Re:TSMC warns over deepening slump in chipmaking sector
by mschuster91 on Friday July 21, 2023 @03:59PM
(#36818866)
> Computer parts are always high-margin. They're made out of purified sand after all, the raw materials of chips is excessively cheap.
The purification and especially the lithography (aka making actual chips out of a silicon disk) is what is expensive. The machines are pricey as fuck - a single line from ASML alone costs 200 million dollars, and that's just the machines for the lithography, not including the machinery that makes the ultra pure monocrystals, that slices them, or that cuts and packages them, or the cleanrooms and the remaining support infrastructure. Or the extremely specialized staff you need to actually operate them.
And it's a ton of money involved with very long lead times - say you're TSMC, you get an order for a batch of chips, and even if you had capacity starting tomorrow, the 700 steps to the final product take three months [1]. That's a massive amount of capital to be stuck for months, and errors can waste all of that.
The purification and especially the lithography (aka making actual chips out of a silicon disk) is what is expensive. The machines are pricey as fuck - a single line from ASML alone costs 200 million dollars, and that's just the machines for the lithography, not including the machinery that makes the ultra pure monocrystals, that slices them, or that cuts and packages them, or the cleanrooms and the remaining support infrastructure. Or the extremely specialized staff you need to actually operate them.
And it's a ton of money involved with very long lead times - say you're TSMC, you get an order for a batch of chips, and even if you had capacity starting tomorrow, the 700 steps to the final product take three months [1]. That's a massive amount of capital to be stuck for months, and errors can waste all of that.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/three-month...