Well, we stil have enough know-how outside Taiwan on everything to produce any semiconductors. A bigger world war is most likely what it takes to bring the supply chain to a halt. Even then, nobody magically forgets these things.
Not magically, they forget naturally. No one human knows the whole sequence, from start to finish, no one can really write it down (or shoot a how-to video). Distributed, institutional knowledge is extraordinarily brittle.
I agree, forgetting happens naturally. For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. But I doubt this is applicable for CMOS technologies. Most of the steps down to finfets (TSMC 16nm) are rather well known. Yes we don't know the exact recipe of TSMC, Samsung or Intel, but it's not like alien technology. I read technical papers from all these fabs regularly and it's more open than what would people expect. Of course they keep their secrets too, for the cutting edge. There's so much knowhow out there that it's quite probable we can get there again in a short time if TSMC vanished fron earth all of a sudden.
The stuff that really matters is mostly on microcontrollers.
The few industries that push computing out of need would suffer. Certain kinds of research, 3D modeling.
But most of what we use computers for in offices and our day-to-day should work about as well on slightly beefed up (say, dual or quad CPU) typical early ‘90s gear.
We’re using 30 years of hardware advancements to run JavaScript instead of doing new, helpful stuff. 30 years of hardware development to let businesses save a little on software development while pushing a significant multiple larger than that cost onto users.
If you wanna make something that's competitive with the latest and greatest, sure. But there's literally thousands of fabs that can make _a_ CPU, and hundreds that can make something that is usable in a PC, even if not very fast. There's a huge span of semiconductor fabrication beyond the bleeding edge of digital logic.
I might be biased, being an insider of semiconductor industry, to think that there gulf isn't that huge. Virtuakly everything is known down to what, 28nm or so. That's still a fairly good process and pretty impossible to forget.
There are other semiconductor manufacturers, right? Certainly it would be catastrophic to the industry, and would likely set progress back a while, but it would hardly be insurmountable. This discussion also assumes TSMC wouldn't sell/trade knowledge/processes, or they'd not be stolen, which wouldn't be crazy, given the hypothetical war in the region
Well, we stil have enough know-how outside Taiwan on everything to produce any semiconductors. A bigger world war is most likely what it takes to bring the supply chain to a halt. Even then, nobody magically forgets these things.
Not magically, they forget naturally. No one human knows the whole sequence, from start to finish, no one can really write it down (or shoot a how-to video). Distributed, institutional knowledge is extraordinarily brittle.
I agree, forgetting happens naturally. For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. But I doubt this is applicable for CMOS technologies. Most of the steps down to finfets (TSMC 16nm) are rather well known. Yes we don't know the exact recipe of TSMC, Samsung or Intel, but it's not like alien technology. I read technical papers from all these fabs regularly and it's more open than what would people expect. Of course they keep their secrets too, for the cutting edge. There's so much knowhow out there that it's quite probable we can get there again in a short time if TSMC vanished fron earth all of a sudden.
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I kinda doubt it. The theoretical knowledge is there, but there’s a huge gulf between that and all the practical knowledge/trade secrets held by TSMC.
Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
The stuff that really matters is mostly on microcontrollers.
The few industries that push computing out of need would suffer. Certain kinds of research, 3D modeling.
But most of what we use computers for in offices and our day-to-day should work about as well on slightly beefed up (say, dual or quad CPU) typical early ‘90s gear.
We’re using 30 years of hardware advancements to run JavaScript instead of doing new, helpful stuff. 30 years of hardware development to let businesses save a little on software development while pushing a significant multiple larger than that cost onto users.
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If you wanna make something that's competitive with the latest and greatest, sure. But there's literally thousands of fabs that can make _a_ CPU, and hundreds that can make something that is usable in a PC, even if not very fast. There's a huge span of semiconductor fabrication beyond the bleeding edge of digital logic.
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I might be biased, being an insider of semiconductor industry, to think that there gulf isn't that huge. Virtuakly everything is known down to what, 28nm or so. That's still a fairly good process and pretty impossible to forget.
There are other semiconductor manufacturers, right? Certainly it would be catastrophic to the industry, and would likely set progress back a while, but it would hardly be insurmountable. This discussion also assumes TSMC wouldn't sell/trade knowledge/processes, or they'd not be stolen, which wouldn't be crazy, given the hypothetical war in the region
Intel still knows 14nm quite well, and would likely sell access to the line if asked.
If Taiwan ceased to exist, that would put us a decade back.
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TSMC factories use ASML hardware (designed and built in the Netherlands), that actually produces the chips.
https://www.asml.com/en
TSMC is running a successful business but they're not the only customers of ASML.
Chips are made elsewhere too. At worst, we (civilization) would lose the cutting edge if that happened.
It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
We would go back to brick phones, with gears stuck on the side. Awesome!
No, that won't do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...