Taiwan is home to a good part of the global chip manufacturing market and one of the most important TSMC plants for Apple. Just because, Apple develops the chips and designs them together with TSMC to finally be manufactured by them. Currently, TSMC is the leading manufacturing company, well ahead of Intel and other Chinese internal such as Huawei chips. This is part of the veto between the US and China to use joint technology.
The sophisticated mechanism that would prevent China from accessing Taiwan’s chip factories
We find ourselves in a somewhat tense global situation, especially when it comes to territories. In Asia, for decades, always There has been fear of China’s invasion of Taiwan. So much so that the Taiwanese foreign minister has already warned about it.
Beyond political and territorial issues, China would have an interest in carrying out reverse engineering at TSMC processor factories in Taiwan. Reverse engineering consists of seeing how others do it and then copying it, equaling it and improving it. To avoid this, TSMC has a method to disable manufacturing equipment remotely. So remote there is more than 9000 kilometers away.
A button 13 hours into the flight that would turn off all equipment
An essential part of the manufacturing of processors at TSMC is all the machinery. These advanced equipment come from a Dutch company called ASML. The same company stated that they have “a button” to disable the machines if necessary. The operation and place of This button is not known to either the companies involved or any government.not even Dutch.
How this panic button works remotely disables high frequency light waves which are used to forge chips. These manufacturing machines are the size of a minibus and need to be constantly connected to the network. That is why, yesoffline, they would not work.
Inside an ASML machine
These machines, which are worth more than 200 million euros, would stop completely
And how would this affect Apple’s chip production? Well, we already had a chip shortage due to COVID in 2021 and 2022. For example, Macs it took months to deliverespecially the highest configurations such as the M2 Max of the time.
An alleged invasion would directly impact Apple’s plans to increase the range of the M4 Chip or the A18 Chip. From TSMC has more factories throughout the worldbut they would be more limited manufacturing lines.
Let’s hope that this situation finally not happenfor the good of the population of both countries, the world situation in general and, yes, also so that the next iPhone 16 reaches all of us on time.
Source | Bloomberg
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