The US government’s plan to widen the scope of its restrictions on the sale of US-made IC chips and production equipment to China would have only a limited effect on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER, 台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said yesterday.
Liu, a Taiwan Industry Economics Database researcher at the institute, said the planned restrictions would force Chinese chipmakers to shift their focus to mature technologies, as they would likely face difficulty obtaining equipment required for the production of advanced chips.
China’s increased focus on mature processes would not hurt Taiwan, as Taiwanese chipmakers are competitive in the field and have achieved high yield rates, she said.
Photo: CNA
The nation’s semiconductor industry would not be pressured by more Chinese chipmakers using mature processes, Liu added.
Her comments followed a Reuters report on Monday that Washington would next month broaden the scope of its restrictions on US exports of semiconductor production equipment to Chinese firms that manufacture advanced chips using sub-14-nanometer processes.
The restrictions would apply to KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc, it said.
The companies would need to obtain permission from the US Department of Commerce before exporting advanced chip production equipment to China, the report said.
Pegatron Corp (和碩) chairman Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢) said the planned curbs are an extension of the trade dispute between Washington and Beijing.
The planned restrictions would not cause the kind of shock that rattled the markets in July 2018, when the administration of then-US president Donald Trump imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent on US$34 billion of Chinese imports, sparking the dispute, Tung said.
The commerce department last month sent letters to US IC designers Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), ordering them to halt shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China without government permission, the Reuters report said.
Liu said the ban would have a limited effect on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as Nvidia and AMD sell products other than AI chips to their Chinese customers.
TSMC was similarly unaffected by the sanctions Washington placed on China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) on Sept. 15, 2020, she said.
The chipmaker achieved this by adopting flexible sales strategies and the void left by the missing Huawei orders was quickly filled by other customers, Liu said.
ASML Holding NV’s new advanced chip machines have a daunting price tag, said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), one of the Dutch company’s biggest clients. “The cost is very high,” TSMC senior vice president Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, referring to ASML’s latest system known as high-NA extreme ultraviolet (EUV). “I like the high-NA EUV’s capability, but I don’t like the sticker price,” Zhang said. ASML’s new chip machine can imprint semiconductors with lines that are just 8 nanometers thick — 1.7 times smaller than the previous generation. The machines cost 350 million euros (US$378 million)
Apple Inc has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the start-up’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence (AI) features to its devices, people familiar with the matter said. The two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in Apple’s iOS 18, the next iPhone operating system, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Apple also has held talks with Alphabet Inc’s Google about licensing its Gemini chatbot. Those discussions have not led to an agreement, but are ongoing. An OpenAI
INSATIABLE: Almost all AI innovators are working with the chipmaker to address the rapidly growing AI-related demand for energy-efficient computing power, the CEO said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported about 60 percent annual growth in revenue for last month, benefiting from rapidly growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing applications. Revenue last month expanded to NT$236.02 billion (US$7.28 billion), compared with NT$147.9 billion in April last year, the second-highest level in company history, TSMC said in a statement. On a monthly basis, revenue surged 20.9 percent, from NT$195.21 billion in March. As AI-related applications continue to show strong growth, TSMC expects revenue to expand about 27.6 percent year-on-year during the current quarter to between US$19.6 billion and US$20.4 billion. That would
‘FULL SUPPORT’: Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said he hopes more companies would settle in the prefecture to create an area similar to Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park The newly elected governor of Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture said he is ready to ensure wide-ranging support to woo Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to build its third Japanese chip factory there. Concerns of groundwater shortages when TSMC’s two plants begin operations in the prefecture’s Kikuyo have spurred discussions about the possibility of tapping unused dam water, Kumamoto Governor Takashi Kimura said in an interview on Saturday. While Kimura said talks about a third plant have yet to occur, Bloomberg had reported TSMC is already considering its third Japanese fab — also in Kumamoto — which would make more advanced chips. “We are