Tag: semiconductors

  • The Challenge of Capacity

    The rise of Asia as a force to be reckoned with in large scale manufacturing of critical components like batteries, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and semiconductors has left US and European governments seeking to catch up with a bit of a dilemma.

    These activities largely moved to Asia because financially-motivated management teams in the West (correctly) recognized that:

    • they were low return in a conventional financial sense (require tremendous investment and maintenance)
    • most of these had a heavy labor component (and higher wages in the US/European meant US/European firms were at a cost disadvantage)
    • these activities tend to benefit from economies of scale and regional industrial ecosystems, so it makes sense for an industry to have fewer and larger suppliers
    • much of the value was concentrated in design and customer relationship, activities the Western companies would retain

    What the companies failed to take into account was the speed at which Asian companies like WuXi, TSMC, Samsung, LG, CATL, Trina, Tongwei, and many others would consolidate (usually with government support), ultimately “graduating” into dominant positions with real market leverage and with the profitability to invest into the higher value activities that were previously the sole domain of Western industry.

    Now, scrambling to reposition themselves closer to the forefront in some of these critical industries, these governments have tried to kickstart domestic efforts, only to face the economic realities that led to the outsourcing to begin with.

    Northvolt, a major European effort to produce advanced batteries in Europe, is one example of this. Despite raising tremendous private capital and securing European government support, the company filed for bankruptcy a few days ago.

    While much hand-wringing is happening in climate-tech circles, I take a different view: this should really not come as a surprise. Battery manufacturing (like semiconductor, solar, pharmaceutical, etc) requires huge amounts of capital and painstaking trial-and-error to perfect operations, just to produce products that are steadily dropping in price over the long-term. It’s fundamentally a difficult and not-very-rewarding endeavor. And it’s for that reason that the West “gave up” on these years ago.

    But if US and European industrial policy is to be taken seriously here, the respective governments need to internalize that reality and be committed for the long haul. The idea that what these Asian companies are doing is “easily replicated” is simply not true, and the question is not if but when will the next recipient of government support fall into dire straits.

    From the start, Northvolt set out to build something unprecedented. It didn’t just promise to build batteries in Europe, but to create an entire battery ecosystem, from scratch, in a matter of years. It would build the region’s biggest battery factories, develop and source its own materials, and recycle its own batteries. And, with some help from government subsidies, it would do so while matching prices from Asian manufacturers that had dominated global markets.

    Northvolt’s ambitious attempt to compress decades of industry development into just eight years culminated last week, with its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the departure of several top executives, including CEO Peter Carlsson. The company’s downfall is a setback for Europe’s battery ambitions — as well as a signal of how challenging it is for the West to challenge Chinese dominance.

    What Northvolt’s bankruptcy means for Europe’s battery ambitions
    Maeve Allsup | Latitude Media

  • Biopharma scrambling to handle Biosecure Act

    Strong regional industrial ecosystems like Silicon Valley (tech), Boston (life science), and Taiwan (semiconductors) are fascinating. Their creation is rare and requires local talent, easy access to supply chains and distribution, academic & government support, business success, and a good amount of luck.

    But, once set in place, they can be remarkably difficult to unseat. Take the semiconductor industry as an example. It’s geopolitical importance has directed billions of dollars towards re-creating a domestic US industry. But, it faces an uphill climb. After all, it’s not only a question of recreating the semiconductor manufacturing factories that have gone overseas, but also:

    • the advanced and low-cost packaging technologies and vendors that are largely based in Asia
    • the engineering and technician talent that is no longer really in the US
    • the ecosystem of contractors and service firms that know exactly how to maintain the facilities and equipment
    • the supply chain for advanced chemicals and specialized parts that make the process technology work
    • the board manufacturers and ODMs/EMSs who do much of the actual work post-chip production that are also concentrated in Asia

    A similar thing has happened in the life sciences CDMO (contract development and manufacturing organization) space. In much the same way that Western companies largely outsourced semiconductor manufacturing to Asia, Western biopharma companies outsourced much of their core drug R&D and manufacturing to Chinese companies like WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics. This has resulted in a concentration of talent and an ecosystem of talent and suppliers there that would be difficult to supplant.

