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TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

We saw a small scale version of this back in 2011 when the Renesas Naka factory got knocked out by the Great East Japan Earthquake:

https://www.eetimes.com/post-quake-the-finest-hour-of-renesas-and-the-industry/

The automotive industry collectively realised that they had a single source dependency on one factory for specialist microcontrollers.

They got some of the fab lines back up and running in a month (main ones took 3 months), with an absolutely spectacular effort, to quote:

"Groundswell of support Renesas received from its own employees, customers, suppliers, contractors and even competitors...the goal was achieved through extraordinary measures by suppliers, contractors – and even sometimes competitors who made no bones about diverting necessary equipment deliveries to Renesas.

At the peak of its recovery efforts in April, 2,500 people were working shifts around the clock, 24/7, all running a thousand different tasks in parallel"

All of the Japanese auto makers gave over thousands of personnel to support the cleanup efforts.

It disrupted the automotive supply chain for at least the next 6 months.

That was one factory, running a very old process node (for highly customised systems) brought back online with immense effort and commitment.

Now multiply that at least 100 fold...

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