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Apple Unsuccessfully Tried to Purchase Exclusive Access to TSMC Chip Production for iOS Devices
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Yes. In one year alone, TSMC has a net income of > 5 billion US$. And btw:
wikipedia.org said:
They do not need Apple.
Or that English is not everybody's first language
Don't worry, I was PM'ed one time for pointing out to grammar errors... So the grammar nazi hunters (this is NOT Godwin's law in effect!) will get to it...
That said, English isn't my first language (French is)... So does that mean the rule doesn't apply to me? 'Cause I would go on a rampage!
You are really the fanboy, APPLE is dead wrong, They are the way to becoming hated, losing the rest of the fading aura of being a good company. These patent lawsuits are not only stupid in the long run but really anti American spirit, Rounded corners make me laugh.
Yeah because Apple won patent suit on round corner. Now goes back to school.
A learning disability doesn't make you write "ummmm" and doesn't make you write "be" instead of "me", just as an example how you can distinguish. And people who were unfortunate enough not to get an education that taught them how to write properly are again penalised by every single badly written post, because every single badly written post makes it harder to learn by reading.
Samsung isn't stupid, despite all of the litigating going on, Apple is a HUGE customer of Samsungs. That would be suicide to separate from Apple.
You are really the fanboy, APPLE is dead wrong, They are the way to becoming hated, losing the rest of the fading aura of being a good company. These patent lawsuits are not only stupid in the long run but really anti American spirit, Rounded corners make me laugh.
Yes, Apple is on the way to be hated in the same way Dell suggested Apple was on its deathbed back in 1997. You live in an apple-hate bubble. The 90% of Apple customers that are not fan boys or girls, and don't follow the day-to-day minute don't care about patent suits, or Apple Store cutbacks or any of that inside baseball crap. They care about products that are easy to use.
As far as the lawsuits being stupid, so far it seems its worked out well for Apple. Most of its claims have thus far been affirmed. We'll see if they get treble damages, and then, if it goes to appeal, what that court says.
And against the "American spirit," hate to tell you but IP protection is in the U.S. Constitution. So in, spirit, Apple is in tune with what the Founders envisioned.
Now, if you argued that current IP law was not in the spirit of what the FF envisioned, then I'd agree with you. The protection lengths, especially, are much too long and go against the entire idea of what IP production was written into the Constitution. But your issue there is with Congress and current and past presidents who enacted current law.
Specifically on the rounded corners issue you mention... it seems like you only read the Cliffs Notes version of the decision. The only rounded corners that infringed were the iPhones, and only because Apple registered the iPhone's design as trade dress. The jury, OTOH, said the iPad's rounded corners were not protected because that design was not registered.
That's strange... TSMC addressed in last month's shareholder meeting explaining their US$2B increase in R&D expenditure was primarily eyeing Apple in '13 & '14 as their main, targeted customer in their next advance chip.
it's no secret that all the major Taiwanese mobile/PC supply chain players want a big slice of that irresistible Apple pie.
TSMC already makes chips for qualcomm which go into iphones
they just don't want apple to own part of the company and dictate their business
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they sold that off
Yes. Doing business with Apple and Apple only is not something this company appears to be interested in.
Just like Apple wouldn't want to be 100% reliant on Samsung; TSMC wouldn't want to be 100% reliant on Apple. And that's what Apple wanted. Exclusivity.
Apple should have done everything possible in order to get complete exclusivity. What the heck is that huge cash reserve for if not for extreme leverage? I see TSMC's point of view though. They could have just set a exclusivity time period, though, and that might have worked well for both parties.
Apple should have done everything possible in order to get complete exclusivity. What the heck is that huge cash reserve for if not for extreme leverage? I see TSMC's point of view though. They could have just set a exclusivity time period, though, and that might have worked well for both parties.
Apple did everything they wanted to do at the time. TSMC denied their request. And just because Apple has a wad of cash doesn't mean THIS exclusivity agreement was worth burning any/a lot of it as "leverage."
Absolutely. Not only would it introduce huge risk for TSMC (if Apple were to move to another technology, TSMC would have to build a new customer base from scratch), but also it would mean Apple would - effectively - own TSMC. As the only client, Apple could freely dictate terms in future negotiations since TSMC would have little or no leverage.
