if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

Question

if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

In: Technology

Answer 1

TSMC is basically the only company that can manufacture the tech in the first place, the methods and technology that they use is the real secret sauce. So there aren’t exactly any foreign actors that could use those design and make them.

This is why TSMC (and Taiwan more broadly) is such a HUGE deal. It basically has a complete monopoly on high end chip manufacturing. There’s plenty of companies that can make older tech, but for the newest of the new no one else can.

​

Patent laws and the like definitely make it more difficult, but that’s only part of it.