TSMC clarified CAPEX and revenue for 2023 last night at the Annual Shareholders Meeting. Last year TSMC guided up during this meeting but this year they guided down. CAPEX was guided down to the lower end of $36B-$32B. Revenue was guided down from low-single to mid-single digit so maybe down another percent or two. The TSMC Jan… Read More
In 2020 TSMC established its Net Zero Project with a goal of net zero emissions by 2050. I remember wondering how could this possibly be done before 2050 or at all for that matter. After working with TSMC for 20+ years I have learned never to bet against them on any topic and green manufacturing is one of them, absolutely.
TSMC presented… Read More
For decades now I’ve watched the incredible growth of SoCs in terms of die size, transistor count, frequency and complexity. Instead of placing all of the system complexity into a single, monolithic chip, there are now compelling reasons to use a multi-chip approach, like when the maximum die size limit is reached, or it’s… Read More
At the recent Synopsys Users Group Meeting (SNUG) I had the honor of leading a panel of experts on the topic of chiplets. One of those panelists was John Lee, Head of Electronics, Semiconductors and Optics at Ansys.
With… Read More
At the recent Synopsys Users Group Meeting (SNUG) I had the honor of leading a panel of experts on the topic of chiplets. One of those panelists was the very personable Dr. Henry Sheng, Group Director of R&D in the EDA Group at Synopsys. Henry currently leads engineering for 3DIC, advanced technology and visualization.
There were quite a few announcements at the TSMC Technical Symposium last week but the most important, in my opinion, were based on TSMC N3 tape-outs. Not only is N3 the leading 3nm process it is the only one in mass production which is why all of the top tier semiconductor companies are using it. TSMC N3 will be the most successful node… Read More
TSMC also covered manufacturing excellence. The TSMC “Trusted Foundry” tagline has many aspects to it, but manufacturing is a critical one. TSMC is the foundry capacity leader but there is a lot more to manufacturing as you will read here. Which brings us to the manufacturing accomplishments from the briefing:
TSMC covered their specialty technologies in great detail. Specialty is what we inside the ecosystem used to call weird stuff meaning non-mainstream and fairly difficult to do on leading edge processes. Specialty technologies will play an even more important part of semiconductor design with the advent of chiplets where die… Read More
TSMC’s 3DFabric initiative was a big focus at the symposium, as it should be. I remember when TSMC first went public with CoWos the semiconductor ecosystem, including yours truly, let out a collective sigh wondering why TSMC is venturing into the comparatively low margin world of packaging. Now we know why and it is absolutely… Read More
The next topic I would like to cover is an update to the TSMC process node roadmap starting with N3. As predicted, N3 will be the most successful node in the TSMC FinFET family. The first version of N3 went into production at the end of last year (Apple) and will roll out with other customers in 2023. There is a reported record amount of … Read More
