TSMC signs chip deal with Apple

[Idontcare]

People like to say this but I don't see any evidence that Samsung ever stole anything submitted to their foundries. Samsung Mobile (a fairly separate entity) got blasted for making devices with physical design too similar to iPhones. That has nothing at all to do with the SoCs. I don't think Apple had to hand over anything of their higher level product roadmaps to Samsung's foundries to get their chips made.

I'm told OJ was innocent too, or that there was no evidence to the contrary

If you are looking for iron-clad evidence and you are an industry outsider who has never been a customer, or a supplier, of a Samsung fab in China or Korea then you are never going to be presented with that evidence in a way that would compel you to believe what you are seeing.

If you are an industry insider then you know what everyone knows which is that your IP is not safeguarded or protected in any way, and you move your business to another foundry where you know it will be.

Did you think it was just a coincidence that basically every big-name fabless company of consequence has migrated to TSMC?

You think they do that for TSMC's stellar wafer pricing or exquisite ability to deliver on their promised timelines? (that is supposed to be a joke )

I'm not worried about proving that Samsung does what they do, they've made their own bed and they are presently getting to lie in it. That kind of street justice is good enough for me.

 

[Ajay]

Good point. Why isn't QCOM running with open arms towards Samsung? Last I read, wafer starts at Samsung's state of the art Austin Fab are something like 40% below expected. One would think QCOM could get a good deal.

 

[Idontcare]

Good point. Why isn't QCOM running with open arms towards Samsung? Last I read, wafer starts at Samsung's state of the art Austin Fab are something like 40% below expected. One would think QCOM could get a good deal.

Another point to look at is that TI took contracts with practically every foundry out there (even SMIC!) but refused to ever take a contract with Samsung's foundry Coincidence?

I wonder what TI knew that kept them from getting into Samsung...:whiste:

 

[Exophase]

I'm told OJ was innocent too, or that there was no evidence to the contrary

If you are looking for iron-clad evidence and you are an industry outsider who has never been a customer, or a supplier, of a Samsung fab in China or Korea then you are never going to be presented with that evidence in a way that would compel you to believe what you are seeing.

I'm not looking for iron-clad evidence, I'm looking for any evidence. I'm not aware that Samsung even has logic fabs in China, just some NAND one they started building last year. And I don't see why South Korea is less reputable than Taiwan. What Samsung Mobile does has almost nothing to do with what the foundry does. Samsung's SoCs are made with the usual licensed and in-house IP like everyone else's. I'm not aware of a single thing you can say that Apple's current SoCs that'd point to Samsung stealing anything. And if this were the case why would Apple have not included it in their lawsuit?

Speaking of TI and other fabs, they were pretty vocal about their disappointment with TSMC and desire to shift OMAP5 to other fabs, back when OMAP5 still had a shot at being relevant. So they may not be running to Samsung but they look like they're running from TSMC, to UMC of all places - as if UMC is even remotely competitive.

Did you think it was just a coincidence that basically every big-name fabless company of consequence has migrated to TSMC?

Who migrated to TSMC? All of the big players currently using it have been using it for years. Apple is the only one that transitioned from Samsung. Some like TI have transitioned from their own fabs to TSMC, but you already know that has nothing to do with Samsung and everything to do with the impracticality of making new process nodes internally.

You think they do that for TSMC's stellar wafer pricing or exquisite ability to deliver on their promised timelines? (that is supposed to be a joke )

No, I think they do it because TSMC, being a pure-play foundry instead of IDM, was always better set up to provide a service to third parties.

That and the fact that they're well ahead of Samsung, and given that Samsung's foundry growth was almost entirely driven by Apple they probably always had little more than enough fab capacity for Apple. Of course with Apple leaving that capacity will open up but that hasn't really happened yet, so we don't know what Samsung will do with it.

Good point. Why isn't QCOM running with open arms towards Samsung? Last I read, wafer starts at Samsung's state of the art Austin Fab are something like 40% below expected. One would think QCOM could get a good deal.

I haven't heard anything real about prices. But I can think of a few reasons why Qualcomm would not want to leave TSMC. Aside from TSMC being ahead of Samsung (they released 28nm products before Samsung released 32nm products...) it's also an actual design effort to change fabs and not especially desirable.

