Dr C.C. Wei's Keynote at TSMC Symposium

At the recent TSMC 2021 Online Technology Symposium, the keynote to open the show was delivered by Dr C. C. Wei, TSMC's CEO. In addition to C.C. himself, there were guest appearances by Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, by Cristiano Amon, CEO-in-waiting of Qualcomm, and by Scott Hanson, CTO of Ambiq.

Some of the material covered in the keynote was detailed in other presentations later in the day. I won't duplicate that in this post. Instead, you should read my two earlier reports from the symposium:

• TSMC: Advanced Technology for Smartphone and HPC Platforms
• TSMC's 3DFabric

Dave Keller

But actually, the show opened with some opening remarks by Dave Keller, President and CEO of TSMC North America. He had some interesting statistics about how society pivoted at the start of the pandemic:

• E-commerce, in just 8 weeks, grew to the level expected to take 10 years.
• Telemedicine increased 10-fold in 15 days.
• Remote working increased 20X in 90 days.
• 250M students adjusted to online learning in 2 weeks.
• Disney+ signed the same number of subscribers in 5 months as Netflix did in 7 years.

As a result, we may be coming out of the lockdown better than when we went in. Today, we can do multiple customer meetings via video, versus traveling. We can electronically signoff documents versus routing paper around the office for what Dave called "wet signatures". We use mobile payments versus cash or credit cards. One thing I find amusing is that Apple switched iPhones to facial recognition, especially for Apple Pay, but wearing masks stops that working cleanly. From a semiconductor perspective, what we do as an industry is more important than ever before. But we are also facing challenges of realigning the global supply chain, not just in semiconductors but every other industry, too.

TSMC has increased its North America headcount by 25% in 2020. Construction of its new Arizona fab is underway and volume production of 5nm technology is scheduled for 2024. Globally, TSMC has increased capex to $100B over the next three years. 2021 capex will be around $30B and 80% will be invested in advanced technologies, including 3nm, 5nm, and 7nm. Some 10% will be invested in advanced packaging and mask-making, and approximately 10% in specialty technologies. 

In 2020, TSMC's US customers consumed 6.1M wafers to build 5403 products. They also taped out 650 new products. The US business accounted for 62% of TSMC's global business.

Dr C. C. Wei

C.C. started looking at digitization of the global economy. For example, IDC has forecast that by 2022, 65% of the world's GDP will be related to the digital economy. This is the new normal. As an example, AI helped solve a 50-year old mystery in biology: protein folding (see my post Google's DeepMind's AlphaFold Solves Protein Folding). This can have a profound impact on drug discovery.

HPC applications have become one of the key drivers of semiconductor technology. But a connected world with billions of connected devices can lead to an explosion in energy consumption. For example, data centers accounted for over 1% of global electricity usage, at 200 terawatt-hours, which is more than some countries' energy consumption. Estimates of growth in global electricity usage from data centers between 2010 and 2030 vary from 5 to 40 times increase over that period. There are a lot of variables, including whether Moore's Law can continue. The pessimistic projections are based on Moore's Law coming to its end, and the efficiency improvements delivered by process technology will not be able to keep up with the demand for data and computing power. So a lot depends on whether our industry can deliver, or even accelerate, improvements in computing efficiency. Can we rise to that challenge? C.C. emphatically believes that we can.

TSMC, as your trusted technology and capacity provider, has an important role to work with you to improve the efficiency that the world requires. We have a predictable roadmap for both 2D scaling and 3DIC to pursue More Moore and Beyond Moore. We continue to offer the most advanced logic technology to prove that 2D scaling is alive and kicking. The crown has passed from N7 to N5, and soon to N3. I am pleased to report that N5 is in volume production in fab 18 with excellent yield, and is seeing demand across many applications, powering smartphone, 5G, AI, networking, and HPC. More than half a million N5 wafers have been produced for our customers. We expect N5 to be a long-lasting node with high demand, and we are excited to add fab 21, TSMC's Arizona fab, as one of N5's production facilities. Construction of fab 21 is well underway, and is scheduled for volume production in 2024.

The next process node is N3. This continues to use FinFET transistors to deliver the best technology maturity, performance, power efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. N3 is targeted for volume production in the second half of 2022 in fab 18.

After noting that N5 is in volume production at TSMC’s fab 18 in Tainan, C.C. unveiled that TSMC has extended N5 to automotive with a new offering, N5A. For an industry that has grown in its need for higher computing power in the last few years, N5A was developed to support the computing demand for AI-enabled ADAS and digital cockpits, and will be available in the third quarter of 2022.

