chipmakers

TSMC leads the integrated circuit manufacturing industry overwhelmingly. The current market share of this Taiwanese company is approximately 70%, according to the consulting firm TrendForce. Samsung is the second largest producer of chips for third parties, although with a market share of 7.2% is positioned very far from the leader of this industry. And the Chinese company SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp) is hot on his heels in third position with a share of 5.32%. However, there was a time when Intel dominated the semiconductor industry with a force comparable to that currently held by TSMC. Its rise to leadership began with the 1981 agreement with IBM to supply the processor for the original PC, making the x86 architecture the standard. de facto of personal computing. Over the next three decades, Intel set the pace of technological development in the semiconductor industry, but its decline began in 2015 when it began accumulating delays in the transition to the most advanced nodes. In 2010, probably few analysts in this sector would have predicted that TSMC would take over from Intel both from a technological point of view and from a strictly commercial perspective. Its market share of 70% says it all. Now it is the Chinese chip manufacturers who are slowly beginning to intimidate. SMIC, as we have just seen, is already hot on Samsung’s heels in the fight to manufacture semiconductors for third parties. And Hua Hong and Huawei are pushing harder and harder. So much so, in fact, that TSMC shareholders are starting to get restless. Huawei wants to change the rules of the game that TSMC is winning CC Wei, the current president of TSMC, has assured that his company “is not afraid” of competition from China. This assertion is not accidental. In fact, this executive spoke these words in response to a shareholder’s question during the annual meeting that was held just a few hours ago. wei has pointed out that competition has been a constant throughout the company’s forty years of history. And it’s true. But it is also true that no company has led the chip sector forever. Fairchild Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, and, of course, Intel, have led. And all of them have fallen. If we look towards China, the companies that seem to worry TSMC the most are SMIC and Huawei. In fact, their alliance has allowed SMIC to manufacture 7nm integrated circuits using the equipment deep ultraviolet photolithography (UVP) of ASML and without the need to resort to the most advanced machines of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). Also, as we told you last week. Huawei has presented a new scaling law and a new chip architecture capable, on paper, of taking its semiconductors to a lithographic process node equivalent to 1.4 nm by 2031. Huawei’s plan is to continue improving the performance and density of its chips despite the restrictions At the moment the most advanced integrated circuits that TSMC, Intel or Samsung produce are 2 nm. Huawei’s plan is to continue improving the performance and density of its chips despite restrictions that limit China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. And the heart of their strategy is the “tau scaling law.” This principle seeks to reduce the time it takes for signals and data to travel through computer chips and equipment. It proposes a paradigm shift that replaces the traditional geometric miniaturization of transistors with temporal scaling (τ), hence its name. It seems like a very complicated strategy, but it’s actually reasonably simple. We can easily understand what it is by referring to this example. Let’s imagine that we have a city (the chip) with many buildings (transistors) connected by roads (wires). Moore’s Law says: “Make buildings smaller to fit more in the same space“. Huawei, however, proposes: “buildings can no longer be much smaller, so instead let’s make cars (electrical signals) travel faster on the roads, and redesign the urban layout so that they travel less distance.” τ (tau) is, precisely, the time it takes a car to go from one building to another, and Huawei’s bet is to reduce it as much as possible. Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture plays an essential role in this approach. And, if we continue with our example, it proposes a new design of the roads on which cars circulate, so that the chip will perform better without the need to build smaller buildings. Huawei has anticipated that its next generation of Kirin chips, which will arrive next fall, will be the first to implement the LogicFolding architecture. Whatever its Chinese competitors do, TSMC will continue to do very well in the short and medium term. But in the long term his current leadership is not guaranteed. Image | TSMC More information | SCMP In Xataka | The condemnation that afflicts China: after decades of manufacturing a competitive desktop processor, it is six years behind