Nathan Lambert
speaker
1,814 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Feb
Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You have more companies than ever designing chips, but you have fewer companies than ever manufacturing them, right? And this is where TSMC comes in is they've just been the best, right? They are so good at it, right? They're customer focused. They make it easy for you to fabricate your chips. They take all of that complexity and like kind of try and abstract a lot of it away from you.
They make good money. They don't make insane money, but they make good money. And they're able to aggregate all this demand and continue to build the next fab, the next fab, the next fab.
Yeah, so there's aspects of it that I would say yes and aspects that I'd say no, right? TSMC is way ahead because former executive Morris Chang of Texas Instruments wasn't promoted to CEO. And he's like, screw this, I'm going to go make my own chip company, right? And he went to Taiwan and made TSMC, right? And there's a whole lot more story there.
So it could have been Texas Instruments, could have been TSMC, but Texas Instruments. semiconductor manufacturing, right? Instead of, you know, Texas instruments, right? But, you know, so there is that whole story there.
Just the brilliance of Morris Chang, you know, which I wouldn't underplay, but there's also like a different level of like how this works, right? So in Taiwan... you know, like the number, top percent of graduates, of students that go to the best school, which is NTU, the top percent of those all go work to TSMC, right? And guess what their pay is?
Their starting pay is like $80,000, $70,000, right? Which is like, that's like starting pay for like a good graduate in the US, right? Not the top, the top graduates are making hundreds of thousands of dollars at the Googles and the Amazons. And now I guess the open AIs of the world, right? So there is a large dichotomy of like, what is the top 1% of the society doing?
And where are they headed because of economic reasons, right? Intel never paid that crazy good, right? And it didn't make sense to them, right? That's one aspect, right? Where's the best going? Second is the work ethic, right? Like, you know, We like to work. You work a lot. We work a lot. But at the end of the day, what is the time and amount of work that you're doing and what does a fab require?
Fabs are not work-from-home jobs. You go into the fab and grueling work. There's, hey, if there is any amount of vibration, an earthquake happens. vibrates the machines. They're all, you know, they're either broken, you've scrapped some of your production. And then in many cases, they're like not calibrated properly. So when TSMC, when there's an earthquake, right?
Recently, there's been an earthquake. TSMC doesn't call their employees. They just go to the fab and like, they just show up, the parking lot gets slammed and people just go into the fab and fix it, right? Like it's like ants, right? Like it's like, you know, a hive of ants doesn't get told by the queen what to do,
Which is like some special chemistry plus nanomanufacturing on one line of tools that continues to get iterated. And yeah, it's just like, it's like specific plasma edge for removing silicon dioxide, right? That's all you focus on your whole career. And it's like such a specialized thing. And so it's not like the tasks are transferable. AI today is awesome because like people can pick it up like,
that. Semiconductor manufacturing is very antiquated and difficult. None of the materials are online for people to read easily and learn. The papers are very dense and it takes a lot of experience to learn. And so it makes the barrier to entry much higher too. So when you talk about, hey, you have all these people that are super specialized, they will work 80 hours a week in a factory, in a fab,
And if anything goes wrong, they'll go show up in the middle of the night because some earthquake. Their wife is like, there was an earthquake. He's like, great, I'm gonna go to the fab. Would you, as an American, do that? These sorts of things are the exemplifying why TSMC is so amazing. Now, can you replicate it in the U.S. ?
Let's not ignore, Intel was the leader in manufacturing for over 20 years. They brought every technology to market first, besides EUV. Strained silicon, high-k metal gates, FinFET, you know, and the list goes on and on and on of technologies that Intel brought to market first, made the most money from, and manufactured at scale first, best technology. highest profit margins, right?
So we shouldn't ignore that Intel can't do this, right? It's that the culture has broken, right? You've invested in the wrong things. They said no to the iPhone. They had all these different things regarding like, you know, mismanagement of the fabs, mismanagement of designs, this lockup, right?
At the same time, all these brilliant people, these 50,000 PhDs or masters that have been working on specific chemical or physical processes or nanomanufacturing processes for decades in Oregon, they're still there. They're still producing amazing work.
It's just like getting it to the last mile of production at high yield where you can manufacture dozens and hundreds of different kinds of chips online. you know, and, and it's good. You customer experience has broken, right? You know, it's that customer experience. It's like the, like part of it is like, people will say Intel was too pompous in the 2000s, 2010s, right?
They just thought they were better than everyone. The tool guys were like, Oh, I don't think that this is mature enough. And they're like, ah, you just don't know. We know, right. This sort of stuff would happen. Um, and so can the U S bring it to the, uh, can the U S bring leading edge semiconductor manufacturing to the U S emphatically? Yes. Right. And we are right. It's happening.
Like Arizona is getting better and better as time goes on. TSMC has built roughly 20% of their capacity for 5 nanometer in the US, right? Now, this is nowhere near enough, right? 20% of capacity in the US is like nothing, right? And furthermore, this is still dependent on Taiwan existing, right? There's sort of important way to separate it out. There's R&D and there's high volume manufacturing.
Effectively, there are three places in the world that are doing leading edge R&D. There's Hsinchu, Taiwan, there's Hillsborough, Oregon, and there is Pyongyang, South Korea. These three places are doing the leading edge R&D for the rest of the world's leading edge semiconductors. Now, manufacturing can be distributed more globally. right?
And this is sort of where this dichotomy exists of who's actually modifying the process, who's actually developing the next generation one, who's improving them, is Hsinchu, is Hillsborough, is Pyongyang, right? It is not the rest of these fabs like Arizona, right? Arizona is a paperweight. If Hsinchu disappeared off the face of the planet, within a year, couple years,
Showing 1401–1420 of 1,814 · page 71 of 91
← Previous
Next →