Industry Expert Blogs
Moore's Law Slowing? Don't Tell TSMCBreakfast Bytes - Paul McLellanMar. 28, 2016 |
TSMC is a manufacturing powerhouse. It has twice the capacity of any other non-memory semiconductor company. It has the best yield in the industry, driven by collecting over 1M datapoints per second from the equipment in its fabs. They are the only company that can ramp from a standing start to full volume by adding 20K wafers per month for three consecutive months. So from 0 to 60K wafers per month in a single quarter (basically manufacturing 90K wafers in the first quarter and then 180K wafers each quarter after that).
To support this, they spend $2.2B on R&D, but if you add in the R&D of their top 10 fabless customers, the whole ecosystem has closer to $20B in R&D.