Economy Taiwan's Importance Can't Be Overstated - Or Can It? (+ TSMC US Mega-Site)

[Long Dark Blues]

So, business.

This is America where profit over people reigns supreme.

Security.

Every damn piece of sophisticated electronic equipment would have a Chinese backdoor.

 

[skysolo]

Security.

Every damn piece of sophisticated electronic equipment would have a Chinese backdoor.

 

[Rob Battisti]

This is exactly business. The economy is part of it.

So business and profit greater than people. You don't even care about the people of Taiwan only their semiconductor making capabilities. If their biggest export was oranges, you would say "meh".

Of course I wouldn’t care if it were oranges




Our economy, everyone’s jobs, all production depends on semiconductors.

 

[Staph infection]

Not business. Our entire economy is built upon Taiwanese Semiconductors.

Seems business based to me. Do it cheaper overseas to increase profits. We let everything leave our country in the name of profit.

 

[Rob Battisti]

Seems business based to me. Do it cheaper overseas to increase profits. We let everything leave our country in the name of profit.

I stated we should be working diligently on making these chips stateside. We’re a long ways away from that. Greed got us into this pickle though, no doubt.

 

[Fugazy]

To give more of an idea of the insane level of high technology we're talking about here in regards to a couple of the aforementioned industry leading western companies in the OP.

http://www.brookings.edu/techstream...e-at-the-center-of-chinese-dual-use-concerns/

An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is a technological marvel. A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer—itself a marvel of materials science—with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon.

This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers—approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds. This wafer with billions or trillions of transistors is eventually made into computer chips. An EUV machine is made of more than 100,000 parts, costs approximately $120 million, and is shipped in 40 freight containers. There are only several dozen of them on Earth and approximately two years’ worth of back orders for more. It might seem unintuitive that the demand for a $120 million tool far outstrips supply, but only one company can make them. It’s a Dutch company called ASML, which nearly exclusively makes lithography machines for chip manufacturing.

EUV machines are at the frontier of human technological capabilities. China has virtually no lithography experience or industry. Any Chinese firm trying to develop EUV lithography would have to start from scratch. It would have to close the gap with ASML’s billions of dollars, decades of experience, and the accumulated experience and tacit knowledge of their tens of thousands of employees. And it would have to succeed where experienced, billion dollar companies failed. There is little chance a Chinese company will make an EUV lithography machine in the foreseeable future.

Applied Materials, Inc. is an American corporation that supplies equipment, software and services for the manufacturing of semiconductor (integrated circuit) chips, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones and televisions, and solar products. The company develops and manufactures equipment used in the wafer fabrication steps of creating a semiconductor device, including atomic layer deposition (ALD), chemical vapor deposition (CVD), physical vapor deposition (PVD), rapid thermal processing (RTP), chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), and ion implantation.

Thats the devils work

 

[SandisLL]

I haven't lived in other countries. I have lived in America where we step over homeless people to go to high class galas. America is profit over people even if you want to say other countries do it too which has nothing to do with why America does it.

It does have.
The same Russia and China does have wild capitalism.
For example no problems to find STEM graduates initially for 400-600 bucks per 1 month...
And ppl with Bentleys and helicopters, villas.

 

[Panty Raider]

Big Dick Style.

Oh, the same style as my penis.

PS Taiwan has some hot babes. My favorite pair of itty bitties are on a taiwanese babe.

 

[BJ@LW&WW]

asml and amat are primarily semiconductor EQUIPMENT manufacturing companies, while tsm is primarily a chip manufacturer. directly comparing tsm to asml and amat makes a little less sense than comparing it to companies like intc, nvda, etc.

anyway, tsm is just one reason why the security of taiwan is important to the US and the west. here is a video with some decent graphics and commentary on the geopolitical interest the west has in taiwan remaining a ?country

 

[The XL]

Everything essential to us should be made or grown at home. Our government sold us out a long time ago.

 

[SandisLL]

Everything essential to us should be made or grown at home. Our government sold us out a long time ago.

Not governments.
Private businesses.
It is the same thing why they are importing cheap crap from china. Like US and europe can't manufacture spoons, socks, screws etc...
Nope. Cos profit!

 

[4daLuLZ]

It can’t be overstated. It’s just about the only country in the world I would support the US getting involved in protecting militarily.

The UK and Canada would be in that too.
The UK is their closest ally and foothold in Europe and Canada…..well, having a country that close to all your major urban area falling would just be no go scenario.

Australia might be there too but for cultural reasons only.

 

[Deorum]

Our entire economy is built upon Taiwanese Semiconductors.

Yet it's not the fundamental lynchpin of the tech industry that it's often made out to be, that would be the capital equipment which is almost exclusively in the hands of the west. Taiwan isn't producing a single semiconductor without that technology. I'd also say the economy is no less dependent on American Intel chips given that it (along with AMD) holds virtually 100% global market share of data center, personal computer and supercomputer µP's. Intel's domestic manufacturing domestic operations are gargantuan (and growing); Samsung's foundry manufacturing operations (directly akin to TSMC) are gargantuan, and while part of a South Korean conglomerate it still makes significant capital investments into American production.

