TSMC Damaged by Earthquake, Could Impact AMD and NVIDIA GPU production

btarunr · Feb 17, 2016

The recent 6.4 magnitude Taiwan earthquake, which hit the island nation on February 6th, affected TSMC worse than expected. Taiwan's premier semiconductor foundry, TSMC, had initially expected semiconductor wafer shipments to be down by less than 1%, but it is now emerging that the drop in shipments could be higher, because the damage to one of its facilities, Fab-14, is worse than originally assessed.

TSMC, in an official communication to its clients, assured that 95% of the foundry machines could return to functionality within 2-3 days after the earthquake. To that effect, machines in Fab-6 and Fab-14B have been fully restored. Despite the disaster, the company appears confident of reaching revenue targets of US $5.9-6.0 billion for Q1-2016. TSMC is the primary foundry partner of major fabless semiconductor companies, such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and AMD. AMD recently moved its next-generation GPU manufacturing to Korean silicon giant Samsung, while NVIDIA is building its next "Pascal" GPU family on TSMC's process.

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Ferrum Master · Feb 17, 2016

Expecting one quarter delays... price premium +30% price... we had the experience with HDD makers... later reporting quarter income records ffs...

jbrown · Feb 17, 2016

I wonder if earthquake is an excuse for the increasing price for upcoming graphic cards..

HumanSmoke · Feb 17, 2016

jbrown said:
I wonder if earthquake is an excuse for the increasing price for upcoming graphic cards..

Shouldn't be unless they plan on using 20nm (they won't). Fab 14 is 20nm. The Phase extension, Fab 14(B) (which is supposed to be back up and running) fabs on 16nmFF+

FordGT90Concept · Feb 17, 2016

Who buys 20nm chips from TSMC then? It's going to cause a headache for someone.

HumanSmoke · Feb 17, 2016

FordGT90Concept said:
Who buys 20nm chips from TSMC then? It's going to cause a headache for someone.

There would still be ARM IP based designs using CLN20SOC. I'm also pretty sure that FPGA's from Xilinx etc would still be fabbed on 20nm as well as 16nmFF+

Ferrum Master · Feb 17, 2016

HumanSmoke said:
There would still be ARM IP based designs using CLN20SOC. I'm also pretty sure that FPGA's from Xilinx etc would still be fabbed on 20nm as well as 16nmFF+

Do you know where nVidia makes their interposer btw?

zithe · Feb 17, 2016

Who knows how expensive it is to repair those facilities.

FordGT90Concept · Feb 17, 2016

Ferrum Master said:
Do you know where nVidia makes their interposer btw?

AMD didn't get theirs from TSMC, I doubt NVIDIA would either. Interprosers are really big processes--bigger than TSMC makes.

medi01 · Feb 17, 2016

Since AMD's Polaris was dubbed "14nm" can we conclude, that AMD's next gen GPUs are planned to come from Samsung?

bug · Feb 17, 2016

FordGT90Concept said:
Who buys 20nm chips from TSMC then? It's going to cause a headache for someone.

Fabs on older processes are reassigned to build less critical components (like controllers and such). Granted, 20nm is not that old, but it's mature enough that, if needed, one can source their parts from somewhere else with relatively few headaches.
It's not a joy your you were waiting for parts from Fab 14, but I don't think it's that bad either.

bug · Feb 17, 2016

medi01 said:
Since AMD's Polaris was dubbed "14nm" can we conclude, that AMD's next gen GPUs are planned to come from Samsung?

That's been widely known for a while, afaik. Imho, 14nm vs 16nm will be non-issue, but it will come down to yields.

geon2k2 · Feb 17, 2016

6.4 earthquake is nothing for that area, I'm surprised it had consequences.

Fukushima earthquake had 9 magnitude and didn't had much impact ... except there was also a Tsunami ... following it.
Earthquake energy is exponential so 9 grade earthquake is 63095734.44 bigger than 6.4 grade earthquake. There is a nice formula on wikipedia : 10^(3/2)*(m2-m1)

ShurikN · Feb 17, 2016

Wait, so what is AMD getting currently from TSMC, and what will in the ZEN/GCN4.0 era? As far as I know they wont be getting anything from TSMC for the upcoming generations. Or am I mistaken?

Ferrum Master · Feb 17, 2016

ShurikN said:
Wait, so what is AMD getting currently from TSMC, and what will in the ZEN/GCN4.0 era? As far as I know they wont be getting anything from TSMC for the upcoming generations. Or am I mistaken?

The low end non HBM silicon will be still made in TSMC if I remember correctly. GLOFO is MIA still...

john_ · Feb 17, 2016

In the title it says that it could impact AMD. How? Does Samsung produce 14nm chips at TSMC's facilities?

Casecutter · Feb 17, 2016

The smart money won't see them moving production to Oklahoma...

HumanSmoke · Feb 17, 2016

Ferrum Master said:
Do you know where nVidia makes their interposer btw?

Couldn't tell you definitively. The choices at the moment would be either UMC (who make the interposer for AMD's Fiji) or TSMC (who make the interposer for Xilinx's Virtex-7/-7HT). Both are 65nm passive silicon designs. TSMC is moving from CoWoS to InFO, but I doubt the process is mature enough for a large GPU + HBM arrangement. Likewise, the assembly is probably down to two vendors also. Amkor (who assemble AMD's Fury package) and ASE.
Here's a (very) brief graphics of where everyone is at the moment

Sorry I can't offer a more precise estimate.

ZeppMan217 · Feb 17, 2016

Whatever happened to GlobalFoundries and their partnership with AMD?

Kurt Maverick · Feb 17, 2016

Great. If the new gen is delayed because of this.....fuck God ¬¬

HisDivineOrder · Feb 18, 2016

ZeppMan217 said:
Whatever happened to GlobalFoundries and their partnership with AMD?

AMD stopped talking about GloFo once GloFo became a verb synonym in the industry for FUBAR'ed. They started talking about other companies that partner with GloFo. Like Samsung.

nexus_a · Feb 22, 2016

geon2k2 said:
6.4 earthquake is nothing for that area, I'm surprised it had consequences.

Fukushima earthquake had 9 magnitude and didn't had much impact ... except there was also a Tsunami ... following it.
Earthquake energy is exponential so 9 grade earthquake is 63095734.44 bigger than 6.4 grade earthquake. There is a nice formula on wikipedia : 10^(3/2)*(m2-m1)

Soil is soft in Tainan and it is close to the epicentre...

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TSMC Damaged by Earthquake, Could Impact AMD and NVIDIA GPU production

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