Explained: The unbelievably complex process of making semiconductor chips
The news of Foxconn-Vedanta's $19.5 billion semiconductor deal falling apart may be a temporary setback for India, striving to achieve its vision of becoming a major global hub in semiconductor manufa
Automated robots transport wafers at an advanced production fab. Semiconductor technologies are so advanced that it"s impossible to catch up without pumping in vast sums of money. Building a foundry business takes time&mdasha single leading-edge fab can cost $10-15 billion and take more than four years to finish. Making chips is so complex and specialised that even diversifying the manufa
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Workers gather for a ceremony that marks the beginning of bulk production of advanced 3-nanometer chips at a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) facility in Tainan, Taiwan, December 29, 2022. It took decades for Taiwan to emerge as a semiconductor giant, which began with the transfer of technology from the US in the 1970s to the setting up of TSMC in 1987. The world"s biggest co
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A file photo of TSMC chairman Morris Chang in Hsinchu, Taiwan, October 5, 2017. Chinese-born engineer Morris Chang, who founded TSMC in 1987, studied at Harvard, Stanford and MIT and worked at Texas Instruments for 25 years. Among his many achievements, Chang pioneered the tactic of initially pricing chips at a loss, expecting that gaining an early market share would increase sales.
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Creating a chip takes hundreds of steps, each with many variables, leading to less than a quarter of the final output being usable. After six to eight weeks of painstaking etching and testing, each wafer can be carved into individual chips for dispatch. To carve these, Taiwan-based TSMC relies on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines made by just one Dutch firm ASML. Each of these
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A file photo of employees working on a lithography machine at the ASML Holding NV factory in Veldhoven, Netherlands. ASML, a Dutch company, has a complete hold over the global semiconductor industry, being the only one in the world that owns the technology and makes the machinery to cut and slice thin chips out of silicon wafers physically. ASML is already working on a new generation of l
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Employees work on Apple iPhone production at a Foxconn factory on September 4, 2021, in Zhongmu County, Henan, China. TSMC"s recent success has been linked to one client"s trust in particular: Apple. For the first six generations of iPhones, Apple had outsourced the manufacturing of its chips to the South Korea-based Samsung. Later, Samsung launched its own competing Galaxy smartphones, c
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A file photo of the 8080 microprocessor, the first microprocessor powerful enough to build a computer around, introduced by Intel in 1974. Pioneers like Intel designed and built chips in-house at the start of the modern computing industry. By the 1980s, American firms, struggling against Japanese competitors, began outsourcing the fabricating sides of their businesses and concentrated on
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An aerial view of Keelung Harbour, Taiwan, on August 4, 2022, as China held military exercises encircling Taiwan. Caught in the tug-of-war between the US and China, TSMC"s success is a walk on the razor"s edge. So it is for Taiwan, the island TSMC sits on. The Pentagon is pressuring the US government to invest more in advanced chipmaking locally so that its missiles and fighter jets are n
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A "First Tool-In" ceremony at the TSMC facility under construction in Phoenix, Arizona, US, on December 6, 2022. Despite its dominance of chip design, America is racing to build chipmaking fabs onshore. Intel is revamping its foundry business, building two new fabs in Arizona and a pair of fabs at its Ohio megasite. Last year, TSMC unveiled its US plans, adding a second Arizona fab and in
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China, meanwhile, has been casting billions at the semiconductor problem with limited success. Its largest chipmaker SMIC cut off from advanced chip tech due to US sanctions, trails years behind Taiwanese companies in the best chip it can produce. US export controls on Chinese semiconductors have entirely ruined the chip industry, sparking mass bankruptcy in which thousands of companies s
