M. Y. Zuo
Active member
By no strings attached and throw it over the wall service I mean a type of scenario where once the negotiations are complete, contracts signed, files transferred, and money wired to their bank account, the entire team, including CEO, could take a year long vacation and expect wafers with enough working dies to show up on their packaging facility’s loading dock next year. By all-in-pricing I mean the CEO just makes one wire transfer and that’s it.
From what I understand that was relatively common practice a few decades ago.
Obviously this could only be done for proven designs on mature nodes, but given that, does anyone offer this?
For example, let’s say a mid sized company wants 10 million SoCs and buys the proven design of a sizeable modern chip, similar to Apple’s A13, and negotiates with TSMC to be made on their N7P process. The company wants to never worry about it again immediately after signing the deal so they expect everything to just work out without a single additional engineering decision or meeting. The CEO will be embarking on a sailing trip around the world right after wiring his $XXX millions of dollars to TSMC’s bank.
I’m not sure how TSMC calculates pricing, wether on a per wafer or per transistor or per square mm or other basis, their discounts, engineering time, ancillary fees, etc. Lets say the all-in regular cost is 40 000 wafers at $400 million in monthly instalments, would paying $500 million up front be reasonable?
From what I understand that was relatively common practice a few decades ago.
Obviously this could only be done for proven designs on mature nodes, but given that, does anyone offer this?
For example, let’s say a mid sized company wants 10 million SoCs and buys the proven design of a sizeable modern chip, similar to Apple’s A13, and negotiates with TSMC to be made on their N7P process. The company wants to never worry about it again immediately after signing the deal so they expect everything to just work out without a single additional engineering decision or meeting. The CEO will be embarking on a sailing trip around the world right after wiring his $XXX millions of dollars to TSMC’s bank.
I’m not sure how TSMC calculates pricing, wether on a per wafer or per transistor or per square mm or other basis, their discounts, engineering time, ancillary fees, etc. Lets say the all-in regular cost is 40 000 wafers at $400 million in monthly instalments, would paying $500 million up front be reasonable?
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