TSMC's New R&D Fab in Taiwan

Sorry that it took so long for me to get this one out onto the newsletter. I have been super busy and I have been tired recently.

Also, there is a new video coming today. I think you’ll find it fun at an atomic level.

The big question that I left viewers with at the end of the video was: “How can TSMC be so ‘productive’ with their R&D when their spend trails that of other companies?”

The comments on the video point out a few things:

• First, the lower cost of living and real estate in Taiwan. I don’t buy this as much as the other reasons. Some of these houses in Hsinchu cost as much as a condo in wider LA County - $1+ million USD.

• Other companies like Intel cover more of the spectrum than TSMC. Intel has to do design and other stuff in addition to the manufacturing. They are also making GPUs, TPUs, etc. TSMC “just” does lithography, packaging, and PDK development.

  • And to add about Google, Amazon, etc. Those FANG bros are using R&D spend to build software, which lack the patentability of “hard” processes. So patents - already a flawed metric - are ever more so.

• TSMC benefits from R&D spending across its ecosystem. I like that idea, but is there that much crossover between their fabless partners who are staying up in the “design” area?

On July 28th 2023, TSMC held a ceremony to inaugurate its newest R&D center out in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

The whole thing made the news here in Taiwan so I thought that I should do a short video about it, TSMC's newest "fab".

Bell Labs

TSMC calls the new building the Global R&D center and it is their version of Bell Labs.

It will be where the company experiments with the various processes and operations for its coming leading edge nodes - N2, N1.4 and so on.

Once the R&D fab masters the recipe, they roll it out to one of the big wafer fab centers in Taichung or Tainan. N2's big rollout will be in Hsinchu and Taichung. I think N1.4 is planned for Longtan, Taoyuan.

They are calling this building the Global R&D Center. I mean, that is what is on the sign. But semiconductor factories are built over phases. So I have seen this building also be referred to as Fab 12, Phase 8. Fab ...