    Enter the BIOSECURE Act, a bill being discussed in the House with a strong possibility of becoming a law. It prohibits the US government from working with companies that obtain technology from Chinese biotechnology companies of concern (including WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics, among others). This is causing the biopharma industry significant anxiety as they are forced to find (and potentially fund) an alternative CDMO ecosystem that currently does not exist at the level of scale and quality as it does with WuXi.

    According to [Harvey Berger, CEO of Kojin Therapeutics], China’s CDMO industry has evolved to a point that no other country comes close to. “Tens of thousands of people work in the CDMO industry in China, which is more than the rest of the world combined,” he says.

    Meanwhile, Sound’s Kil says he has worked with five CDMOs over the past 15 years and is sure he wouldn’t return to three of them. The two that he finds acceptable are WuXi and a European firm.

    “When we asked the European CDMO about their capacity to make commercial-stage quantities, they told us they would have to outsource it to India,” Kil says. WuXi, on the other hand, is able to deliver large quantities very quickly. “It would be terrible for anyone to restrict our ability to work with WuXi AppTec.”

    A hand giving pills to another hand with a backdrop of the US and China flags.

    Industry braces for Biosecure Act impact
    Aayushi Pratap | C&EN

  • Why Intel has to make its foundry business work

    Historically, Intel has (1) designed and (2) manufactured its chips that it sells (primarily into computer and server systems). It prided itself on having the most advanced (1) designs and (2) manufacturing technology, keeping both close to its chest.

    In the late 90s/00s, semiconductor companies increasingly embraced the “fabless model”, whereby they would only do the (1) design while outsourcing the manufacturing to foundries like TSMC. This made it much easier and less expensive to build up a burgeoning chip business and is the secret to the success of semiconductor giants like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

    Companies like Intel scoffed at this, arguing that the combination of (1) design and (2) manufacturing gave their products an advantage, one that they used to achieve a dominant position in the computing chip segment. And, it’s an argument which underpins why they have never made a significant effort in becoming a contract manufacturer — after all, if part of your technological magic is the (2) manufacturing, why give it to anyone else?

    The success of TSMC has brought a lot of questions about Intel’s advantage in manufacturing and, given recent announcements by Intel and the US’s CHIPS Act, a renewed focus on actually becoming a contract manufacturer to the world’s leading chip designers.

    While much of the attention has been paid to the manufacturing prowess rivalry and the geopolitical reasons behind this, I think the real reason Intel has to make the foundry business work is simple: their biggest customers are all becoming chip designers.

    While a lot of laptops and desktops and servers are still sold in the traditional fashion, the reality is more and more of the server market is being dominated by a handful of hyperscale data center operators like Amazon, Google, Meta/Facebook, and Microsoft, companies that have historically been able to obtain the best prices from Intel because of their volume. But, in recent years, in the chase for better and better performance and cost and power consumption, they have begun designing their own chips adapted to their own systems (as this latest Google announcement for Google’s own ARM-based server chips shows).

    Are these chips as good as Intel’s across every dimension? Almost certainly not. It’s hard to overtake a company like Intel’s decades of design prowess and market insight. But, they don’t have to be. They only have to be better at the specific use case Google / Microsoft / Amazon / etc need it to be for.

    And, in that regard, that leaves Intel with really only one option: it has to make the foundry business work, or it risks losing not just the revenue from (1) designing a data center chip, but from the (2) manufacturing as well.

    Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances1. That’s why we’ve already started deploying Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon.

    Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs
    Amin Vahdat | Google Blog

  • How packaging tech is changing how we build & design chips

    Once upon a time, the hottest thing in chip design was “system-on-a-chip” (SOC). The idea is that you’d get the best cost and performance out of a chip by combining more parts into one piece of silicon. This would result in smaller area (less silicon = less cost) and faster performance (closer parts = faster communication) and resulted in more and more chips integrating more and more things.

