The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained (opens in new tab)

Great example of this presentation style is in an old version of the Extreme ultraviolet lithography wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extreme_ultraviol...

One of the most chaotic wikipedia pages I've seen. Sadly today it's much cleaner.

Semiconductor industry is almost all B2B. People don't invest much time into trying to make technical content look aesthetically pleasing. It only gets read by other technical experts who don't value aesthetics as long as the information is clear.

I don’t suppose you noticed who the author was either, or did you? ;)

Brilliant all-around guy. Wrote the book on some things back in the day. Sometimes reading a difficult presentation is the price to pay for knowledge.

That's because you have to pay an extra licensing fee for clear and concise visual design. Besides, that would add complexity - imagine if there was something that needed to be changed after the article was published! /s

It seems like the SC industry is a bunch of Brent from the Phoenix Project where miracles happen when they enter a trance and find the right bit to flip at the right place and that their PowerPoint presentations is a snapshot of the neural network inside their brain.

It is a little bit dated. But the core concepts are all still valid. I posted it because - as someone working in the industry - I find it is somewhat rare to find a public article that attempts to explain the "big picture" landscape of the semiconductor ecosystem.

Some of it is a tiny bit outdated or paints a partial picture (STM does 22nm too for instance, although I'm not sure if it did in 2012).

But overall I think it's pretty current and accurate.

One thing is doesn't do is point out that "x nm" doesn't have anything to do with gate length or physical dimensions anymore. It's commercial speech for transistor density (vertical FinFET are denser than planar transistor, gate length is roughly the same).

I hope it's not too outdated, but if it is I'd be really interested in a newer article that's written like this. I really appreciated the simple breakdown of the supply chain. As a total outsider, I've always really wanted to understand why TSMC and ASML (for instance) seemed to be so important politically.

It can't be too outdated if the stated date is to be trusted ("02-06-2022") as the industry doesn't move that rapidly.

No disagreeing with your point - the article does seem outdated - but Apple still does license some Arm core designs I think - eg in the U series SoCs.

> But I don't see how RISC has any hope, as ARM is already everywhere

You are ignoring the very low end.

ARM requires a royalty. It's not much, but it is what it is. RISC-V requires no such royalty (that I know of).

At the lowest end kind of chips, a fraction of a penny royalty is a big deal.

Currently, those chips currently all use proprietary designs. All the tools supporting those chips are absolute trash, as expected. Converging to a single architecture that can use all the same design tools and software ecosystem would be a big win.

I view RISC-V like I view autoformatters. It actually kinda sucks, nobody likes it very much, but converging to a single point brings more benefits than holding to your own unique opinions.

Aside: If I had my drothers, I'd converge backward to something like DEC Alpha EV-4/EV-5 (21064/21164). EV-4 was good enough to provide the basis for the StrongARM architecture. The software tooling for those chips still exists even if a bit dusty. MIPS dumb-ass byte access patents have long expired so we can have real byte access instructions. And in-order execution is often a plus in the embedded world rather than a minus.

I'm no expert, but in lieu of not having any sibling comments yet, let me offer my amateur view:

The name RISC-V (which I'm supposing you're referring to) comes from "reduced instruction set computer (RISC)" (from around 1980s), with a added "five". It's a instruction set architecture (ISA) which is basically a abstract specification for how a CPUs instructions could be. RISC-V is not a company, but a "open standard" for this ISA. While ARM for example both maintains a ISA, runs a company and builds chips, RISC-V is maintained by a foundation which many companies are a part of.

RISC-V is exciting because it's one of the few open standard ISA with a lot of public references and available material for curious hackers, compared to what we've seen before. So far, the performance and the power consumption (as far as I know) hasn't been as optimized as other architectures, so it's still early to tell if it'll have some larger impact on the industry at large or not.

The R in ARM means risc. So arm must be advanced risky.

I think you meant to write RISC-V and not just RISC.

Intel and AMD are focused on the x86(-64) ISA, with a strong presence in the desktop and server space [1].

ARM is everywhere mobile, they really cornered the "low-power" (ie energy) space way ahead of Intel and AMD. They provide a great ecosystem of IPs and tools around them. Think of them as the "battery's included" DIY provider for building chips.

But both of the above generally target general-purpose CPUs [2], the one you usually think as being the core of your computer. But there are others! DSPs have dedicated instructions for saturated math (no overflow/rollover) and multiply-accumulate, GPUs are DSPs on steroids, and there's otherwise an entire spectrum of complexity you can have from your 8-bit integer microcontroller that doesn't even have a divide instruction, all the way up to the massively-parallel floating-point processors.