C.C. laid out some of the roadmap for advanced packaging, which is grouped under the name 3DFabric. SoIC will be ready for volume production in 2022, and by the end of that year, TSMC will have five dedicated fabs for 3DFabric.

C.C. also introduced N6RF (after Cristiano from Qualcomm had presented). N6 is an enhanced (optical shrink) of N7, and obviously the RF variant is targeted at RF while delivering the scaling benefits of N6. C.C. then gave a passing mention of all of TSMC's specialty technologies as in the diagram below.

This was a jumping-off point to introduce Scott Hanson of Ambiq. They build sub-threshold designs. I won't cover what he said in this post. If you want an overview of some of Ambiq's technology, see my post Misfit Shine 2 Lasts for 6 Months on a Coin Cell. How Do They Do That?

C.C. wrapped up looking at some numbers, although some of them repeated some of the numbers that Dave had shown in his introduction. In 2020, total managed capacity reached 12M 12" (300mm) equivalent wafers. In 2021, TSMC's capex increased "ambitiously" to $30B. 

But when it comes to our commitment to manufacturing excellence, there's more to the story. We are constantly reminding ourselves that our manufacturing business is energy-intensive. We are already the biggest purchaser of green energy in Taiwan. Our 2030 target is to supply 25% of power for TSMC fabs from renewables, and 100% for non-fab facilities.

In building trust, actions speak larger than words. The $100B capex over the next three years speaks louder than anything we could say to you. Speaking of trust, TSMC will never have its own products to compete with yours. That's why we are able to work closely and grow together.

Lisa Su

AMD and TSMC have worked together for 25 years, spanning more than ten process generations, and:

our most recent collaboration on N7 has been our most successful ever. N7 is the best technology in the industry. It has enabled AMD to deliver leadership computing and graphics products over the past few years. We are in a high-performance computing megacycle right now, driven by the growing adoption of cloud computing services, the digital transformation of entire industries, the transition to exascale supercomputing, and the broad deployment of AI and 5G networks.

Lisa then gave a few highlights of their partnership. AMD's partnership with TSMC on N7 started in 2015 when they looked at how computing would evolve over the next five years. When they defined their long-term product roadmaps, they anticipated a major inflection occurring at 7nm. AMD has leveraged N7 to deliver over 30 leadership datacenter, PC, graphics, and gaming products to market.

These include the industry's first 64-core x86 processor, our new third-gen EPYC processors that are the fastest server CPUs in the world, the world's highest performance PC processors including our RYZEN mobile processors that deliver industry-leading battery life, our RADEON RS6000 series GPUs, and semi-custom processors for the Sony Playstation 5 and the Microsoft Xbox series X and S consoles. We have shipped over half-a-million N7 products to date, and over half-a-billion CPU cores. Everyone wants more performance and more energy-efficient designs. Accomplishing this will require a partnership that is not only deep on design-technology co-optimization, but has the breadth to handle different markets, and includes both fab and packaging technologies.

Cristiano Amon

C.C. introduced Cristiano Ammon, who is the CEO-elect of Qualcomm since the transition from Steve Mollenkopf does not happen until June 30. You don't get any prizes for guessing that Cristiano talked about 5G (and even 6G). I continue to be somewhat negative about how "transformational" 5G is. Yes, the bandwidth is higher. Yes, it is more "always on" than 4G. It can handle more connections.

But this was Cristiano's turn to give his opinion, not mine. And to some extent he agreed with me that it is a marathon, not a sprint, reporting the impact going out as far as 2035 at times.

We are just at the beginning of this era. This will drive continuing need for leading node and other technology advancements to drive innovation in the use of space, power consumption, and performance.

5G has the potential to transform the competitive environment around the world and enrich our lives. Accenture estimates that in the US between 2021 and 2025, 5G could add up to 60M jobs across all sectors of the economy, and $1.5T to the US GDP.

A prime example is our modem/RF systems, which combine our leading modem with our leading RF. Our latest solution, the Snapdragon X65 5G modem/RF system delivers the world's first 10Gb/s speed. With tight modem/RF integration, and advanced solutions like AI antenna tuning, customers can deliver superior data speeds, call quality, coverage, and all-day battery life.

Qualcomm is not just in mobile. Their technology is also driving the always-on always-connected PC, and advanced automotive. Cristiano thinks the next transformational technology will be extended reality (XR) where high-performance and low power will be taken to new levels.

Broad deployment of 5G mmWave technology will create the environment to enable XR to become the next computing platform. TSMC has a portfolio of technologies that is well-aligned with our roadmap and we are collaborating closely to achieve our present and future goals.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.