Industry Expert Blogs
TSMC: Specialty Technologies-May 2, 2019 |
What is a "specialty technology"?
Kevin Zhang, the VP of business development, told us at the recent TSMC Technology Symposium:
"If Yuh-Jier Mii doesn't talk about it, then it's a specialty technology"
Yuh-Jier Mii is the head of technology development for the mainline digital processes: 7nm, 5nm, 3nm, and beyond. He had spoken earlier that morning.
TSMC Has Never Closed a Fab
Kevin explained that specialty technology runs in Fabs 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16. I don't know why, but TSMC doesn't have a fab 4, 7, or 9. Here is TSMC's list of all TSMC fabs.
That's a lot of fabs, but here's an amazing thing. Cheng-Ming Lin pointed out last year that TSMC has never closed a fab. Fab 1 was leased in the very early days, and they did give it back. But that's it. That was at last year's Technology Symposium which I reported on in my post TSMC's Fab Plans, and More. I assume the missing fab numbers got merged into adjacent fabs.
The strategy is to run mainline digital when a fab is new, and then find more lines of business to run in it as the volume of digital wafers moves to the next fab over the following years.