TSMC and five other foundries exposed US secrets

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce

At the request of the U.S. Department of Commerce, major semiconductor manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung have handed over their trade secrets before November 8 to clarify their production capacity supply situation.

According to public information from the U.S. Department of Commerce and reports from Jiwei.com, TSMC provided the U.S. with the most complete business data and responded to most of the questions in the questionnaire (including production capacity and raw material shortages).

TSMC

The public information provided by TSMC mainly focuses on its own production capacity, integrated circuit output from 2019 to 2021 and the proportion of each branch in total output, as well as the sales of the products with the largest order backlog in the most recent month, but does not disclose the specific names of the products with the largest order backlog.

Figure: TSMC's production industry distribution in 2019-2020

Powerchip

The documents Powerchip provided to the U.S. Department of Commerce were very rich in content and responded to most of the questions in the questionnaire.

Figure: Powerchip's production, process nodes and other information

1. Powerchip has two 8-inch wafer foundries with a total production capacity of 113K/month, mainly used for power discrete devices (MOSFET and IGBT) foundry.

2. Powerchip has two 12-inch wafer foundries with a total capacity of 111K/month, mainly used for DRAM (~50%) and professional logic foundry (~50%).

3. According to information provided by OEM customers, automotive end customers account for less than 10% of OEM business.

4. Powerchip is building a new 12-inch wafer foundry (50K/month) for mature processes, which will be operational in 2023.

UMC

The information UMC submitted to the US was official and impartial, basically only answering questions about production capacity, and most of the information was not made public.

TowerSemi (Israel Tower Semiconductor)

Similar to Powerchip, the information provided by TowerSemi was also quite detailed, and it answered almost all the questions asked by the US.

In addition, TowerSemi also stated that there will be no delayed supply issues in 2020 and 2021 because TowerSemi has an advanced demand and supply planning system, so it can deliver to customers at the specified time.

Like Powerchip, TowerSemi's most difficult semiconductor products to source are digital signal processors (DSPs) made of silicon germanium.

VIS (world advanced)

According to public information, VIS's process nodes are between 90nm and 1,500nm. VIS's integrated circuit output showed an upward trend from 2019 to 2021, with revenue increasing from US$916 million to US$1.569 billion. The product with the largest order backlog is logic chips.