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
In addition to all the other things everyone else has said, features on top-of-the-range modern chips are just a few atoms across.
Everything is super sensitive to the environment at these scales and the kind of physics we are used to in our macroscopic world is overwhelmed by considerations like quantum effects.
People can do this stuff in the lab, but that is very different to doing stuff profitably at scale. When your yield rates are affected by e.g. a roadworks two blocks over, you have the manufacturing process from hell. It takes a long time, a lot of trial and error and a huge investment to get everything working smoothly; it’s not just a matter of doing the right thing, but also of working out what the right thing to do even is given what it is like where you are and what is around you. Since the outcome is the result of many many iterations of trial and error, people may not even be explicitly aware of which tiny details matter and are critical to get right.
It is certainly possible to set up a workable fab node elsewhere, and others do exist, but it would take a vast amount of time, money and effort to go from building site to commercially profitable facility even if you had complete access to TSMC facilities to use as reference.
Latest Answers