    While the laws of physics haven’t reversed any of the above, the cost of designing chips that integrate more and more components has gone up sharply. Worse, different types of parts (like on-chip memory and physical/analog componentry) don’t scale down as well as pure logic transistors, making it very difficult to design chips that combine all these pieces.

    The rise of new types of packaging technologies, like Intel’s Foveros, Intel’s EMIB, TSMC’s InFO, new ways of separating power delivery from data delivery (backside power delivery), and more, has also made it so that you can more tightly integrate different pieces of silicon and improve their performance and size/cost.

    The result is now that many of the most advanced silicon today is built as packages of chiplets rather than as massive SOC projects: a change that has happened over a fairly short period of time.

    This interview with IMEC (a semiconductor industry research center)’s head of logic technologies breaks this out…

    What we’re doing in CMOS 2.0 is pushing that idea further, with much finer-grained disintegration of functions and stacking of many more dies. A first sign of CMOS 2.0 is the imminent arrival of backside-power-delivery networks. On chips today, all interconnects—both those carrying data and those delivering power—are on the front side of the silicon [above the transistors]. Those two types of interconnect have different functions and different requirements, but they have had to exist in a compromise until now. Backside power moves the power-delivery interconnects to beneath the silicon, essentially turning the die into an active transistor layer which is sandwiched between two interconnect stacks, each stack having a different functionality.

    What is CMOS 2.0?
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • Intel’s focus on chip packaging technology

    Intel has been interested in entering the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) space for a long time. For years, Intel proudly boasted of being at the forefront of semiconductor technology — being first to market with the FinFET and smaller and smaller process geometries.

    So it’s interesting how, with the exception of the RibbonFET (the successor to the FinFET), almost all of Intel’s manufacturing technology announcements (see whitepaper) in it’s whitepaper to appeal to prospective foundry customers, all of it’s announcements pertain to packaging / “back end” technologies.

    I think it’s both a recognition that they are no longer the furthest ahead in that race, as well as recognition that Moore’s Law scaling has diminishing returns for many applications. Now, a major cost and performance driver is technology that was once considered easily outsourced to low cost assemblers in Asia is now front and center.

    IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ahead of an invite-only event today in San Jose, Intel outlined new chip technologies it will offer its foundry customers by sharing a glimpse into its future data-center processors. The advances include more dense logic and a 16-fold increase in the connectivity within 3D-stacked chips, and they will be among the first top-end technologies the company has ever shared with chip architects from other companies.

    A Peek at Intel’s Future Foundry Tech
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • The Opportunity in Lagging Edge Semiconductors

    While much attention is (rightly) focused on the role of TSMC (and its rivals Samsung and Intel) in “leading edge” semiconductor technology, the opportunity at the so-called “lagging edge” — older semiconductor process technologies which continue to be used — is oftentimes completely ignored.

    The reality of the foundry model is that fab capacity is expensive to build and so the bulk of the profit made on a given process technology investment is when it’s years old. This is a natural consequence of three things:

    1. Very few semiconductor designers have the R&D budget or the need to be early adopters of the most advanced technologies. (That is primarily relegated to the sexiest advanced CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs, but ignores the huge bulk of the rest of the semiconductor market)
    2. Because only a small handful of foundries can supply “leading edge” technologies and because new technologies have a “yield ramp” (where the technology goes from low yield to higher as the foundry gets more experience), new process technologies are meaningfully more expensive.
    3. Some products have extremely long lives and need to be supported for decade-plus (i.e. automotive, industrial, and military immediately come to mind)

    As a result, it was very rational for GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD’s in-house fab) to abandon producing advanced semiconductor technologies in 2018 to focus on building a profitable business at the lagging edge. Foundries like UMC and SMIC have largely made the same choice.

    This means giving up on some opportunities (those that require newer technologies) — as GlobalFoundries is finding recently in areas like communications and data center — but provided you have the service capability and capacity, can still lead to not only a profitable outcome, but one which is still incredibly important to the increasingly strategic semiconductor space.

