SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
TSMC to Spend $100B on Fabs and R&D Over Next Three Years: 2nm, Arizona Fab & More
TSMC this week has announced plans to spend $100 billion on new production facilities as well as R&D over the next three years. The world's largest contract maker of chips says that its fabs are currently working at full load, so to meet demand for its services going forward it will need (much) more capacity. Among TSMC's facilities to go online in the next three to four years are the company's fab in Arizona as well as its first 2nm-capable fab in Taiwan.
[...] TSMC's capital expenditures (CapEx) budget last year was $17.2 billion, whereas its R&D budget was $3.72 billion, or approximately 8.2% of its revenue. This year the company intends to increase its CapEx to somewhere in the range of $25 to $28 billion, which would make for a 45% to 62% year-over-year increase in that spending. The company's R&D spending will also rise as its revenue is expected to grow. In total, TSMC plans to invest around $30 billion or more on CapEx and R&D this year. Taken altogether, if the company intends to spend around $100 billion from 2021 through 2023, its expenditures in the next two years will be roughly flat with 2021, something that should please its investors.
SK Hynix to Build $106 Billion Fab Cluster: 800,000 Wafer Starts a Month
Capping off a busy week for fab-related news, South Korea authorities this week gave SK Hynix a green light to build a new, 120 trillion won ($106.35 billion) fab complex. The fab cluster will be primarily used to build DRAM for PCs, mobile devices, and servers, using process technologies that rely on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The first fab in the complex will go online in 2025.
[...] The new fabs will be used to make various types of DRAM using SK Hynix's upcoming production technologies that will use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. And with a start date still years away, we're likely looking at a fab that will be used to manufacture DDR5, LPDDR5X, and other future types of DRAM.
See also: TSMC bumps spending up 50% to meet increased demand
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 04 2021, @01:14PM (6 children)
I know chip fabrication isn't cheap, but $100 billion? I wondered if that could be an error, and they meant $100 million. $100 million is plenty huge. But no, seems they mean billion, with a B. The Apollo moon landing project was "only" $28 billion (about $280 billion after adjusting for inflation), how could chip fabrication be so expensive as to rival that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 04 2021, @01:28PM
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 04 2021, @01:55PM (2 children)
>> how could chip fabrication be so expensive as to rival that?
The moon landing project only required a few uniforms and a soundstage, while chip fabrication requires numerous rolls of Rubylith and gallons of ultrapure sulfuric acid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 04 2021, @02:23PM
The funny part is NASA advised Stanley Kubrik on what the moon should look like for 2001, then went and copied the set because it seemed so realistic for their own moon landing. It looked more "moon" than the actual moon.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Monday April 05 2021, @11:05AM
Sulfuric acid isn't nearly deadly enough to be used in actual chip fabrication. If anything, that's just used as a cleaning agent on the equipment. Actual process chemicals are fun substances like dichlorosilane, phosphine, hexachlorodisilane, Chlorine trifluoride, pyridine, 100% ammonia (probably the safest active agent after the metric megatons of nitrogen used), and tetraethoxysilane (TEOS), which has a nauseating smell best described as canned cancer. Specifically sulfuric acid looks tame compared to DCS. The only ppe you need is goggles, gloves, respirator, and an apron. On the contrary, trace amounts of DCS are fatal if inhaled, and it bursts into a bright orange flame when exposed to atmosphere. Sulfur acid required an ignition source to even start burning.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday April 04 2021, @02:47PM
Think of it as the most major practical application of nanotechnology.
Last time I checked, fab cost was approaching $20 billion, and they even have a "law" for it [wikipedia.org]. It's probably going to get much worse as precise 3D stacking becomes a key operation for making almost all processors.
A restart of Moon activities using reusable Starship would be a lot cheaper than building semiconductor fabs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 04 2021, @03:38PM
It's a similar-sized and more complex operation than Apollo, for starters. Apollo got the higher price tag because they were rushing stuff, employing a lot of people, and being sloppy with the spending. The company, TSMC itself employs almost 60k people. In addition, it consumes considerable resources (electricity, ultra-pure silicon, etc) and generate products of immense value (and far more complex than all of the gear combined of the Apollo program). That supply chain employs a lot of people as well. Finally, they have to build this all to exacting standards required. Yet a third army of people and resources.