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At the beginning of May, we noted that Taiwan Semiconductor was considering bolstering its production in the U.S., and that President Biden's Commerce Secretary was urging more domestic production. Now, it looks like TSMC could be within striking distance of a serious U.S. expansion. The chipmaking giant is "weighing plans to pump tens of billions of dollars more into cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. state of Arizona than it had previously disclosed", a Reuters exclusive revealed Friday morning.The company had already said it was going to invest $10 billion to $12 billion in Arizona. Now, the company is mulling...

TSMC and other major high-tech firms in Taiwan have reported little impact from a five-hour rolling power blackout that affected many parts of the country on May 13. TSMC stated some of its fabs saw brief voltage drops as a result of the outage following electricity distribution issues at a power plant in Kaohsiung, but the foundry house soon activated emergency backup generators to maintain normal production and minimize possible impact. The STSP administration also noted that only seven out of some 40 companies using 22.8kV power supply system in the park were affected by the power blackout, and most...

SiFive, a company established by researchers who invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture in the University of California Berkeley several years ago, has this week announced two platforms which could be used to design semi-custom SoCs based on RISC-V cores. SiFive is the world’s first and yet the only company developing chips featuring the RISC-V ISA and it already has initial customers interested in designing SoCs for machine learning, storage, embedded, IoT and wearable applications. SiFive: World’s First Developer of Commercial RISC-V Chips RISC-V is an open-source microprocessor architecture developed by researchers in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and...

IBM today unveiled a breakthrough in semiconductor design and process with the development of the world's first chip announced with 2 nanometer (nm) nanosheet technology. Semiconductors play critical roles in everything from computing, to appliances, to communication devices, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure.Demand for increased chip performance and energy efficiency continues to rise, especially in the era of hybrid cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. IBM's new 2 nm chip technology helps advance the state-of-the-art in the semiconductor industry, addressing this growing demand. It is projected to achieve 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use, than...

Last September, when Arm trotted out the Neoverse V1 design and made it available, the N2 design was not yet available. But as of this announcement, today, it is. Both the Ampere Computing Altra and the Amazon Web Services Graviton2 processors, which are the two production-grade Arm server chips in the market today, are based on N1 cores and platform designs, with various customizations...With the V1 platform, Arm is designing cores and the uncore regions of a hypothetical processor using either 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer processes, presumably either at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp or Samsung Electronics, which have fabs...

Speaking to Sky News yesterday Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu explained Taiwan has been forced to invest massively in its military as the threat of a Chinese invasion grows. The foreign minister said Taiwan was putting "more investment in our military" after issuing a grave warning that China "seems to be preparing for their final military assault against Taiwan". But despite the concerns he stressed that the people of Taiwan are "determined to defend ourselves" in the face of growing Chinese aggression. Mr Wu said: "They (China) have been conducting disinformation campaigns, hybrid warfare and recently they have increased their...

Apple just launched its first custom processor for computers. The M1 chip is similar to the A-series processors inside the iPhone and iPad, and it powers just two devices: The late 2020 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. And yet, Intel is still terrified, having mounted a massive ad campaign in an attempt to convince the world that the M1 MacBooks can’t stand up to Windows 10 laptops running on Intel hardware. The campaign was somewhat half-baked, and has since drawn criticism and ridicule for its missteps. The M1 MacBooks offer formidable performance and excellent battery life, with M1 being built...

Nvidia just made some MASSIVE announcements in terms of ARM-based computers, so they're now joining Apple and AMD in the fight against Intel and their x86-based chips.

Shanghai Tianshu Intellectual Semiconductor Co. (Tianshu Zhixin) announced Wednesday that it's nearing "mass production and commercial delivery" of Big Island, China's first domestically produced 7nm general-purpose GPU (GPGPU). Tianshu Zhixin said in January that BI was made using an unidentified 7nm process node and 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging. On Wednesday, it confirmed our suspicion that BI was made using TSMC's 7nm FinFET process. It also shared a little more information about what people can expect from BI when it starts to ship. Tianshu Zhixin claimed that BI offers "nearly twice the performance of mainstream manufacturers' products" at a lower power...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manuf... (TSM) Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE:TSM), a major supplier to Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), has confirmed plans to build a $12B chip factory in Arizona as the U.S. tries to wrestle global supply chains back from China. The plant, which would create over 1,600 jobs, will produce the most sophisticated 5 nanometer chips that can be used in high-end defense and communications devices. The Trump administration is also in talks with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) about new foundries. While the company has major manufacturing operations in the U.S., it supplies only its own chips rather than making them for outside...

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has been in discussions for several years with both TSMC and Intel to build advanced chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. and extract U.S. supply chain needs from China and southeast Asia. It appears his efforts, and the emphasis on global supply-chain shifts from President Trump, are getting results. According to numerous media reports Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is likely to announce this week they will build an advanced chip manufacturing facility in Arizona. A manufacturing facility for advanced 5 nanometer chip manufacturing is a steep investment decision costing around $10 billion. This shift in...

There's money in chips.Photo: Cult of Mac Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), a.k.a. the world’s largest contract chip maker and one of Apple’s two suppliers for the present-gem A9 chip, has announced that its 2015 earnings were the highest in its 29-year history. Contrasting with reports of developers said to be suffering the effects of weakened Apple orders, TSMC has thrived on the back of the iPhone 6 and 6s — with $9.15 billion in net profits this year alone, representing a 16.2 percent annual increase. TSMC said that net profit, earnings-per-share, and consolidated sales all broke the company’s past...

ARM SoCs are set to be speed cranked next year as both TSMC and GlobalFoundries have revealed they plan to release chips running at 3GHz sometime in 2014. Phys.org reports that the current fastest ARM chips are clocked at about 2.3GHz, and most are around 1.6GHz, so the new chips should provide quite a bit more oomph.Both TSMC and GlobalFoundries will be moving their chip making process to 20nm, down from the current smallest scale they can work on which is 28nm. As well as allowing the manufacturers to make faster chips without extra cooling considerations, the process shrink...

Twelve years of cooperation Chipmaker for hire TSMC and Nvidia have announced the shipment of the one-billionth Geforce graphics core. In a collaboration spanning three decades, the two outfits have gone through several GPU generations and manufacturing nodes, starting with the ancient 250nm Riva cores. Currently TSMC produces 40nm parts designed by Nvidia and the 28nm node should come on line later this year. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted that the complexity of Nvidia’s GPUs has increased by more than one thousand times since the start of the partnership. TSMC CEO Morris Chang cited the success as a prime...

EDITORIAL Don't get too enamoured with your fancy, long term plans... Process technology is the best friend, and worst enemy of the graphics world.  Throughout the years we have seen improvements in process tech create new opportunities within the 3D graphics industry, and at the same time we have seen it be the downfall of certain products and cycles.  Today we see that in full effect, and for a variety of causes. Looking back through the years we have seen some great advances, and some huge stumbles.  Consider NVIDIA and their flawed GeForce FX design on a “not quite ready...