Did anyone read that AMD is rumored to stop desktop CPU production and wants to solely produce for server and graphics? Maybe Dresden/Germany would be an excellent factory for the next few years making high yield ARM processors, given the fact that Apple and AMD switch managers once in a while...
No, they are stopping the IPC race with Intel. They are focusing on three things: their APU ( CPU+GPU on one die and the scalability of it on all platforms), GPUs (8xxx and future productions), Bulldozer to Steamroller for server market.
They are not dropping out of the CPU sector, they are just focusing their time on their APU rather than a race with Intel. Which is good since the APU is an architectural masterpiece and unless Intel can figure something out it is going out lose out to AMD big time in the consumer and OEM market. (Last part is obviously my opinion)
TSMC isn't the only chip maker so they wouldn't be creating a monopoly. They'd be trying to move everything in-house.
It seems to me that there are a lot of misunderstandings here about how semiconductor manufacturing works.
Most semiconductor companies today are fabless -- they design and test their chips, but actual manufacturing occurs at TSMC or another fabrication house. The reason is that a semiconductor fabrication plant costs over $1 billion. To make this profitable, the fab needs to run 24/7. You can't compete if you build a fab and only take advantage of 25% of its capacity, because you have to amortize the factory cost. TSMC basically "timeshares" its fabs among many customers, in order to share its manufacturing capacity across many semiconductor design companies (such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc).
It costs millions of dollars to design and validate a semiconductor, before even hitting the fab house. Then, very expensive masks have to be made - mask costs can run into millions of dollars for some processes, and it's time-intensive, so you cannot have a mistake in your design. This isn't software, where you can recompile and re-test.
Once the masks are made, sample wafers are made and tested, and minor mask changes are made, if necessary. Here's the important part: Once the masks are validated for production, they are validated only for that plant. Occasionally, a mask can be validated for production at two TSMC plants, but never across two companies, like TSMC and UMC. It simply isn't done.
The problem is that when demand is high, TSMC puts its customers on allocation. Instead of 10 million parts a month, they'll cut you back to 8 or 9 million a month. This has obviously affected Apple and Qualcomm, so much so that they're offering up $1 billion for exclusive fab access. For some reason, TSMC said no. Perhaps the cost of the fab is greater than $1 billion, or they have limited fabs and their total revenue is higher if they simply run them 24/7 across a range of customers. I don't think Apple and Qualcomm are trying to corner the market, they're trying to ensure reliable part supply.
Personally, it may make sense for the US government or a private consortium to form for American semiconductor manufacturing, but it is no easy feat.
I hope this long post was helpful to some of you.
Most semiconductor companies today are fabless -- they design and test their chips, but actual manufacturing occurs at TSMC or another fabrication house. The reason is that a semiconductor fabrication plant costs over $1 billion. To make this profitable, the fab needs to run 24/7. You can't compete if you build a fab and only take advantage of 25% of its capacity, because you have to amortize the factory cost. TSMC basically "timeshares" its fabs among many customers, in order to share its manufacturing capacity across many semiconductor design companies (such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc).
It costs millions of dollars to design and validate a semiconductor, before even hitting the fab house. Then, very expensive masks have to be made - mask costs can run into millions of dollars for some processes, and it's time-intensive, so you cannot have a mistake in your design. This isn't software, where you can recompile and re-test.
Once the masks are made, sample wafers are made and tested, and minor mask changes are made, if necessary. Here's the important part: Once the masks are validated for production, they are validated only for that plant. Occasionally, a mask can be validated for production at two TSMC plants, but never across two companies, like TSMC and UMC. It simply isn't done.
The problem is that when demand is high, TSMC puts its customers on allocation. Instead of 10 million parts a month, they'll cut you back to 8 or 9 million a month. This has obviously affected Apple and Qualcomm, so much so that they're offering up $1 billion for exclusive fab access. For some reason, TSMC said no. Perhaps the cost of the fab is greater than $1 billion, or they have limited fabs and their total revenue is higher if they simply run them 24/7 across a range of customers. I don't think Apple and Qualcomm are trying to corner the market, they're trying to ensure reliable part supply.
Personally, it may make sense for the US government or a private consortium to form for American semiconductor manufacturing, but it is no easy feat.
I hope this long post was helpful to some of you.