Friday, February 24th 2023
TSMC Said to be Planning Second Fab in Japan
The rumour mill has kicked into high gear this week about TSMC planning a second fab in Japan. The original source is the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper (via Reuters), based in Tokyo, although it's unclear where the actual fab would be located, if it's indeed even happening. According to the paper, the new fab would be focusing on 5 and 10 nanometer chips, but production isn't expected to start until sometime in the second half of this decade. This suggests that these would be mainstream nodes by then, which points to yet another fab for either the vehicle industry or something similar.
The fab is said to cost more than a trillion yen, or over US$7.4 billion to build. TSMC's CEO C.C. Wei was asked about the potential fab during TSMC's latest earnings call, but simply said that the company had nothing further to add. TSMC is of course busy building a fab in Japan on Kyushu island, but as it'll have a node capacity for 12 to 16 nm parts, it makes sense that TSMC would already be planning for an extension of said fab that can produce on more advanced nodes as its customers will be moving to more advanced nodes over time.
Source:
Reuters
The fab is said to cost more than a trillion yen, or over US$7.4 billion to build. TSMC's CEO C.C. Wei was asked about the potential fab during TSMC's latest earnings call, but simply said that the company had nothing further to add. TSMC is of course busy building a fab in Japan on Kyushu island, but as it'll have a node capacity for 12 to 16 nm parts, it makes sense that TSMC would already be planning for an extension of said fab that can produce on more advanced nodes as its customers will be moving to more advanced nodes over time.
23 Comments on TSMC Said to be Planning Second Fab in Japan
Save dem older fabs for those gigantic 5-16nm auto-grade stuffs :)
More CPUs to build giant robots.
Teslas are pretty interesting electrically vs other car companies, they have less than half of those ECUs @20-ish, way less in wiring harnesses, they also don't use disposable fuses it's all resettable efuses. Funny enough original Teslas did not have J1962(OBD2) connectors because it doesn't burn gas it doesn't fall under that regulation, they did add it in later iterations for w.e reason.
EVs don't need any more more modern chips than a ICE car except depending on what you want to do.
Cars are just having more advanced processing in general with things like more complex diving assistance and entertainment built into the cars. Tesla needs complex chips because they do a lot of computing and it's way more vertically integrated. Ford at least admits to wanting to be more like Tesla and do a lot more integration to reduce costs. Basically Tesla's per car margins are so much better than the rest of the industry so some of the companies are looking to emulate what they've done which is reduce and remove anything and everything they could and moving to a more centralized architecture. Tesla kind of had to do it in the S/X days because traditional oems did not want to do more limited runs at lower volumes and they also asked Tesla for extra money for the development, so Tesla just pulled everything in-house.
I read this in a written interview from TSMC when they talked about their USA and Germany fabs because it's not just taking the settings you already use from your running fab and type them in because things just ain't the same.
But still excited every time wish I could get a personal tour at a TSMC fab one day it would be one dream to come true :D
I hate it when people spout nonsense about Americans. Same goes for those who excessively attack the Chinese or Russians. It comes off as childish and only makes you look bad.