My understanding is that 1 company in Taiwan makes the greatest chips in the world and no one else can replicate them. How is that possible?
In: Engineering
As other responders have said, it’s not that other vendors don’t have leading edge transistor technology. So what TSMC does can, to a degree, be replicated. But what is very difficult to replicate is the combined *volume* and *reliability* at which TSMC does it. It’s a weird side-effect of semiconductor manufacturing: the more volume (number of wafer starts) you have, the more reliable (higher yield) the semiconductors produced will be. TSMC has been a leader at this for 30 years, putting a steady percentage of their profits into technology and reliability improvements that bring them more and larger customers, which bring them higher profits and … around it goes. The only other companies which achieve a similar degree of volume and quality are the 3 remaining DRAM and Flash makers: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. There are no non-DRAM, non-Flash foundries that are better than TSMC in terms of volume and reliability.
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