TSMC 7nm Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ch...ing-issues

It's no secret that AMD's Zen-3 based Ryzen 5000 series CPUs are flying off the shelves faster than AMD can make them, but it looks like the same will be the case for Zen 3 notebook chips when they land in Q1. A report from DigiTimes doesn't specifically call out the reason behind the issues, but claims they could be due to either PlayStation 5 orders or a lack of packaging and substrate availability.

But the latter issue doesn't only affect AMD. Reports show that Nvidia, Apple, Huawei, EV cars, and virtually any other market that uses silicon interposers are suffering at the hands of the shortage of critical chip packaging supplies.
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Naturally, in such a situation, AMD is quite powerless as a fabless chipmaker because it relies on TSMC for its parts. One could argue that TSMC's suppliers should increase supply, but that would require increased capacity and investments from the substrate makers. No one can predict with any certainty that post-pandemic demand will remain at this level, potentially making that a poor investment for those firms, so that doesn't seem likely.

This means the current difficulties with finding Ryzen 5000, Radeon RX 6000, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S consoles are likely to continue. And the same goes for Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...production

ABF is incredibly important to the chip-packaging process, and an ongoing shortage is hitting pretty much everyone who employs advanced packaging standards. This could fit our criteria for an important piece of the overall explanation of what’s going on, because this isn’t an issue that would impact just Nvidia, AMD, Intel, or any other single company. If TSMC can’t buy enough of it, the impact could ripple out across the market, hitting a number of companies. Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung all use ABF as well. DigiTimes reported on a shortage at least as early as June 2020 and claimed it could widen and worsen in 2021. That prediction seems to have borne fruit.

Low yields on GDDR6 have also been blamed for GPU shortages, though again, it’s not clear exactly which component shortages are driving which problems. But it’s clear this goes beyond yield problems, which makes sense — we have heard rumors of low 8N yields at Samsung, but nothing about any equivalents at TSMC. We also know that AMD has been shipping 7nm silicon out of TSMC since mid-2019, implying that the node should be pretty mature by now, even for high-power desktop chips and GPUs. The fact that we’re seeing global problems does suggest there might be additional variables in play.

Also, the crypto market is exploding again, which is going to help exactly no one and nothing when it comes to finding a solution to ongoing shortages.
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TSMC’s major suppliers for ABF are all rumored to be experiencing ongoing shortages. There are rumors that AMD can’t currently meet demand for notebooks because of the ABF problem and that the issue could worsen in Q3 2021 when Zen 3 notebooks come to market. Up until now, we’ve heard a lot of rumors that the shortages would ease in March-April 2021, but if the ABF angle is true, it could take longer.