Taiwan drought could drastically cutback TSMC production

[Derangel]

The entire industry screwed the pooch by relying soo much on TMSC. Should have had fabs elsewhere long before now.

I see the over-reliance on TSMC as more a matter of necessity than short sightedness or anything else. There have been other fabs attempting to do semiconductors, but no one has even come close to matching TSMC’s ability to produce, to innovate, etc. GloFlo failed miserably, Intel screwed up hard, Samsung is nowhere near ready, and so on. It’s a shitty situation that was, unfortunately, inevitable without another viable competitor to step up.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I remember that well, and HDDs started to double and then triple in cost what they were earlier that summer.
It look years for costs and pricing to return to normal, and by that point SSDs were starting to become mainstream.

The shortage was so bad that both Seagate and Western Digital were scraping the bottom of their trash pile for dead drives to refurb so they actually had a product to sell. I remember looking at Newegg and Amazon during that time frame and almost 100% of the drives were refurb units, there were no new drives being made.

My tech hoarding is both a curse and a gift. I often times get frustrated with myself for being a tech hoarder, but then I've been greeted with years of tech shortages and been very glad I had a stack of 100+ hard drives on hand or drawers full of video cards, RAM and CPUs. The few times I let go of stuff to try and thin out my collection, I usually end up immediately regretting it, because either I or someone else will have a dire need for the exact same thing I just got rid of.

 

[Marees]

Data from 2010 suggests that a 200W EUV system would require 1,600 liters of water per minute, compared with 75 liters/minute for a conventional DUV machine.

Even if you assume more efficient production has cut the water usage for EUV in half, however, it’s still more than 10x larger than the water requirements for DUV.

TSMC’s 5nm customers are all using EUV, but so far as we know, most 7nm customers and everyone building at >7nm are all still on DUV.

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...d-to-cut-water-usage-due-to-ongoing-shortages

 

[Wat]

Oh come on. Those millions of gallons of water are not "consumed" during chip manufacture. Some may escape as water vapor, but thats it.
Most of this water is not the ultra pure water used in the process, it is used for temperature control. Heating things up or cooling them down-- that goes for the process and for the buildings too.

Its cheaper/easier to use the water and release it back to the environment when done than to have a closed loop system. Now that water is becoming scarce, they will have to look at alternatives.

 

[sfsuphysics]

International governments can be mad about the auto chip shortage all they want. Poor planning on their part doesn't mean they can push someone else around because it came back to bite them in the ass. We've already had several incidents of tech product shortages due to everyone putting their eggs in the proverbial single basket, like the time in 2011 with the Thailand flooding that single handedly destroyed the hard drive supply chain for the better part of a year. Nobody learned from it then, and probably won't learn from it now.

Yup, that was what came to my mind... I remember that flood, and my brother in law was like "hey I want you to build me a computer to play games on, I have a $500 budget".... *sigh* fuck me.

 

[Deleted member 89018]

The entire industry screwed the pooch by relying soo much on TMSC. Should have had fabs elsewhere long before now.

there are other fabs. Just not many pushing the cutting edge of production, which is what everyone wants right now. (Just TSMC and Samsung I think?).

Anyone check in on global foundries lately?

nvidia recently said they were starting up production of the gtx 1050ti to try and meet demand. And Intel has been recycling the same parts and manufacturing process since skylake. but everybody is clamoring for 2021 tech, not 2015 tech.

So here we are, with just a handful of companies able to produce new tech parts, and everyone demanding more more better better cheaper cheaper. The entire tech industry - cars included - made this problem for themselves.

 

[SecretStash]

Maybe it was already asked but why do automakers need >7nm lest they can't build cars?
Why do they need TSMC above other less advanced fabs?