Apple A16 SoC Now Manufactured In Arizona (appleinsider.com) 51
"Apple has begun manufacturing its A16 SoC at the newly-opened TSCM Fab 21 in Arizona," writes Slashdot reader NoMoreACs. AppleInsider reports: According to sources of Tim Culpan, Phase 1 of TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona is making the A16 SoC of the iPhone 14 Pro in "small, but significant, numbers. The production is largely a test for the facility at this stage, but more production is expected in the coming months. The volume will ramp up massively once the second stage of the Phase 1 fab actually concludes. If everything stays on schedule, the Arizona plant will hit a target for production sometime in the first half of 2025.
Sources say TSMC is achieving yields that are marginally behind those of Taiwan-based factories. Yield parity is expected to happen within months. TSMC has also raised its investment and moved to build additional plants in Arizona, with three set to be constructed in total. The U.S. Commerce Department previously claimed this will create 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs, on top of an estimated 20,000 construction jobs.
Sources say TSMC is achieving yields that are marginally behind those of Taiwan-based factories. Yield parity is expected to happen within months. TSMC has also raised its investment and moved to build additional plants in Arizona, with three set to be constructed in total. The U.S. Commerce Department previously claimed this will create 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs, on top of an estimated 20,000 construction jobs.
Impossible (Score:2)
Americans are far too lazy with their minimum wages, workers rights and pornography!
Re: Impossible (Score:2)
Don't forget the legal weed, shrooms, and pickleball
Obligatory quote from America: World Cop (Score:1)
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You can't smoke weed and play pickleball simultaneously, which is why I play disc golf.
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This sounds like a challenge.
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You can't smoke weed and play pickleball simultaneously, which is why I play disc golf.
You kidding? You should stop by the retirement village pickleball courts sometime. I ain't seen so much grass being passed around since high school. Say what you will about our elders right now, they know how to party.
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He's trying to gather support for his Butlerian Jihad.
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The factory is almost completely automated. One of the things about all this talk bringing back manufacturing instead it doesn't really bring back the jobs because the only reason we're using as many people on this planet to manufacture shit as we do is because we pay them so little or not at all.
I just visited your home page and oh my god! You've made 20+ posts today! Don't you have anything else to do in your life? What about letting other users post instead? With all the time you spend on posting, do you even still have time to read what others have to say or you only listen to yourself?
On top of that, you keep on posting the same communist rants over and over again and it's very boring.
What does that have to do with what he posted? .. and have you been in a coma since the 1970s? Or are you just too mentally limited to come up with a better slur than accusing random people of being Soviet Communists for pointing out the easily verifiable primary reason why every US mega-corp moved their production to China?
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The factory is almost completely automated. One of the things about all this talk bringing back manufacturing instead it doesn't really bring back the jobs because the only reason we're using as many people on this planet to manufacture shit as we do is because we pay them so little or not at all.
Oh, there are quite a few jobs there, including a whole lot of jobs for Taiwanese engineers because the US does not have enough engineers experienced in chip manufacturing. Apart from that fact, another problem here is that in a modern manufacturing environment you need highly educated and skilled people. However, when politicians say ‘bring back manufacturing jobs’ the man in the street thinks that will be old style manufacturing jobs for unskilled minimally educated labour when in reality what
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Yeah it's nothing like the factories that made the Model T with tons of workers on an assembly line. It's less jobs requiring much more skill. That's just what manufacturing is now.
Another huge part of why this factory is important is it makes us less dependent on Taiwan. It's a little bit of protection against China taking over the country and stopping production of chips. But more people will understand if we shout "Jobs!' than if we shout political reasons. And shouting the political reasons is just like
Hopefully all the previous ones (Score:1)
Built in Taiwan donâ(TM)t start exploding.
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I also hope they "donâ(TM)t".
Re: Hopefully all the previous ones (Score:3)
Mmm...donats...
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I also hope they "donâ(TM)t".
Slashdot really should turn off the mobile site if they're not going to maintain it properly. It doesn't handle UTF-8 at all, even in the most simplistic "strip things sensibly so that they're readable" sense, and the result is that there's literally no way for anybody who hits Slashdot from a mobile device to post usefully other than scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page and switching to the desktop site.
Going to need a bigger supply chain (Score:4, Informative)
Big picture, it's good infrastructure to have some redundancy of the geographic sort like this. I mean, ideally throughout the supply chains for each tier of chip. Or anything you want a steady supply of.
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Big picture, it's good infrastructure to have some redundancy of the geographic sort like this.
Bigger picture, Arizona is mostly desert and more water is being used than is available: Central Arizona Project. Chip manufacturing is a water intensive endeavour... WTF?
Paging the open-borders free-traders (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope we all now understand why outsourcing your industrial capacity to the lowest overseas bidder is a strategic weakness and why having domestic low- and high-value manufacturing is an invaluable asset.
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-Spellchecker approved!