 

[Idontcare]

I'm not looking for iron-clad evidence, I'm looking for any evidence. I'm not aware that Samsung even has logic fabs in China, just some NAND one they started building last year. And I don't see why South Korea is less reputable than Taiwan. What Samsung Mobile does has almost nothing to do with what the foundry does. Samsung's SoCs are made with the usual licensed and in-house IP like everyone else's. I'm not aware of a single thing you can say that Apple's current SoCs that'd point to Samsung stealing anything. And if this were the case why would Apple have not included it in their lawsuit?

Speaking of TI and other fabs, they were pretty vocal about their disappointment with TSMC and desire to shift OMAP5 to other fabs, back when OMAP5 still had a shot at being relevant. So they may not be running to Samsung but they look like they're running from TSMC, to UMC of all places - as if UMC is even remotely competitive.



Who migrated to TSMC? All of the big players currently using it have been using it for years. Apple is the only one that transitioned from Samsung. Some like TI have transitioned from their own fabs to TSMC, but you already know that has nothing to do with Samsung and everything to do with the impracticality of making new process nodes internally.



No, I think they do it because TSMC, being a pure-play foundry instead of IDM, was always better set up to provide a service to third parties.

That and the fact that they're well ahead of Samsung, and given that Samsung's foundry growth was almost entirely driven by Apple they probably always had little more than enough fab capacity for Apple. Of course with Apple leaving that capacity will open up but that hasn't really happened yet, so we don't know what Samsung will do with it.

I haven't heard anything real about prices. But I can think of a few reasons why Qualcomm would not want to leave TSMC. Aside from TSMC being ahead of Samsung (they released 28nm products before Samsung released 32nm products...) it's also an actual design effort to change fabs and not especially desirable.

Ah, ok, I see where this is going and it just isn't the kind of thing I want to spend time on.

/throws in towel

 

[jpiniero]

I think Samsung is actually getting out of the fab business now that Apple is leaving. Hence the Intel deals. They'll continue to use both Qualcomm/TSMC and Intel.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I think Samsung is actually getting out of the fab business now that Apple is leaving. Hence the Intel deals. They'll continue to use both Qualcomm/TSMC and Intel.

You think they'd just convert the logic fabs to memory?

 

[blackened23]

People like to say this but I don't see any evidence that Samsung ever stole anything submitted to their foundries. Samsung Mobile (a fairly separate entity) got blasted for making devices with physical design too similar to iPhones. That has nothing at all to do with the SoCs. I don't think Apple had to hand over anything of their higher level product roadmaps to Samsung's foundries to get their chips made.

You seem to place a lot of trust in corporations, which isn't necessarily a wise thing to do. A lot of people seem to hedge their bets on who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are among corporations but they're all pretty much the same. Businesses and corporations definitely have an ugly / cut-throat side across the board when it comes down to it.

I'm certain that Samsung used Apple's business to their advantage (as they compete in many of the same areas), and i'm also sure there is not a shred of concrete evidence anywhere. Where there is proof, you can also be sure there is plausible deniability.

 

[Exophase]

Just because I'm asking for evidence of one specific accusations doesn't mean I place a lot of trust in corporations. Excuse me for not just automatically assuming a company committed this one particular act of theft which they'd be easily liable for, and would be pretty easy to pin on them. But yeah, Apple sued them for making phones too much like iPhones (while everyone else in the industry did exactly the same thing) but ripping off their IC designs completely went past their radar.

Do you even realize that asking for evidence is not the same thing as blindly denying something? Is asking to stick with facts and objectivity really too much to ask?

I think Samsung is actually getting out of the fab business now that Apple is leaving. Hence the Intel deals. They'll continue to use both Qualcomm/TSMC and Intel.

That sounds like a whole lot of money down the drain for R&D that's still years too early to be realized.

A lot of people don't seem to be aware of this but Samsung has made SoCs and many other ICs for several years before Apple came along.

 

[Khato]

but ripping off their IC designs completely went past their radar.

The thought of Samsung potentially going this far never even crossed my mind - I'd thought all of this discussion with respect to the risks of using a competitor to manufacture your silicon was with respect to giving them a 1+ year sneak peak into your product plans. If Samsung Semiconductor let Samsung Mobile know what Apple had in the pipeline for their upcoming products' SoCs, well, there's a fair bit that can be deduced from such. (The massive increase in graphics and memory bandwidth of the A5X for example would hint at a marked increase in screen resolution.) In result Samsung Mobile would have a much better idea of what Apple products they'd be going up against and could adjust their own development to be more competitive.

