Apple was instrumental in TSMC setting up chipmaking plants in the US – not just by offering to be the first customer, but also in lobbying for the CHIPS Act funding that persuaded the company to proceed.
The Taiwanese company takes extreme precautions to protect the secrecy of its chipmaking processes, even for the somewhat older chips made in Arizona, but BBC News was given a very rare tour of the facility …
‘Made in America’ Apple chips
Apple first announced its plan for ‘Made in America’ chips back in 2022, with the news hailed as one of the success stories of the US CHIPS Act. The initiative will see a series of TSMC chipmaking plants built in Arizona, with some of the production reserved for Apple chips.
TSMC deliberately limits its most advanced chipmaking capabilities to its home territory of Taiwan, meaning its US plants can only make chips for older Apple devices. However, the company recently promised to accelerate the pace of development, meaning it will eventually be making chips for products around three generations old, rather than the previous 4-5 years.
The chipmaker recently broke ground on its third US plant, with Apple CEO Tim Cook expressing his pride at being the first customer for the facility.
A look inside the TSMC Arizona plant
We shouldn’t, of course, expect too much. TSMC has maintained its global lead in chipmaking by developing the most advanced processes and successfully preventing competitors from finding out too much about them.
The BBC says the company not only doesn’t allow visitors to bring in any personal electronic devices, it even forbids paper, presumably guarding against any notes or drawings.
The piece says that the giant Arizona plants almost exactly replicate the ones in Taiwan.
Greg Jackson, one of the facilities managers, takes me around in a golf buggy. The factories are almost a carbon copy of the TSMC spaces in Taiwan, where he trained. “I would say these facilities are probably some of the most advanced and complicated in the world,” he says.
The clean rooms containing the chipmaking machines are housed within a ‘moat’ accessed by a bridge.
These machines shoot UV light tens of thousands of times through drops of molten tin, which creates a plasma, and is then refracted through a series of specialised mirrors […]
Inside the “Gowning Building”, workers dress in protective clothing before crossing a bridge that is supposed to create the cleanest environment on Earth.
That’s because even a single particle of dust would be enough to destroy months worth of work.
That’s how long it takes to produce each wafer of 4nm chips. During that time, between 3,000 and 4,000 separate operations are performed on multiple layers to create a complex 3D array of a staggering 10 to 14 trillion transistors.
If you could somehow shrink your body to the same scale and get inside the wafer, he says that the many different layers would look like very tall streets and skyscrapers.
As I say, it doesn’t reveal too much, but we do get brief clips of the machines in use, so it’s still an interesting look inside one of the world’s largest production plants making one of the world’s smallest products.
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Screengrab: BBC News
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