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Apple partner TSMC considers building powerful new chipsets in the U.S.

phonearena.com, Mar. 17, 2020 – 

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the largest independent foundry in the world. This means that it manufactures chips designed by companies that do not own facilities to fabricate their own chips. Well known tech giants like Apple and Huawei have their integrated circuits produced by TSMC and you might be surprised to learn that Qualcomm and MediaTek rely on TSMC to produce their components.

Considering that it does manufacture the Kirin chipsets designed by Huawei's HiSilicon unit which are used on Huawei's phones, you'd expect TSMC to get caught up in both the U.S.-China trade war and the Trump administration's "bullying" (for lack of a better word) of Huawei. Last November, the Taiwan government was forced to deny a report that said the Trump administration was pressuring it to force TSMC to stop manufacturing chips for Huawei. Now, the Nikkei Asian Review is reporting that the U.S. government wants TSMC to build a new factory in the states. The report cites two sources who say that the idea is under active consideration by the company.

A TSMC factory built in the U.S. would produce powerful 2nm chipsets according to sources

The sources added that the factory would be cutting edge and would produce chips more advanced than the 5nm components TSMC will churn out as soon as next month. The 5nm process node refers to the number of transistors that can fit into an integrated circuit. As the process numbers go down, the transistor density rises which means that newer chips are packed with more transistors; this makes these ICs more powerful while consuming less energy. For example, the 7nm Apple A13 Bionic SoC contains 8.5 billion transistors; the A14 Bionic, expected to launch with this fall's 5G 2020 iPhone models, are each expected to be packed with 15 billion transistors. Besides Apple, Huawei is expected to have a 5nm chip made by TSMC ready this fall for the Mate 40 series. Huawei is TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple and accounted for 10% of TSMC's annual revenue (which came to $35.7 billion in 2019).

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