TSMC: Specialty Technologies

By Cadence

May 2, 2019

What is a "specialty technology"?

Kevin Zhang, the VP of business development, told us at the recent TSMC Technology Symposium:

"If Yuh-Jier Mii doesn't talk about it, then it's a specialty technology"

Yuh-Jier Mii is the head of technology development for the mainline digital processes: 7nm, 5nm, 3nm, and beyond. He had spoken earlier that morning.

TSMC Has Never Closed a Fab

Kevin explained that specialty technology runs in Fabs 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16. I don't know why, but TSMC doesn't have a fab 4, 7, or 9. Here is TSMC's list of all TSMC fabs.

That's a lot of fabs, but here's an amazing thing. Cheng-Ming Lin pointed out last year that TSMC has never closed a fab. Fab 1 was leased in the very early days, and they did give it back. But that's it. That was at last year's Technology Symposium which I reported on in my post TSMC's Fab Plans, and More. I assume the missing fab numbers got merged into adjacent fabs.

The strategy is to run mainline digital when a fab is new, and then find more lines of business to run in it as the volume of digital wafers moves to the next fab over the following years.

To read the full article, click here