Semi-conductor plants...

[Nena Trinity]

Ok since apparently only Samsung and TSMC are able to make any 7nm to 8nm chips, I feel like the market is in the situation the two cannot manufacture enough chips? It's also maybe not only due to Covid but also due to supply & demand. If so why doesn't Samsung or TSMC licence the 8nm and 7nm recipe to someone like Global Foundries? Samsung even did it in the past with 14nm right?

[Moonzy]

possibly:

1) why share the profit? if licensing fee is too high then glofo prob wont take it

2) does glofo have the capability to do it?

[Nena Trinity]

48 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

possibly:

1) why share the profit? if licensing fee is too high then glofo prob wont take it

2) does glofo have the capability to do it?

They are currently at 12nm LPP+ so I would think them or SMIC(has a node comparable to Samsungs 8nm/10nm) would be perfectly capable to do it.

[mariushm]

Even if they license it, do they have the MONEY to make it?  A fab costs hundreds of millions of dollars  if not billions to build and start it.

 

And then, it burns money even if it's doing nothing... you HAVE TO make chips all the time, even if you throw them away... it can be more costly to shut down the fab (a process in itself which can take hours to days to complete) and it also takes days if my memory is correct to start a fab. (That's why prices fluctuate so much when you hear things like Micron memory factory lost power for 10 minutes or something like that ... takes hours for factory to start back up and recalibrate a lot of things an in the meantime quite possible a few days worth of wafers were maybe damaged or unusable so it's actually days worth of production thrown in trash. 

 

Now let's say the factory makes 10k chips a day and samsung lets another company make chips and now there's 20k chips made each day. They keep making them for a few months and satisfy the demand and then the orders go down and now the fab burns money  because there's no orders or too low orders.

 

AMD actually owned Global Foundries and had to give it up because it cost too much, and even then it had to agree to place orders and process a minimum amount of wafers made at Global Foundries for a number of years as a condition of sale - because the investors that took it were afraid the rest of orders weren't enough to keep it profitable.

 

 

[whm1974]

14 hours ago, mariushm said:

Even if they license it, do they have the MONEY to make it?  A fab costs hundreds of millions of dollars  if not billions to build and start it.

 

And then, it burns money even if it's doing nothing... you HAVE TO make chips all the time, even if you throw them away... it can be more costly to shut down the fab (a process in itself which can take hours to days to complete) and it also takes days if my memory is correct to start a fab. (That's why prices fluctuate so much when you hear things like Micron memory factory lost power for 10 minutes or something like that ... takes hours for factory to start back up and recalibrate a lot of things an in the meantime quite possible a few days worth of wafers were maybe damaged or unusable so it's actually days worth of production thrown in trash. 

 

Now let's say the factory makes 10k chips a day and samsung lets another company make chips and now there's 20k chips made each day. They keep making them for a few months and satisfy the demand and then the orders go down and now the fab burns money  because there's no orders or too low orders.

 

AMD actually owned Global Foundries and had to give it up because it cost too much, and even then it had to agree to place orders and process a minimum amount of wafers made at Global Foundries for a number of years as a condition of sale - because the investors that took it were afraid the rest of orders weren't enough to keep it profitable.

Isn't AMD the main Customer of Global Foundries?

[Nena Trinity]

4 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Isn't AMD the main Customer of Global Foundries?

Only for 12/14nm memory controllers for Zen chips most likely...

[GDRRiley]

4 hours ago, whm1974 said:

Isn't AMD the main Customer of Global Foundries?

no they really only make IO dies and chipsets (I think) there.

 

The cost for Global foundries is to high. and samsungs 8nm node is really a 10

[Nena Trinity]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

no they really only make IO dies and chipsets (I think) there.

 

The cost for Global foundries is to high. and samsungs 8nm node is really a 10

Forgot about their chipsets LMAO.