TSMC's big move! 20 new wafer fabs added in Taiwan

According to a recent report by Nikkei Asian Review, although the US government actively hopes that the global semiconductor supply will not be overly dependent on Taiwan, Taiwan's local wafer manufacturers have invested heavily in Taiwan in recent years. Currently, 20 wafer fabs have been completed or are under construction, with a cumulative investment of US$120 billion, further strengthening Taiwan's strength in the global semiconductor market.

Tainan Science Park, which is still building wafer fabs on a large scale, is the production base of TSMC's most advanced process, supplying many terminal products such as Apple iPhone. TSMC has just completed the construction of four wafer fabs, but due to the strong market demand for wafer fab capacity, it is also building another four wafer fabs, which are the most advanced 3nm process production bases, and each wafer fab is worth up to US$10 billion.

Wafer refers to the silicon wafer used to make silicon semiconductor circuits, and its raw material is silicon. After high-purity polycrystalline silicon is dissolved, silicon crystal seeds are added, and then slowly pulled out to form cylindrical single crystal silicon. After grinding, polishing, and slicing, the silicon crystal rod forms a silicon wafer, that is, a wafer. Domestic wafer production lines are mainly 8 inches and 12 inches. The main processing methods of wafers are sheet processing and batch processing, that is, processing 1 or more wafers at the same time. As the feature size of semiconductors becomes smaller and smaller, and the processing and measurement equipment becomes more and more advanced, new data characteristics have emerged in wafer processing. At the same time, the reduction in feature size increases the impact of the number of particles in the air on the quality and reliability of the wafer after processing during wafer processing, and as the cleanliness improves, the number of particles also has new data characteristics.

In addition to investing $24 billion in the construction of a 5nm wafer factory in the United States, TSMC also decided to build a 28nm wafer factory in Japan last year. However, this requires subsidies from the Japanese government. Today, Japanese officials announced that they have approved TSMC's wafer factory plan in Kumamoto Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan, and will provide a subsidy of up to 476 billion yen (about 24 billion yuan).

TSMC is building another fab. According to the information disclosed this time, it is in Taiwan. It will build four wafer fabs at one time. The investment in each wafer fab is about 10 billion US dollars (about 67 billion RMB). The four fabs will cost 268 billion RMB (40 billion US dollars). They will be used to produce 3nm chips in the future. It is reported that this investment of tens of billions of dollars is only part of TSMC's previous 120 billion US dollar investment plan.

TSMC has once again made a big investment in chip manufacturing, and most of the investment is concentrated in high-end processes. It can be seen that TSMC is aggressive this time and is going to sweep away all competitors including Samsung. This has further aggravated the anxiety of the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry. TSMC has already left us far behind, and now it is running so fast and so fiercely. Can we still catch up?

TSMC, the leading foundry, held the 2022 TSMC Technology Symposium in North America on the 16th. It revealed that by 2025, the production capacity of mature and special nodes will be expanded by about 50%. It plans to build new wafer fabs or expand production in Taiwan, Japan and China, intensifying the competition between TSMC and other foundry manufacturers such as GlobalFoundries, UMC and SMIC.

Foreign media "AnandTech" reported that when it comes to TSMC, most of them produce high-end CPUs, GPUs and advanced nodes of mobile SoCs, because advanced chips are the main driving force for technological progress. However, many devices use mature or special process chips, which are used in combination with complex advanced processors and have a significant impact on the lives of ordinary consumers. In recent years, the demand for various computing and smart devices has surged, leading to a global chip shortage, impacting automobiles, consumer electronics, PCs and many related products.

The global semiconductor industry is still in an upward phase of prosperity, driving the industry's profit elasticity upward this year; in the long run, the scale of the global semiconductor industry has long-term demand growth: Over the past 20 years, the global semiconductor industry's revenue has maintained healthy growth, mainly due to the rapid growth of the technology industry.

Semiconductor chips play a unique role in the computing performance, connection perception, and storage expansion of electronic products. According to Gartner's forecast, the scale of the global semiconductor industry will grow by 17% in 2021, 10% in 2022, and the compound growth rate from 2021 to 2025 will reach 4.5%. According to CSIA data, the compound growth rate of China's semiconductor industry from 2020 to 2025 is 15%, which is higher than the global growth rate. There are many wafer foundries in mainland China, of which three wafer foundries have entered the top 10 in the world, namely SMIC, Huahong Group, and Jinghe Integrated. According to the ranking in Q4 2021, SMIC ranked fifth, Huahong ranked sixth, and Jinghe Integrated ranked tenth. This is the first time that three companies in the mainland have entered the Top 10, which shows that China's chip manufacturing industry is indeed developing rapidly.