of the worldwide value while that for equipment was NT$513 billion, or a global share of 28%.

Semiconductor companies plan to expand their capacities, their investments in the next couple of years will reach as high as NT$2.72 trillion.

Taiwan is very worried, as its position is very bad in the conflict between US and China, as both of countries can wreck all the taiwan economy to ashes in few months.

Also leakage of top qualified engineers is staggering, for example Huawei now hires any silicon related engineers for 4-5x of their present taiwan salary.