Texas To Get Multiple New Fabs as Samsung and TI to Spend $47 Billion on New Facilities
by Anton Shilov on November 24, 2021 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Semiconductors
- Samsung
- EUV
- Samsung Foundry
- Texas Instruments
After a year of searching for the right place of its new U.S. fab, Samsung this week announced that it would build a fab near Taylor, Texas. The company will invest $17 billion in the new semiconductor fabrication plant and will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives from local and state authorities. Separately, Texas authorities have announced that Texas Instruments intend to spend $30 billion on new fabs in the state, as well.
Samsung to Spend $17 Billion on New Texas Fab
Samsung yet has to disclose all the details about its fab near Taylor, Texas, but for now the company says that the new fab site will occupy an area of over 5 million square meters and will employ 2,000 workers directly and another 7,000 indirectly. To put the number into context, Samsung's fab near Austin, Texas currently employs about 10,000 of workers.
Samsung will start construction of the new fab in the first half of 2022 and expects it to be operational in the second half of 2024. It usually takes about a year to construct a building for a semiconductor manufacturing facility and then about a year to install and set up all the necessary equipment.
Samsung has not announced which process technologies will be used at its fab near Taylor, Texas, but says it will produce chips for 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and mobile applications, which implies that the fab will gain fairly advanced technologies. In fact, keeping in mind that all of Samsung's nodes thinner than 7 nm rely on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, it is reasonable to expect the new fab to be EUV capable. As a result, Samsung's customers from the U.S. (such as IBM, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) will be able to produce their chips in the U.S. rather than in South Korea, which might allow their developers to address systems used by the U.S. government.
"With greater manufacturing capacity, we will be able to better serve the needs of our customers and contribute to the stability of the global semiconductor supply chain," said Kinam Kim, Vice Chairman and CEO, Samsung Electronics Device Solutions Division. "In addition to our partners in Texas, we are grateful to the Biden Administration for creating an environment that supports companies like Samsung as we work to expand leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. We also thank the administration and Congress for their bipartisan support to swiftly enact federal incentives for domestic chip production and innovation."
Samsung's new semiconductor production plant will be located 25 kilometers away from the company's fab near Austin, Texas, so the facilities will be able to share infrastructure and resources (such as materials and supplies).
Samsung says that it will spend about $6 billion on construction on the building as well as improvements of the local infrastructure. Tools that will be used by the fab will cost another $11 billion. Meanwhile, to build the new plant Samsung will receive hundreds of millions in incentives from the state, the county, and the city, according to media reports. Some of the packages have not been approved yet.
Texas Instruments to Invest $30 Billion on New U.S. Fabs
Samsung is not the only company to build new fabs in Texas. The Governor of Texas recently announced the Texas Instruments was planning to build several new 300-mm fabs near Sherman. In total, TI intends to build as many as four wafer fabrication facilities in the region over coming decades and the cumulative investments are expected to total $30 billion as fabs will be eventually upgraded.
Texas Instruments itself yet have to formally announce its investments plans, but the announcement by the governor Greg Abbot indicates that the principal decisions have been made and now TI needs to finalize the details.
Sources: Samsung, Austin American-Statesman, Texas.gov
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flgt - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
Agree, our company is scrambling now because one of the fabs was so badly damaged in the power outage it wasn’t cost effective to fix it. It was a trailing edge node and they just shut down and left their customer with no parts. Now we have to simultaneously redesign a bunch of products.rayhapes - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
Well actually "prone" would not be the correct term. Texas' outage history is kinda wierd. Once every 10 years or so there something happens that gets national attention but otherwise pretty good.I can tell you NO facilty of any signifance anywhere would be operating without back up power sources.
Can you name a specific DRAM fab that suffered any significant loss due to power outages?
Holy cow if I were spending 10s of Billions on a facility like this I would be factoring in back up power and more importantly Solar Power...Texas is pretty sunny and I bet the energy companny supplying that power will be working with Samsung to do just that. I know TI produces a lot of its own power already.
flgt - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
"But the termination of all our utilities for an indefinite length of time? That required a complete shutdown of both our facilities and an evacuation of our team (except the critical facilities team members), marking an extraordinary event without any precedent in our 30+ years of operations in the Austin area."https://www.nxp.com/company/blog/through-the-storm...
https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/3...
https://www.eetimes.com/infineon-and-nxp-resume-au...
meacupla - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
Micron Taiwan Dec, 2020Samsung Hwaseong, Jan 2020
Toshiba June 15, 2019
Samsung Xi'an August 2016
This is not a complete list.
Fabricators require a lot of power, like anywhere from 40MW to 100MW depending on scale, and all of it is mission critical.
And despite all these power failures causing tremendous amounts of damage, none of these fabs seem to have backup power or UPS. Curious.
As for Texas only having power outages every 10 years or so. Weren't those caused by extreme weather events? Which, mysteriously, seem to be happening more frequently.
mode_13h - Friday, November 26, 2021 - link
Backup power is not cheap. You're basically talking about building a dedicated power station. Without precedent of power problems in the localities where they're situated, I can understand how that cost would be difficult for them to swallow. Probably, they'd rather the municipality just add reliability and redundancy to their grid.FunBunny2 - Friday, November 26, 2021 - link
"none of these fabs seem to have backup power or UPS. Curious."not at all. that much power requires a full-scale power plant, which demands fuel. which then sits idle most of the time. the bean counters have always, so far, calculated that the in-process losses are less than the amortized cost of such power plants.
"100 megawatts of solar power is thus enough, on average, to power 16,400 U.S. homes."
https://law.lclark.edu/live/news/28453-100-megawat...
that's not trivial
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
These kinds of comments keep popping up. Fabs use an INSANE amount of power, the Samsung fab in Austin is by far the number one consumer of power. You can't just battery backup a fab, things shut down. In February Austin Power completely cut the fab off with only hours warning, while leaving much of downtown lit. Facilities worldwide have had power issues in the news in the last 5 years.mode_13h - Friday, November 26, 2021 - link
> Texas' outage history is kinda wierd. Once every 10 years or so there something happensThe last time Texas had a major freeze, they were warned to winterize their power grid, and they didn't do it. We really can't say this will be only a once-per-decade problem. Weather is getting increasingly crazy.
easp - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
Nothing diesel generators and huge backup batteries can't fix (until you can't refuel the generators).FunBunny2 - Friday, November 26, 2021 - link
"Nothing diesel generators and huge backup batteries can't fix (until you can't refuel the generators)."100 MW of diesel power??? to channel John McEnroe: "YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!!!"