    When GlobalFoundries abandoned development of its 7 nm-class process technology in 2018 and refocused on specialty process technologies, it ceased pathfinding, research, and development of all technologies related to bleeding-edge sub-10nm nodes. At the time, this was the correct (and arguably only) move for the company, which was bleeding money and trailing behind both TSMC and Samsung in the bleeding-edge node race. But in the competitive fab market, that trade-off for reduced investment was going to eventually have consequences further down the road, and it looks like those consequences are finally starting to impact the company. In a recent earnings call, GlobalFoundries disclosed that some of the company’s clients are leaving for other foundries, as they adopt sub-10nm technologies faster than GlobalFoundries expected.

    GlobalFoundries: Clients Are Migrating to Sub-10nm Faster Than Expected
    Anton Shilov | Anandtech

  • NVIDIA to make custom AI chips? Tale as old as time

    Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business.

    And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.

    Given the above and the fact that NVIDIA did used to effectively build custom products (i.e. for game consoles and for some of its dedicated autonomous vehicle and media streamer projects) and the efforts by cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft to build their own Artificial Intelligence silicon it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that they’re pursuing this.

    Or that they may eventually leave this market behind as well.

    While using NVIDIA’s A100 and H100 processors for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) instances, major cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft are also advancing their custom processors to meet specific AI and general computing needs. This strategy enables them to cut costs as well as tailor capabilities and power consumption of their hardware to their particular needs. As a result, while NVIDIA’s AI and HPC GPUs remain indispensable for many applications, an increasing portion of workloads now run on custom-designed silicon, which means lost business opportunities for NVIDIA. This shift towards bespoke silicon solutions is widespread and the market is expanding quickly. Essentially, instead of fighting custom silicon trend, NVIDIA wants to join it.

    Report: NVIDIA Forms Custom Chip Unit for Cloud Computing and More
    Anton Shilov | Anandtech

  • Good Windows on ARM at last?

    Silicon nerd 🤓 that I am, I have gone through multiple cycles of excited-then-disappointed for Windows-on-ARM, especially considering the success of ChromeOS with ARM, the Apple M1/M2 (Apple’s own ARM silicon which now powers its laptops), and AWS Graviton (Amazon’s own ARM chip for its cloud computing services).

    I may just be setting myself up for disappointment here but these (admittedly vendor-provided) specs for their new Snapdragon X (based on technology they acquired from Nuvia and are currently being sued for by ARM) look very impressive. Biased as they may be, the fact that these chips are performing in the same performance range as Intel/AMD/Apple’s silicon on single-threaded benchmarks (not to mention the multi-threaded applications which work well with the Snapdragon X’s 12 cores) hopefully bodes well for the state of CPU competition in the PC market!

    Single-threaded CPU performance (Config A is a high performance tuned offering, Config B is a “thin & light” configuration)
    Multi-threaded CPU performance (Config A is a high performance tuned offering, Config B is a “thin & light” configuration)

    Overall, Qualcomm’s early benchmark disclosure offers an interesting first look at what to expect from their forthcoming laptop SoC. While the competitive performance comparisons are poorly-timed given that next-generation hardware is just around the corner from most of Qualcomm’s rivals, the fact that we’re talking about the Snapdragon X Elite in the same breath as the M2 or Raptor Lake is a major achievement for Qualcomm. Coming from the lackluster Snapdragon 8cx SoCs, which simply couldn’t compete on performance, the Snapdragon X Elite is clearly going to be a big step up in virtually every way.

    Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Performance Preview: A First Look at What’s to Come
    Ryan Smith | Anandtech

  • The World Runs on Excel… and its Mistakes

    The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act earmarked hundreds of billions in subsidies and tax credits to bolster a U.S. domestic semiconductor (and especially semiconductor manufacturing) industry. If it works, it will dramatically reposition the U.S. in the global semiconductor value chain (especially relative to China).

