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TSMC's New N4C

blueone said:
Not a bad idea, but seems very unlikely. Apple stopped supporting the iPhone 6 about eight years ago. Even the iPhone 8 became unsupported four years ago. Several industry analysts are saying Apple needs to offer low-cost iPhones in some markets. Unfortunately, I can easily think of a lot of incremental costs involved, especially for chips redone in a cheaper fab process, additional IOS development for less capable chipsets, testing, and support. I find it difficult to see Apple doing this.
Click to expand...

Okay, iPhone 6 is a bad example. It was my favorite phone though. The point is that Apple can use TSMC AZ fabs for low volume N-2 or N-3 phones. It is a "made in the USA" slight of hand.
 
Daniel Nenni said:
Okay, iPhone 6 is a bad example. It was my favorite phone though. The point is that Apple can use TSMC AZ fabs for low volume N-2 or N-3 phones. It is a "made in the USA" sleight of hand.
Click to expand...
What is the volume for an iPhoneSE? I can’t remember even there is a cheap iPhone or iPad that is out there that uses N7. Hard to believe Apple will run a money losing commodity product just to say made in America by Taiwanese, LOL.
 
Daniel Nenni said:
Okay, iPhone 6 is a bad example. It was my favorite phone though. The point is that Apple can use TSMC AZ fabs for low volume N-2 or N-3 phones. It is a "made in the USA" slight of hand.
Click to expand...

TSMC Arizona Fab 1 coming to HVM next year is for N5/N4 with only 20,000 300mm wafers per month. The "low volume" orders from Apple, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom's need to put into perspective.

It's because combining each of those big companies' "low volume" orders can be big enough to keep TSMC Arizona Fab 1 busy for a while.
 
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TBiggs said:
What is the volume for an iPhoneSE? I can’t remember even there is a cheap iPhone or iPad that is out there that uses N7. Hard to believe Apple will run a money losing commodity product just to say made in America by Taiwanese, LOL.
Click to expand...

I was looking into the 'richness' of iPhone sales recently. "CIRP" - Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Inc. indicates that the split is roughly ~ 40-47% Pro/Max, 48-55% Base, and 5% SE. (the range is because the mix from Apple.com is heavier Pro than models coming from Carriers).

"Bloomberg Intelligence" also seems to agree with this; with an iPhone SE take rate of 5.9% vs. other models.
 
nghanayem said:
I am curious to see what this looks like once we see teardowns. Based on the wording of better yield when using the optical shrink option of N4, that sounds like improved OPC/illumination/masks to me. But Fred would have a better idea. Maybe they added some lower cost metal layers, or some relaxed pitches on some of the layers for lower cost? I also wonder if it would be possible to do a non SiGe PMOS for folks who value cost over PMOS mobility without requiring designers to do too much work?
Click to expand...
It looks like they said they made the IP more area-efficient and more cut-friendly.
 
hist78 said:
The US pricing strategy will have a high possibility to succeed because TSMC Arizona fab capacity is relatively smaller than TSMC's Gigafabs. The first two fabs will have a combined capacity of 50,000 wafers per month. Under the political and strategic consideration, Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom can easily allocate a small percentage of their orders to TSMC Arizona and help it to reach a high utilization rate.
Click to expand...
Forget Apple and AMD. AMD Zen 5 to be launched in H2 2024 will use the TSMC N3 process. At most the TSMC Arizona fab could manufacture the N4X process I/O chiplet. But not the logic chiplets which have the processing cores. As for Apple the A17 SoC is already using the N3 process.

Will they manufacture low end chips in the US with higher chip prices? Kind of doubtful.

Maybe NVIDIA could make chips in that fab. But we will see.
 
Mooredaddy said:
Off topic but will we be getting a tech symposium write up on the site at some point?
Click to expand...

I thought we would talk about it in the forum this year. TSMC only allowed us a handful of slides which I posted. Honestly, there were no surprises. Just really good execution on the roadmap they presented last year. The only surprise for me was that CC Wei did not speak. He has multiple COO's now who seem to be lobbying for the CEO slot at some point in time.
 
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