[新聞] Biden's chip dreams face reality check of supply chain complexity

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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）--要瞭解美國總統喬-拜登（Joe Biden）在搞定困擾汽車製造商和其他行業的半導體短缺方面所面臨的挑戰，請參考一家美國公司為現代汽車公司（Hyundai Motor Co）的新型電動汽車IONIQ 5提供的晶片。安森美半導體設計的相機圖像感測器晶片的生產始於義大利的一家工廠，在那裡，原始矽片被印上複雜的電路。這些矽片首先被送往臺灣進行包裝和測試，然後送往新加坡儲存，再到中國組裝成相機單元，最後送往韓國的現代汽車零部件供應商，然後到達現代汽車的汽車工廠。該圖像感測器的短缺導致現代汽車在韓國的工廠閒置，使其成為最新一家遭受全球供應困境的汽車製造商，這些困境使包括通用汽車公司和福特汽車公司以及大眾汽車在內的大多數汽車製造商的生產陷入癱瘓。而圖像感測器的曲折歷程表明，對於晶片行業來說，既要提高產能解決當前的短缺問題，又要重新振興美國的晶片製造業，將是多麼複雜的事情。美國總統喬-拜登週一在華盛頓召集半導體行業高管，討論解決晶片危機的辦法，這也是他在更廣泛的努力中支援國內晶片產業的最新舉措。他還提出500億美元支援晶片製造和研究，作為其2兆美元基礎設施提案的一部分，他說這將有助於美國贏得與中國的全球競爭。其中大部分資金可能會用於英特爾、三星和台積電建設價值數十億美元的先進晶片工廠。但行業高管表示，解決更廣泛的供應鏈問題至關重要，拜登政府面臨著複雜的選擇，要對其中的哪些要素進行補貼。 "試圖在一個給定地點重建從上游到下游的整個供應鏈是不可能的，"安森美半導體高級副總裁David Somo告訴路透社。"這將是非常昂貴的。" 美國現在只占全球半導體製造能力的12%左右，低於1990年的37%。據行業資料顯示，目前全球超過80%的晶片生產發生在亞洲。 1,000個步驟，70個邊境。生產一個電腦晶片可能涉及1000多個步驟，70個獨立的邊境口岸和眾多的專業公司，其中大部分在亞洲，而且基本上不為公眾所知。這個過程從平板大小的矽原料盤開始。在被稱為 "晶圓廠 "的晶片工廠裡，電路被蝕刻在矽片上，並通過一系列複雜的化學過程在其表面形成。下一步--封裝--很好地說明了供應鏈的挑戰。晶圓從晶圓廠出來時，每個圓盤上有數百甚至數千個指甲大小的晶片。它們必須被切割成單個晶片，並放入包裝中。傳統上，這意味著將每個晶片放在 "引線框架 "上，並將其焊接到電路板上。然後，整個元件將被包裝在一個樹脂盒中以保護它。這個過程是非常勞動密集型的，導致晶片公司在幾十年前就將其外包給包括臺灣、馬來西亞、菲律賓和中國在內的國家。封裝步驟本身也有自己的供應鏈。例如，韓國的Haesung DS為汽車晶片製造封裝元件，出口到馬來西亞或泰國，客戶包括英飛淩和恩智浦。這些公司或在某些情況下是分包商，然後為博世和大陸等汽車供應商組裝和封裝晶片，再由這些供應商向汽車製造商提供最終產品。 "如果他們(拜登政府)要想在這方面取得成功，就必須幫助重建美國的包裝業，"加州晶片包裝公司Promex的首席執行官迪克-奧特說。 "否則就是浪費時間。這就像造一輛汽車，卻沒有車身可以裝。" 但較新的晶片封裝工藝的勞動強度要低得多，這使得一些美國晶片製造商認為可以從國外引進晶片。 10月，總部位於明尼蘇達州的晶片代工企業--天水科技公司接管了佛羅里達州的一個工廠，計畫在那裡建立起先進的封裝生產線。 "全行業都有一種共識，那就是所有這些都需要在這裡發生，"天水科技首席執行官 Thomas Sonderman說。更快的周轉南加州大學電氣和電腦工程教授托尼-萊維表示，重建美國封裝產業不僅可以使晶片公司及其客戶免受政治風險的影響，還可以説明他們擺脫創造新晶片的漫長週期。通過在本地開展更多工作，美國晶片公司可以更頻繁地製造出更小批量的晶片，加快創新速度，並有可能創造出更快速調整需求的能力。 Levi表示，亞利桑那州、德克薩斯州和紐約--英特爾、台積電、三星和GlobalFoundries 在這些地方都有現有的或計畫中的設施--將適合封裝等供應鏈要素的集群化。 "美國非常擅長的是系統設計、產品設計和製造本身之間的緊密合作，"萊維說。不過，拜登政府將如何平衡晶片行業眾多子行業的需求還有待觀察。眾多公司，其中許多是海外公司，提供包括晶圓和氣體在內的關鍵代工材料。先進的晶片生產所使用的精密工具大多是在美國製造的，但對於工廠部件來說，情況並非如此，比如在各個工藝步驟之間攆動晶片的機器人系統。除此之外，一些業內人士認為，美國不僅需要支援新的尖端晶圓廠，還需要支援老的技術。位於奧斯丁的矽設計公司Silicon Labs的首席執行官Tyson Tuttle指出，比較成熟的晶片才是嚴重短缺的。他說："我們的半導體產業存在資本錯置的問題。"太多的資金流向了最先進的技術。 E. TechSearch International Inc.總裁Jan Vardaman表示，晶片封裝行業一直承受著嚴重的價格壓力，導致利潤率小於晶片工廠和晶片設計公司。"從財務和經濟的角度來看，他們進行大筆投資是沒有意義的。" "單純的投錢並不能解決問題。這是一個比較複雜的問題。" 心得/評論：基本上這篇新聞有趣的地方在於你可以從這些意見提供者的表述中看見各自出於自身利益的立場相信台灣人來說更是清晰可見比起實際操作上的技術難度產業鏈搬遷更有可能是卡在這些既得利益者的政治遊說上面這是一個遠較單純的重建產業鏈更困難的問題。 -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc), 來自: 118.163.36.239 (臺灣) ※ 文章網址: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Stock/M.1618331273.A.1F8.html

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