    With such large amounts of taxpayer money practically “gifted” to large (already very profitable) corporations like Intel, the U.S. taxpayer can reasonably assume that these funds should be allocated carefully and thoughtfully and with processes in place to make sure every penny furthered the U.S.’s strategic goals.

    But, when the world’s financial decisions are powered by Excel spreadsheets, even the best laid plans can go awry.

    The team behind the startup Rowsie created a large language model (LLM)-powered tool which can understand Excel spreadsheets and answer questions posed to it. They downloaded a spreadsheet that the US government provided as an example of the information and calculations they want applicants fill out in order to qualify. They then applied their AI tool to the spreadsheet to understand it’s structure and formulas.

    Interestingly, Rowsie was able to find a single-cell spreadsheet error (see images below) which resulted in a $178 million understatement of interest payments!

    The Control Panel tab in the Example Pre-App-Simple-Financial-Model spreadsheet from the CHIPS Act funding application website. Notice cells C51 and D51 corresponding to the senior debt interest rate (5%) and the subordinated debt interest rate (8%)
    The Assumptions Processing tab in the Example Pre-App-Simple-Financial-Model spreadsheet from the CHIPS Act funding application website. Notice row 50. Despite the section being about Subordinated Debt (see Cell B50), they’re using cell C51 from the Control Panel tab (which points to the Senior Debt rate of 5%) rather than the correct cell of D51 (which points to the Subordinated Debt rate of 8%).

    To be clear, this is not a criticism of the spreadsheet’s architects. In this case, what seems to have happened, is that the spreadsheet creator copied an earlier row (row 40) and forgot to edit the formula to account for the fact that row 50 is about subordinated debt and row 40 is about senior debt. It’s a familiar story to anyone who’s ever been tasked with doing something complicated in Excel. Features like copy and paste and complex formulas are very powerful, but also make it very easy for a small mistake to cascade. It’s also remarkably hard to catch!

    Hopefully the Department of Commerce catches on and fixes this little clerical mishap, and that applicants are submitting good spreadsheets, free of errors. But, this case underscores how (1) so many of the world’s financial and policy decisions rest on Excel spreadsheets and you just have to hope 🤞🏻 no large mistakes were made, and (2) the potential for tools like Rowsie to be tireless proofreaders and assistants who can help us avoid mistakes and understand those critical spreadsheets quickly.

    If you’re interested in checking out Rowsie, check it out at https://www.rowsie.ai/!

    DISCLAIMER: I happen to be friends with the founders of Rowsie which is how I found out about this

  • I want your market and you to pay for it

    I have followed TSMC very closely since I started my career in the semiconductor industry. A brilliant combination of bold business bet (by founder Morris Chang), industry tailwinds (with the rise of fabless semiconductor model), forward-thinking from the Taiwanese government (who helped launch TSMC), and technological progress, it’s been fascinating to see the company enter the public consciousness.

    In hearing about TSMC’s investment in the very aptly-named ESMC (European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), I can’t help but think this is another brilliant TSMC-esque play. TSMC gets:

    • Guarantee outsized market share in leading edge semiconductor technology in Europe
    • Paid for in part by some of their largest customers (Infineon, Bosch, and NXP) who will likely commit / guarantee some of their volumes to fill this new manufacturing facility
    • AND (likely) additional subsidies / policy support from the European Union government (who increasingly doesn’t want to be left out of advanced chip manufacturing given Asia’s current dominance and the US’s Inflation Reduction Act push)

    TSMC has managed to turn what could have been a disaster for them (growing nationalism in semiconductor manufacturing) into a subsidized, volume-committed factory.

    TSMC, in collaboration with Bosch, Infineon and NXP, is planning to invest in the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), based in Dresden, Germany. This strategic move aims to meet the burgeoning demand for advanced semiconductor-manufacturing services, particularly in the automotive and industrial sectors.

    Driving Europe’s Chip Renaissance: TSMC’s Vision with ESMC
    Maurizio di Paolo Emilio | EETimes