TSMC: Specialty Technologies

By _Cadence - Breakfast Bytes

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.

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