 

[Rob Battisti]

Yet it's not the fundamental lynchpin of the tech industry that it's often made out to be, that would be the capital equipment which is almost exclusively in the hands of the west. Taiwan isn't producing a single semiconductor without that technology. I'd also say the economy is no less dependent on American Intel chips given that it (along with AMD) holds virtually 100% global market share of data center, personal compter and supercomputer µP's. Intel's domestic manufacturing domestic operations are gargantuan (and growing); Samsung's foundry manufactiuring operations (directly akin to TSMC) are gargantuan, and while part of a South Korean conglomerate it still makes significant capital investments into American production.

They go hand in hand. It doesn’t change the fact that it would be absolutely devastating to the economy to lose Tawainese semiconductor manufacturing AND risk it being taken over by China.

 

[Yehudim]

There’s a lot of geopolitical and moral reasons we have defended Taiwan before this technology even existed.

I feel like semiconductors have become a red herring both for our own selfish reasons and projecting those selfish reasons on to China. The bottom line is that a totalitarian dictatorship wishes to prey on a small, free state because of historical fantasy.

 

[Deorum]

i would think the investment is in the billions. the machinery is relatively cheap at hundreds of millions but, you need to set it up, dial it in for the accuracy mentioned in the op, train people to use it properly, train people to maintain it properly, build support facilities around it, and i imagine it's is demanding of support needing specific temperatures, humidity levels, isolation, etc. in order to be so precise. Then you need material production, where's the silicon and tin coming from, is it the correct purity, etc.? That's just scratching the surface, imo.

Easily in the billions, and it's not like you can just get these machines off the shelf. They're generally built on receipt of a PO, and with current part shortages, everyone in the industry is way behind on deliverables. Facilities are complicated to get up and running in terms of exhaust and supply lines, but then you've also got the whole problem of the fabs automation itself - FOUP movement and getting all the machines up and connected to the host system interface. (I write software that runs a specific type of tool used in the industry)

That said, I would guess finding the people qualified to do all this might be the biggest lag. This stuff is all highly complicated and requires huge teams of highly specialized engineers and scientists.

Phoenix probably has the most developed and robust industry ecosystem of any metropolitan area in the country. There's a reason that it has become Intel's largest global manufacturing site since their original flag planting fab in 1980 and why TSMC has chosen it to gradually construct an entire technology park damn near equal in size to Hsinchu in Taiwan.

 

[Deorum]

Facilities are complicated to get up and running in terms of exhaust and supply lines, but then you've also got the whole problem of the fabs automation itself - FOUP movement and getting all the machines up and connected to the host system interface.

It's pretty incredible.

 

[Deorum]

It’s just about the only country in the world I would support the US getting involved in protecting militarily.

The UK and Canada would be in that too. The UK is their closest ally and foothold in Europe and Canada…..well, having a country that close to all your major urban area falling would just be no go scenario.

Australia might be there too but for cultural reasons only.

There’s a lot of geopolitical and moral reasons we have defended Taiwan before this technology even existed.

I feel like semiconductors have become a red herring both for our own selfish reasons and projecting those selfish reasons on to China. The bottom line is that a totalitarian dictatorship wishes to prey on a small, free state because of historical fantasy.

The funny thing is that the US is obligated to do that for like 50 different countries around the world, and Taiwan isn't actually one of them. Article 5 of NATO alone accounts for 30 of those (soon to be 32 once Finland and Sweden become member states). America doesn't even have the spine to recognize the Republic of China as a sovereign nation, it has obeyed the CCP's official narrative since the 三个联合公报 of the 1970s. How Disgraceful.

 

[Yehudim]

The funny thing is that the US is obligated to do that for like 50 different countries around the world, and Taiwan isn't actually one of them. Article 5 of NATO alone accounts for 30 of those (soon to be 32 once Finland and Sweden become member states). America doesn't even have the spine to recognize the Republic of China as a sovereign nation, it has obeyed the CCP's official narrative since the 三个联合公报 of the 1970s. How Disgraceful.

It’s sad but we’ve stuck by Taiwan 3x times they were seriously threatened by China and Congress has been unanimously in favor of Taiwan.

I think there’s a lot of evidence we are salami-slicing our way into formal recognition and China will have no one to blame but themselves.

 

[Deorum]

It’s sad but we’ve stuck by Taiwan 3x times they were seriously threatened by China and Congress has been unanimously in favor of Taiwan.

I think there’s a lot of evidence we are salami-slicing our way into formal recognition and China will have no one to blame but themselves.

It'd definitely be a Day 1 dictator initiative, and yet so humorously far down the list of the things I'd do that would have China's head fucking spinning with rage like the Exorcist. It's time to stop playing games.