 

[blackened23]

The thought of Samsung potentially going this far never even crossed my mind - I'd thought all of this discussion with respect to the risks of using a competitor to manufacture your silicon was with respect to giving them a 1+ year sneak peak into your product plans. If Samsung Semiconductor let Samsung Mobile know what Apple had in the pipeline for their upcoming products' SoCs, well, there's a fair bit that can be deduced from such. (The massive increase in graphics and memory bandwidth of the A5X for example would hint at a marked increase in screen resolution.) In result Samsung Mobile would have a much better idea of what Apple products they'd be going up against and could adjust their own development to be more competitive.

This, exactly.

 

[erunion]

I think Samsung is actually getting out of the fab business now that Apple is leaving. Hence the Intel deals. They'll continue to use both Qualcomm/TSMC and Intel.

That's a very real possibility. The mobile soc field was young and crowded, its now maturing and thinning. With the QCOM vs Intel battle that's just begun, it maybe in Samsung best interest to not join in the fight and just make friends with both sides. Licensed ARM cores have reached the end of their relevance, we won't see them in phones for much longer.

 

[Exophase]

The thought of Samsung potentially going this far never even crossed my mind - I'd thought all of this discussion with respect to the risks of using a competitor to manufacture your silicon was with respect to giving them a 1+ year sneak peak into your product plans. If Samsung Semiconductor let Samsung Mobile know what Apple had in the pipeline for their upcoming products' SoCs, well, there's a fair bit that can be deduced from such. (The massive increase in graphics and memory bandwidth of the A5X for example would hint at a marked increase in screen resolution.) In result Samsung Mobile would have a much better idea of what Apple products they'd be going up against and could adjust their own development to be more competitive.

And yet I can't think of a single way in which Samsung Mobile moved products which put them closer to Apple earlier than their other competitors.

Personally, I don't see a difference in magnitude between Samsung Semiconductor leaking logic details to the SoC makers (Samsung LSI) or the mobile device makers (Samsung Mobile), nor the former being more egregious than the latter. Both are not automatically a given and some evidence actually would apply. I also think Samsung's divisions are more walled off than some people realize, word has been going around that SamMobile came really close to completely dumping Exynos 5 Octa from any Galaxy S4s (and even if that's not true, they've so far made it into far fewer than expected)

This particular concern also doesn't make sense in the context in which people have been arguing - that manufacturing with Samsung is a risk for other SoC makers. Being as none of those other SoC makers are really making phones and tablets.

 

[Khato]

That's a very real possibility. The mobile soc field was young and crowded, its now maturing and thinning. With the QCOM vs Intel battle that's just begun, it maybe in Samsung best interest to not join in the fight and just make friends with both sides. Licensed ARM cores have reached the end of their relevance, we won't see them in phones for much longer.

Agreed - was actually discussing this exact subject earlier today with the same conclusion (minus the Samsung connection.) For the last few years Qualcomm and the licensed ARM cores had been trading places every year since both were on a two year cadence offset by a year from one another. Difference being that A15 based designs haven't really manifested this year and Qualcomm's tweaked Krait core is basically on par with it. (Qualcomm was unquestionably aided by effectively being the sole provider of LTE modems.) Now whether this trend continues or not is questionable, but it wouldn't be too surprising if it does for the simple fact that I'd imagine both Qualcomm and Apple have larger design teams working on their respective ARM processor cores than ARM itself.

 

[Exophase]

Licensed ARM cores may well mostly lose presence in high and even medium range phones and tablets but the lower end Chinese and Taiwanese vendors like MediaTek, Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner, and several others will still use them. And I don't see them all going away overnight. A fair number of them are probably already planned customers for Cortex-A12.

 

[insertcarehere]

Licensed ARM cores may well mostly lose presence in high and even medium range phones and tablets but the lower end Chinese and Taiwanese vendors like MediaTek, Rockchip, Amlogic, Allwinner, and several others will still use them. And I don't see them all going away overnight. A fair number of them are probably already planned customers for Cortex-A12.

That's probably true, considering the large number of devices from various OEMs using stuff like the Mediatek mt6589, they would probably be very well served by what cortex-A12 cores promise to be.

 

[Khato]

Definitely. The only question there being how those licensed ARM core based SoCs end up comparing in cost to previous generation custom ones that are being made on deprecated process nodes. My guess is that those value vendors will still come out on top just because they're fine with minuscule margins. Really the only competition they might need to worry about is Intel since they can just keep on selling their previous generation product made on the n-1 process just for the 'foundry margins' if they so choose. Those value vendors may be fine with 10% margins or some such, but their foundry is still raking in 40-50%.

