Seems like the automotive industry is gonna be the one to have to blink here. I’m not intimately involved in the details of the industry but didn’t the automotive industry already try to pass their risk onto TSMC by cancelling contracts early on into covid and we’re already told to get to the back of the line when they wanted their chip orders again?

If TSMC has enough demand to sell everything they make, they don’t really need to take specific client needs into account

What does blink mean? Does your chips work when it is -70c - cars are used in arctic environments and so automakers have special tests to ensure they work in cold temperatures most of us will never see. Do you chips work when it is +65c - the inside of a parked car will get that hot, and the car is expected to work. How long will you keep the new chips in production - the longer the better we need to provide spare parts for everything for at least 10 years, so if you go out of production we need to fill a warehouse with the final production run just in case the things start mass failing in a few years.

I think the auto industry is looking to see if they can bypass the whole above mess with their own fabs. They don't need fancy processes, they need something reliable that they can depend on for years. The cost to a fab though means they need to worry about anti-trust as they can't go alone.

I think OP is saying that TSMC is saying “Okay auto manufacturers, we don’t want to manufacture chips that meet all of your requirements when we have so much order volume, so you’ll have to drop the requirements or find a different fab.” So the auto industry making their own fabs is exactly what TSMC wants them to do.

And the automakers will likely balk at spending many dozens of billions of capital outside of their core competency.

Since all the other legacy fabs are also at capacity for the next few years.

It's rapidly becoming part of their core competency, no different than steel panel manufacturing.

If the auto manufacturers don’t want chips to be part of their core competencies, then they’ll probably need to go back to building cars like they did thirty years ago.

Legacy auto is screwed. They are getting smaller and have fixed costs and fixed cultures that are going to be hard to remove. At the same time this makes it hard to recruit the types of people you need to turn the ship around.

This thread is a good example of the legacy auto mentality of blaming a supplier, instead of taking responsibility for the situation they are in.

This is about all auto. Or you thing that EV won't experience cold climate?

Doubtful the story you heard is correct.

Too many mainstream articles on semiconductors are just vague, uncheckable facts combined with filler that seems to have been suggested by Intel's PR department, even when Intel is totally irrelevant. Intel needs delicious subsidies!

> Intel is totally irrelevant

Intel still has the fastest chip in the world with the i9-12900KS. They are also the second largest semiconductor company in the world by revenue, only just last year barely passed by Samsung. [1]

I know Intel is not hip, but to call them irrelevant is some serious reality distortion.

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[1] https://www.eetasia.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/04/I...

Sorry. I was responding in the context of automotive. There have been so many articles about the automotive chip shortage mentioning Intel. It's seems like filler by uninformed journalists. Intel is not a top dog in auto and most of Intel's auto qualified parts are in the Altera line actually made by TSMC.

Intel is still very very relevant overall to server, networking, and consumer space. Huge revenues!

Oh yeah, I've noticed that as well. Mainstream media loves talking about the general chip shortage and investment into 5nm and 3nm fabs in the same article, whether it is Intel or TSMC. The media (and the general population) seems to be fully convinced that a chip is a chip.

I honestly don't really understand 95% of what you've written here, but could this mean an end of godawful touch screens in cars?

No, it means there will be even worse touchscreens because now automakers can't afford silicon that might actually power a tablet.

That's scary - I have a < 1 yr old Tesla model Y and it is embarrassing how underpowered the tablet that controls basically every part of the car is.

Tesla's have pretty responsive displays.

The last vehicle I bought, I turned down several vehicles because many of the internal environmental controls were through a touchscreen, and the touchscreen was so slow and bad I was honestly astonished that they were selling it.

The salesman tried to downplay it but I still walked out of the ford dealership 100% because of their shitty controls/touchscreen.

Ended up buying a car with old fashioned buttons and knobs, much happier.

FWIW, Tesla is one of the few companies that actually put decent processors in their cars: in lieu of a cruddy, off-the-shelf ARM CPU, they use Intel (and more recently, Ryzen) x86-based machines. Their performance relative to the Cortex processors running in competitors is enormous, it must be slow due to the volume of processes Tesla is actually running onboard.

Isn't one of the big problems with Tesla vehicles that they use COTS hardware?

I'm sure I saw something about how they used commercial-grade touch screen instead of automotive grade, so they feel far nicer / more responsive than other cars but fail much faster as they aren't designed to handle repeated heating/cooling cycles that cars experience.

I don't need my car to drive itself with technology that doesn't work and requires me, pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers as test subjects. I don't need my car to be powerful enough to compute simulations of the Earth's atmosphere. I just want a basic fucking car with good enough safety features. This fetishization of shoving chips into every square centimeter is ridiculous. I want to use my computer and drive my car, not drive my computer with all of the attendant software issues that'll inevitably crop up.

How can they not afford a 300 dollar tablet in a 40k dollar car?

A $300 tablet drops support in 90days to a year. A $300 tablet equivalent in a car has a trailing maintenance requirement for service and parts for years (5-10?)

A 300 dollar tablet dies quickly in the automotive environment with outdoors-like variation in temperature and humidity. Tablet manufacturers literally write in their product sheets "do not leave the device in a car or it may get damaged"; if you leave an iPad in direct sun for a month and it dies, it's expensive for you, if the same happens to a car console, that's expensive for the manufacturer which has to repair it under warranty.

The temperature range for iPad listed by Apple is 0 to +35 C for operation and -20 to +45 C for storage. The required temperature range for electronics on automotive dashboards (which may be exposed to direct sun) is -40 to 90 C, which effectively requires different materials, which means you can't even reuse most components.

assuming you're selling 5 million of a part where the previous generation is 5-10 years old, $1.5 billion is not a lot of money for development, validation, materials, manufacturing, logistics, dealer training, integration with future models, and a decade of OTA updates

Because it becomes a $3000 tablet, in today's chip-shortage environment, to meet certification for automotive use.

Oh damn. Thanks.

Automotive is the extreme case. For now it would be good that many non-automotive chips will shift to 28nm.

That will leave some decent spare capacity for automotive.

And maybe when a lot of such chips would be done in 28nm, it would make sense for TSMC to invest more in optimizing the process for them.