: Taiwan’s Powerchip sells legacy fab it opened just 19 months ago after spending $9.5 billion

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24313827

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with fabs right now?

Micron has found a way to add new DRAM manufacturing capacity in a hurry by acquiring a chipmaking campus from Taiwanese outfit Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC).

The two companies announced the deal last weekend. Micron’s version of events says it’s signed a letter of intent to acquire Powerchip’s entire P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, for total cash consideration of US$1.8 billion.

    • tal@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I’m not really a hardware person, but purely in terms of logic gates, making a memory circuit isn’t going to be hard. I mean, a lot of chips contain internal memory. I’m sure that anyone that can fabricate a chip can fabricate someone’s memory design that contains some amount of memory.

      For PC use, there’s also going to be some interface hardware. Dunno how much sophistication is present there.

      I’m assuming that the catch is that it’s not trivial to go out and make something competitive with what the PC memory manufacturers are making in price, density, and speed. Like, I don’t think that if you want to get a microcontroller with 32 kB of onboard memory, that it’s going to be a problem. But that doesn’t really replace the kind of stuff that these guys are making.

      EDIT: The other big thing to keep in mind is that this is a short-term problem, even if it’s a big problem. I mean, the problem isn’t the supply of memory over the long term. The problem is the supply of memory over the next couple of years. You can’t just build a factory and hire a workforce and get production going the moment that someone decides that they want several times more memory than the world has been producing to date.

      So what’s interesting is really going to be solutions that can produce memory in the near term. Like, I have no doubt that given years of time, someone could set up a new memory manufacturer and facilities. But to get (scaled-up) production in a year, say? Fewer options there.

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I mean you can’t do it in your garage, but if you have the facility with the machines and the staff and the knowledge then yeah it’s not hard.

      There is actually a guy making CMOS transistors in his garage because he has some of the machines, but he can’t make them micro-sized and can’t make whole die sheets. (Also that’s transistors for processors, not memory, but they parallel.)