 

[Exophase]

Well we don't really know what the margins of Chinese foundries are like.. but even if margins are the same as TSMC, that only works if the raw manufacturing cost between Intel's n-1 and Chinese foundry n-1 is the same for Chinese customers. I don't think that'll strictly be true, even for fully depreciated nodes, because of various overhead factors being different between the two. It also only works if Intel is offering chips about the same size as the competitors, which is a problem if they're not willing to go low end enough. For instance they aren't offering a configuration comparable to something with Cortex-A7.

On the other hand, super-cheap Allwinner is already using the same GPU configuration Intel uses in their highest end Atom SoC, both released about the same time (SGX543 MP2, although I'm guessing Allwinner's is lower clocked). With BayTrail not offering that much more GPU power than CT+ it'll be easy for those competitors to overtake it, and GPU specs can be fairly significant marketing fuel for phones and tablets.

I think Intel is simply not interested in offering enough product diversity to dominate all corners of the mobile market in all regions.

Besides, why would Intel want to give SoCs away in China? Are they really going to have so much fab capacity that they're dying to get rid of them wherever they can? Winning Africa with OEM lock-in could work but I doubt that'll fly in China, where device makers are constantly switching components, and I doubt they'll win a hard advantage in the software ecosystem for mobile either. So it's not like they can give them away now then skyrocket prices later and still keep their customers.

 

[mrmt]

Exophase, question for you:

- After Apple departure there is plenty of capacity within Samsung Foundry Division to spare, and more important, capacity could be on the cheap.

- The same can be said about Globalfoundries.

- In Globalfoundries' case, we know the reason nobody goes to them: Their PR slides haven't anything to do with reality, so unless you are looking for something far behind the bleeding edge, Globalfoundries is not for you.

- We didn't hear anything about Samsung having any kind of problems with their node. Things seem to be ok.

Given the above, why aren't bleeding edge customers flocking on Samsung's door to get deals on the cheap instead of having to fight (and pay dearly) for capacity on TSMC?

 

[SiliconWars]

Exophase, question for you:

- After Apple departure there is plenty of capacity within Samsung Foundry Division to spare, and more important, capacity could be on the cheap.

- The same can be said about Globalfoundries.

Can always rely on you to spread FUD about Globalfoundries. The facts, as usual, tell a totally different story.

Globalfoundries on capacity expansion spree

IC Insights: GlobalFoundries is world's fastest-growing chip company

If you have lots of spare capacity lying around you don't go expanding. This is just your fantasy - GF is making plenty of money and will just continue to make more as the years progress, and they certainly aren't giving anything away on the cheap.

In 3 years GF has become the worlds fastest growing chip company yet you continue to parrot the same rubbish in complete denial of the facts.

 

[ShintaiDK]

GF is making plenty of money and will just continue to make more as the years progress, and they certainly aren't giving anything away on the cheap.

ATIC and Mubadala dont agree with you.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/...es_Unlikely_to_Become_Profitable_Shortly.html

And their investment is dropping. Just like the Abu Dhabi facility was cancelled.

 

[SiliconWars]

Yep and Intel also cancelled upgrades worth ~$1 billion at fab 24 around the same time. It was a bad time to be building fabs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...-4-billion-spending-as-chip-demand-rises.html

“GlobalFoundries is expected to be the largest revenue contributor to Mubadala in coming years,” Amol Shitole, a credit analyst with SJS Markets Ltd.

Capacity expansion in wafer manufacturing business and a strong customer base are “likely to result in higher revenues from this segment,” he said.

Semiconductors contributed 47 percent to Mubadala’s revenue in 2012 compared with 42 percent a year earlier, according to the company’s financial statement. Sales of semiconductor wafers, used in the fabrication of integrated circuits and other microdevices, rose 26 percent to $4 billion

How clear need it be? GF has turned into a very successful business in only 3 years, they cannot make enough wafers for demand and they continue to grow. There is no way that ATIC is bailing out.

 

[zebrax2]

Where are the next gen console chips made? Glofo? TSMC?

 

[SiliconWars]

Rumours say the Xbox is fabbed at GF.

 

[mrmt]

Can always rely on you to spread FUD about Globalfoundries. The facts, as usual, tell a totally different story.

Globalfoundries has yet to get a bleeding edge customer for them, AMD was doing everything it could to get away from their foundry "partner", they lost 600 million dollars last year... You know, silly facts outside GLF's PR-land that shows that things are not good for Globalfoundries. Not bad for a very "successful business", isn't it?

I don't think you have any PR statement to counter this "FUD", do you?