Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. or TSMC had a strong business relation with China’s Huawei Technologies Co. as the Taiwanese firm formerly sold chips to HiSilicon, with Huawei accounting for about 15% of TSMC’s total business.
But, following the May directive by the U.S. Department of Commerce, TSMC was forced to cut off all its relationship with Huawei. The U.S. Regulations, passed on May 15, prohibit producers from providing semiconductors to Huawei if U.S. gear is utilized at any point of creation, according to Fortune.
Huawei’s chips are widely used in their smartphones and being the worlds second-largest smartphone manufacturer, it has to have a lot of them to meet its demands. The Huawei’s chip design unit, HiSilicon, also uses American software to create its semiconductors, while components of TSMC’s manufacturing equipment is also made from the U.S., according to Fortune.
Commenting on this Kung Ming-hsin, head of Taiwan’s economic planning agency the National Development Council, said that Washington was worried about a certain firm, not Taiwan’s economic relations with China, Reuters reported. The US mainly targeted Huawei since it lacked transparency and had too close of a relationship with the Chinese authorities, Kung added.
“As for the TSMC, although their orders are no longer Huawei, they have rapidly been filled up, as other individuals actually need them,” Reuters cited Kung as saying. TSMC declined to pass any comment, saying it didn’t comment on its own customers. However, as per leaks heard before, most likely we will see AMD and NVIDIA taking up those spare 7nm chips to use them into their next-gen GPUs.
TSMC has already announced last month that it’d be constructing a US$12 billion semiconductor centre in Arizona while the onstruction is set to start in 2021, on the other hand, with chip production slated to begin by 2024. Indeed a good time for TSMC as they are progressing at a rapid pace, their upcoming target being 5nm production, early stages of 3nm chips, development of 2nm chips and their speculated revelation of 4nm based process as well.
Source: Taiwan News
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