TSMC and Huawei
Since the Huawei chip incident, TSMC, a company that has been in the limelight since it was once Huawei’s most important chip supplier, but now the cooperation between the two is history. As for why this happened, I’m sure it’s clear to everyone that it was due to certain countries pulling the strings!
TSMC, known as Taiwan’s integrated circuit manufacturing, is the world’s first professional foundry and holds a leading position in the semiconductor market. Currently, TSMC’s process level has reached 5nm and has started supplying related chips to major customers, such as Apple’s A14 and Huawei’s newly released Kirin 9000.
However, TSMC’s supply to Huawei ends on Sept. 15 of this year, as the U.S. rules go into effect on that date. According to TSMC president Wei Zhejia, the fourth quarter will not supply any chip products to Huawei, as to whether cooperation will resume later, but also depends on the attitude of the United States.
Many of you may be wondering, isn’t TSMC a Taiwanese company from China? Why do we have to look to the United States for action? This is because TSMC’s production facilities contain some of the American technologies that until now it has not been able to completely free itself from its dependence on, even as the world’s number one foundry, the United States!
In fact, TSMC has been fighting for the opportunity to continue working with Huawei, it has made many efforts, but did not get any good results. Some time ago, the US issued licenses to Intel and AMD allowing them to supply relevant products to Huawei, and TSMC is going to have a much harder time getting a license than these two companies!
It’s understood that TSMC’s biggest customer is Apple, and the second biggest is Huawei, which contributed $36 billion in revenue to TSMC last year alone! So for whatever reason, TSMC definitely wants to keep the hope of continuing to supply Huawei, but Wei Zhejia’s statement is a big disappointment to many.
If TSMC won’t be working with Huawei in Q4 and beyond, there’s a good chance that the Kirin chip will indeed become out of print as Yu Chengdong claims, which would also result in a major discount to Huawei’s phone business! For this reason, most people are not very friendly to TSMC, after all, nobody wants to see Huawei suffer.
Still haven’t given up.
So what exactly is TSMC’s attitude towards Huawei? According to the latest, TSMC still hasn’t given up on Huawei, and we’ve got it all wrong! This is so because TSMC has made two announcements to the public, or you could say two signals have been released.
The first news is that TSMC has publicly stated that TSMC will only have orders if it satisfies its customers. And TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin stated that the entire semiconductor industry will suffer from the unreasonable behavior of the U.S. Today, many countries have begun to build autonomous production lines, and TSMC may be moving in this direction in the future!
This means that TSMC takes its customers very seriously, every single one of them is its foundation, not to mention that Huawei is its second largest customer! In addition, Liu’s words prove that US actions will only lead to a boycott of all semiconductor companies, and perhaps TSMC will join the “de-beautification” campaign in the future.
The second news is that TSMC is preparing to increase its production capacity, increasing its capital expenditure to $18 billion in 2021. Now TSMC’s high-end chip capacity are consumed by U.S. companies, such as Apple has taken almost all the 5nm chip orders, while Qualcomm and Intel and other companies carved up TSMC’s 7nm market.
In order to further enhance competitiveness, TSMC developed a plan to increase the monthly chip production capacity of the wafer fabs, on the one hand, a large number of factory expansion, on the other hand, to buy more lithography machines. It is reported that TSMC has submitted an order to ASML for lithography machines, and the total number of EUV lithography machines is expected to exceed 50 next year!
This is a sign that TSMC needs more partners, otherwise it will have inventory backlogs in its production capacity, and the customer TSMC wants the most is naturally none other than Huawei. Thus, since applying directly for a U.S. license won’t work, TSMC will have to find another way, and these circumstances prove that it still hasn’t given up on Huawei!
write at the end
In fact, apart from TSMC, other suppliers are also very positive towards Huawei and they are all working hard for continued cooperation. Hopefully, these companies’ efforts will pay off, and I’m sure Huawei will be able to get out of its immediate predicament and achieve its goal of rising to the top!
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