Fast! (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got to hand it to the TSMC project managers.
Most American companies would take 3x or longer to get a fab up and running.
I would like to see a case study or book about this project's management, especially subcontract incentives.
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You've got to hand it to the TSMC project managers.
Most American companies would take 3x or longer to get a fab up and running.
I would like to see a case study or book about this project's management, especially subcontract incentives.
Indeed!
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Most American companies would take 3x or longer to get a fab up and running.
Would they though? Construction started in 2021 (approvals process / engineering took a while before that) and they expect first actual production runs in 2025, and this just being "phase 1" of the three phases involved in building its fab to actual completion.
It seems to be quite a normal speed.
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To compare to Intel: Fab 34 started construction in Ireland in 2019 and went into volume production in 2023. That's also 4 years. Just like what TSMC's current schedule is. And the Irish fabs were only slightly smaller and cheaper than phase 1 of this TSMC fab (which admittedly is part of a huge mega project that is going to be ongoing for quite a few years to come)
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Is it fast? (Score:2)
-1, no points of reference
Love or hate them (Score:3)
No, it's all love from me, this is pure win (Score:1)
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Yep. High five to these guys and also to small fabs like the ones ran by Texas Instruments and guys like Globitech. You guys might not be at 2nm, but you still kick ass and make us proud.
Yep. High five to these guys and also to small fabs like the ones ran by Texas Instruments and guys like Globitech. You guys might not be at 2nm, but you still kick ass and make us proud.
Amen to that!!!
And something tells me this Fab will be at 2nm before you know it!
TSMC has it down!
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Love or hate Apple, this is awesome. More of this please. It’s only too bad intel wasn’t up to the task to partner with Apple on this.
And 4 nm will soon be 3...
It IS awesome to see this happening on US Soil.
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What has this got to do with loving or hating Apple? Apple didn't contribute to this fab, they just happened to be the customer used for the first test production. TSMC is the driving force here, and Intel are also expanding their fabs in Arizona.
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You can't just "build a fab" by pointing at a map and constructing it. A fab costs billions of dollars to build and equip and you only do it when you have a customer lined up and ready. ASML only builds so many machines a year, so you have to order them years in ad
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You can't just "build a fab" by pointing at a map and constructing it. A fab costs billions of dollars to build and equip and you only do it when you have a customer lined up and ready. ASML only builds so many machines a year, so you have to order them years in advance, and that kind of money is only spent not on a whim of "build it and they will come" but on definite order books.
Apple is likely the startup customer that pre-paid for exclusive access to the fabs for several years to make it worthwhile.
Once this fab is up and running, Apple will likely be fronting another fab to make the next generation of devices so when that fab is running, this fab would be free to be used by other companies. It was only a few years ago when Samsung was making Apple's chips in Texas.
The question is, did nVidia get in on it as well - between the two of them the fab could be basically locked up until the next fab.
Interestingly enough, according to TFA, TSMC would reportedly not "confirm nor deny" that Apple was the AZ Fab's First Customer.
Draw whatever Conclusions you wish from that. . .
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Probably because just mentioning Apple's name on slashdot causes the haters to boil out of the woodwork, froth at the mouth, and start flamewars. Yesterday there was an article about Apple doing less processing of the pictures taken on the iPhone than Google does with Android. It wasn't that the post-processing functionality was unavailable, mind you, nor were people even claiming it was inferior. They were hating on Apple simply for not doing as much image processing by default as Android does. And fla
assembly (Score:4, Interesting)
So the SoC is manufactured in Arizona then sent to China to be assembled into a complete phone?
Re: assembly (Score:2)
Sent *back* to China, yes, I would assume so.
Maybe this'll remove one of the excuses American politians use to meddle in China's internal affairs.
Re: assembly (Score:2)
Hrm, maybe not "back to", but still.
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You mean like trying help the Uyghurs, or telling the Han Chinese to give Tibet back to the Tibetans? Or trying to keep the seas free from Chinese naval interference? Or telling the Chinese that the CCP is leach sucking their blood?
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If it's for the iPhone, then I believe the chips will be sent to China, India, (Brazil?), and perhaps other locations for assembly. If the chip is going to be used in other devices, it could be shipped to other countries as well.
The parts for the iPhone come from a ton of different countries, so the chips being made in one place and then shipped somewhere else for assembly into the phone is standard practice.
This site doesn't have a ton of detail about where parts are sourced, but gives some idea how many c
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TSCM TSMC CMST STMC TCMS CTSM (Score:2)
Why do they need more three year old chips? (Score:1)
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Why are they manufacturing three-year-old chips? Do they even make any new products that use them? Why wouldn't they want to make something newer?
I believe they are being used in the iPhone 15 and 15 plus. But with that generation going EOL, I would assume that they would either transition the Fab to the A18, or release a 4th Generation iPhone SE using the A16 (Bionic). The current iPhone SE (3rd Gen.) uses the A15 Bionic SoC.