原文標題：
Biden's chip dreams face reality check of supply chain complexity
拜登的晶圓夢想面臨著對供應鏈複雜性的現實檢驗
文連結：
https://reurl.cc/GdYG5A
發布時間：
APRIL 13, 20217:05 PM
原文內容：
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - To understand President Joe Biden’s challenge in
taming a semiconductor shortage bedeviling automakers and other industries,
consider a chip supplied by a U.S. firm for Hyundai Motor Co’s new electric
vehicle, the IONIQ 5.
Production of the chip, a camera image sensor designed by On Semiconductor,
begins at a factory in Italy, where raw silicon wafers are imprinted with
complex circuitry.
The wafers are then sent first to Taiwan for packaging and testing, then to
Singapore for storage, then on to China for assembly into a camera unit, and
finally to a Hyundai component supplier in Korea before reaching Hyundai’s
auto factories.
A shortage of that image sensor has led to the idling of Hyundai Motor’s
plant in South Korea, making it the latest automaker to suffer from global
supply woes that crippled production at most automakers including General
Motors Co and Ford Motors Co and Volkswagen.
And the winding journey of the image sensor shows just how complicated it
will be for the chip industry to both ramp up capacity to address the current
shortage and re-invigorate U.S. chip manufacturing. For a graphic, click
tmsnrt.rs/3dW8nbN
U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday convened semiconductor industry executives
in Washington to discuss solutions to the chip crisis, the latest move in a
broader effort to bolster the domestic chip industry. He’s also proposed $50
billion to support chip manufacturing and research as part of his $2 trillion
infrastructure proposal, which he said would help the United States win the
global competition with China.
Much of that money will likely go towards the construction of
multi-billion-dollar advanced chip plants by Intel, Samsung and TSMC. But
industry executives say addressing the broader supply chain is crucial, and
the Biden administration faces complicated choices on which elements of it to
subsidize.
“Trying to reconstruct an entire supply chain from upstream to downstream in
a single given location just isn’t a possibility,” David Somo, senior vice
president at ON Semiconductor, told Reuters. “It would be prohibitively
expensive.”
The United States now only accounts for about 12% of worldwide semiconductor
manufacturing capacity, down from 37% in 1990. More than 80% of global chip
production now happens in Asia, according to industry data.
1,000 STEPS, 70 BORDERS
Producing a single computer chip can involve more than 1,000 steps, 70
separate border crossings and a host of specialized companies, most of them
in Asia and largely unknown to the public.
The process starts with plate-size discs of raw silicon. At chip factories
known as ‘fabs,’ circuits are etched into the silicon and built up on its
surface through a series of complicated chemical processes.
The next step - packaging - offers a good illustration of the supply chain
challenges.
Wafers emerge from fabs with hundreds or even thousands of fingernail-sized
chips on each disc. They must be cut up into individual chips and put into a
package.
Traditionally that meant placing each chip onto a “lead frame” and
soldering it to a circuit board. The entire assembly would then be packaged
in a resin case to protect it.
That process is very labor intensive, leading chip companies to outsource it
decades ago to countries including Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and
China.
The packaging step itself has its own supply chain: South Korea’s Haesung
DS, for example, makes packaging components for automotive chips, exporting
them to Malaysia or Thailand for customers including Infineon and NXP. These
companies, or in some cases a sub-contractor, then assemble and package chips
for automotive suppliers like Bosch and Continental, which in turn supply
final products to automakers.
“If they (the Biden administration) are going to be successful with this,
they are going to have to help rebuild the package industry here in the
United States,” said Dick Otte, CEO of Promex, a California-based chip
packaging firm.
“Otherwise it is a waste of time. It is like building a car and not having a
body to put on it.”
But newer chip packaging processes are far less labor intensive, leading some
U.S. chipmakers to believe they can be brought back from abroad.
In October, Minnesota-based chip foundry, SkyWater Technology took over a
facility in Florida where it plans to build out advanced packaging lines.
“There’s kind of an industry-wide agreement that all this needs to happen
here,” Thomas Sonderman, chief executive, SkyWater Technology, said.
FASTER TURNAROUND
Rebuilding the U.S. packaging industry would not only insulate chip companies
and their customers from political risk, it could also help them break free
of the long cycles involved in creating new chips, said Tony Levi, a
professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of
Southern California.
By doing more work locally, U.S. chip firms could create smaller
manufacturing runs of chips more frequently, speeding innovation and
potentially creating the capability to more quickly adjust to demand.
Levi said that Arizona, Texas and New York – where Intel, TSMC, Samsung and
GlobalFoundries all have existing or planned facilities – would be suited to
cluster supply chain elements like packaging.
“What the U.S. is very good at is close collaboration between system design,
product design and the manufacturing itself,” Levi said.
Still, it remains to be seen how the Biden Administration will balance the
demands of the many sub-sectors of the chip industry.
Numerous firms, many of them overseas, provide critical foundry materials
including wafers and gases. The sophisticated tools used for advanced chip
production are mostly made in the United States, but that’s not the case for
factory components such as the robotic systems that whisk chips among the
various process steps.
On top of that, some in the industry argue that the U.S. needs to support not
only new cutting-edge fabs, but older technology too. It’s the more mature
chips that are in severe shortage, noted Tyson Tuttle, CEO of Austin-based
silicon design firm, Silicon Labs.
“We have a mismatch of capital in the semiconductor industry,” he said,
with too much of the money going to the most advanced technologies.
E. Jan Vardaman, President at TechSearch International Inc, said the chip
packaging industry has been under severe price pressure, leading to smaller
margins than chip factories and chip design firms. “From a financial and
economics point of view, it does not make sense for them to make a big
investment.”
“Simply throwing money at this does not solve the problem. It is a more
complex problem.”
機翻如下：
三藩市（路透社）