Problem is, that spectrum was divided between many different proprietary ISAs, each with their various levels of tool sophistication and support.

RISC-V is based on the idea that we can do a better job unifying the ISAs across this spectrum of processor complexity. It's an extensible ISA that starts with basic integer-only operations and direct addressing, and can extend with instructions for more sophisticated operations such as adding 32-bit floating operations, 64-bit float, supervisor mode, hypervisor mode, SIMD... All of which can share a common ecosystem of compilers, formal verification, debuggers...

But the real popularity of RISC-V is that you can use its ISA, and design a chip around it, freely without having to pay a (expensive!) license to ARM. This does present an existential threat to ARM, although they have a strong head-start in offering a ready-made ecosystem of tools. Do you want to spend $10M in engineering manpower and experimental silicon tape-out designing your new chip? Or just pay $2M to ARM to license their known-good CPU?

It takes a lot of effort, expertise (and iteration!) to design a CPU core that's as performant and feature-full as what ARM spent years (decades!) perfecting. Do companies choose RISC-V because it allows them to re-use their tools on novel chip designs, or because it's just cheaper and, new as it is, sufficient for their purposes? It's exciting to watch the development.

(Also I can't help but notice that many of the RISC-V chip announcements are coming from China)

[1] Fun fact: in the 80s and 90s, x86 was the "cheap, consumer" chip that was looked down upon by the Workstation class RISC-type chips like the Sun Sparc, or DEC Alpha (and much of Apple's chip design team sprang from a core of ex-DEC designers!) But Linux came along, Intel kept improving their chips, and took over the workstation/big-iron space from the incumbents

[2] cue the corrections about ARM's (and Intel's!) GPU design, co-processor architecture...

For China it is. The US seems to have been under the impression for the last couple decades that geopolitics don’t exist anymore.

On that note, if TSMC’s technical supremacy isn’t a core part of Taiwan’s national security strategy I’d be shocked - whatever else the US may think about Taiwan & China, the fact that our entire electronic infrastructure relies on TSMC in some form or fashion ensures we have a deep and serious ongoing commitment to their independence from our chief geopolitical rival.

As the other reply said, it's a strategic goal for China.

The EU has also recently woken up to this and launched: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/european-proce...

Seems cheaper to station troops in South Korea and even profitable to arm Taiwan.

Yeah this is one thing I don't get about the Intel is doomed crowd. Semiconductor manufacturing lead has changed hands a bunch of times in the past, with Intel being in the lead for probably most of the past 2-3 decades. TSMC has had notable problems with nodes and has been about as far behind Intel as Intel is behind now for periods.

Why wasn't TSMC doomed then? And why couldn't Intel turn around now like TSMC did?

Intel looks nothing like other vertically integrated CPU businesses that divested from manufacturing in the past, it's still making a lot of money and gross margins are still healthy (and still higher than AMD and TSMC at the moment!) although clearly taken a hit from the mid/low 60s where they typically sat down to mid/low 50s in the past 3 years. Manufacturing silicon is still a profitable business for them.

Intel also has by some important metrics, the best performing CPUs available despite competitors being on TSMC and Samsung. I don't argue the others aren't better in other equally valid metrics. It was actually much more difficult to make that same statement about competitors back when Intel had a clear silicon tech advantage.

So definitely Intel is a leading edge node manufacturer if others were in the past.

I think the chart is meant to be an approximated summary, not a precise timeline down to sub-year intervals. Even though Intel has fallen somewhat behind compared to norm, I think they should still be considered "leading edge". The "Intel 7" process (formerly known as Intel 10nm process) is comparable in transistors per mm^2 with TSMC 7nm. Really, we should all drop the "nm" naming conventions and simply go with transistors per mm^2 for a given design pattern.

The very long form is an EE degree with an emphasis in VLSI.

In seriousness, there just isn't as much information about semiconductors publicly available like there is in software. If you can make your question a little more specific I will try to help.

> Infographic is outdated and borderline propaganda.

> Taiwan is expected to fall next.

You'll do everyone a favor by not exaggerating that much. You make it seem like there is consensus around the expectation that Taiwan will "fall next" while there is no such thing. You're also making claims about fabs being set on fire or being hacked by foreign entities without any sort of evidence.

There is another problem: all of the equipment makers have stopped producing the "old" tools that are used for >40nm process 8 inch wafers. People in these "old" fabs seriously go on eBay to buy used parts to replace broken parts inside tools in their fab because the original tool maker stopped making spare parts years ago.

Fairchild was acquired by Onsemi