Obviously, the stability of power supply is a serious hurry for semiconductor manufacturers and even all semiconductor wealth. With the further development of semiconductor wealth, the need for electricity will also show a dramatic growth trend. If Taiwan cannot guarantee sufficient power supply, “power shortages†will become the biggest stagnation to discourage Taiwan’s semiconductor wealth development.
According to the statistics of the World Energy Agency, the per capita annual electricity consumption in Taiwan has reached about 10,800 kWh in 2012, which exceeds that of Japan and South Korea and has become the most per capita electricity consumption in non-oil-producing countries and regions in Asia. In 2014, China's per capita annual electricity consumption was only 4,740 kWh, less than half of Taiwan's 2012. Among them, Taiwan’s huge semiconductor wealth is a big consumer of electricity, and Taiwan’s average public power consumption is due to “averageâ€.
With the rapid development of semiconductor wealth, the need for power supply is also rapidly advancing. If the supply of electricity cannot keep up, the development of semiconductor wealth will also be subject to great dissatisfaction. At present, Taiwan’s most proud semiconductor wealth is threatened by “power shortagesâ€, and with the rapid growth of Taiwan’s semiconductor wealth for power, and the spur of Taiwan’s “2025 non-nuclear homelandâ€, the future threat will remain. Further intensified. This also casts a dark shadow on the future development of Taiwan’s semiconductor wealth.
815 Taiwan blackouts are just the beginning
According to data from 2011, the total annual power consumption of computer communication and electronic wealth, chemical materials, metals, and steel assets in the three areas accounts for 33.1% of the total electricity consumption in Taiwan, and it will increase 3 billion kilowatts per year. More than the time, it is exactly large consumers.
It should be pointed out that due to the lack of energy wealth in Taiwan, coal mines and hydropower are relatively abundant. This also leads to 99% of the energy needed in Taiwan needs to be imported. However, for a long time, the price of electricity in Taiwan has been at a low level for the world because of political reasons (it cannot devaluate). According to statistics released by the National Energy Administration in August 2016, the property price in Taiwan was the 8th lowest in the world in 2015, and the residential electricity price was the third lowest in the world. As a result of the long-term low electricity prices, Taiwan’s power supply company, Taipower, has to connect a certain amount of power generation, but it cannot raise electricity prices, and economically efficient nuclear power can no longer be used, resulting in the company’s operating deficits. According to the data released by Taipower in August this year, it lost nearly NT$7.1 billion in the first half of this year, accumulated losses amounted to NT$10 billion, plus various long- and short-term debts, and the debt on the account was as high as 1.06 trillion yuan. Yuan New Taiwan Dollar, debt ratio as high as 85%. The continued losses of Taipower also led to difficulties in increasing investment and increasing the amount of power generated. In addition, the necessary substantial increase in power consumption has also caused Taiwan to become more and more in danger.
At the end of July 2017 and early August 2017, two typhoons, Rusha and Haishu, landed in Taiwan before and after the typhoon. One transmission tower in Dongshan, Yilan, was torn down by the typhoon, causing Taiwan to rush into power supply. Initial assessment of the repair of this power tower requires at least 15 days.
Then on August 15th, an island-wide blackout occurred in Taiwan, affecting nearly 7 million households (almost the entire population of Taiwan). In order to protect Taiwan’s pillar wealth, semiconductor wealth, the government provided all the remaining power that night to the semiconductor fabs in the three major science parks. This also made the world’s largest wafer foundry TSMC unscathed in the blackout, and the world’s largest chip maker, Sun Moonlight Group’s sole South Yard campus, showed a 60-minute power outage before quickly recovering its power supply. Only Nam Mao Technology's factory located in Nanke Park showed some losses. Overall, this blackout has little impact on Taiwan’s semiconductor wealth.
However, this blackout actually intimidated Taiwan’s semiconductor wealth.
Because, in the course of production of the chip, in the event of a power outage, it means that all the wafers on the production line must all be scrapped. First of all, the production of the chip Fab requires a super clean production environment. Any natural catastrophe has a large impact on the construction of the ultra-clean environment. The connection to the ultra-clean environment itself also requires the consumption of large amounts of electricity. In the event of a power outage, the ultra-clean environment may be contaminated, and wafers on the entire production line will largely be scrapped. At the same time, the power outage of the chip production equipment will bring greater losses. Take an ASML ArF-immersion 1980Di lithography production line as an example. If a power failure occurs, the equipment cost for re-commissioning, restart, and rampup will be as much as tens of millions of dollars. For all mills with a lot of equipment, the losses will be even greater.
Before this, in 2016, Xi’an’s high-voltage substation equipment exploded and the voltage in the east and south of Xi’an City abruptly changed. This led to the sabotage and shutdown of Samsung’s Samsung memory chip factory, and all wafers on the production line were banned, according to the then 64-layer NAND chip. The price estimate, Samsung lost up to 300 million US dollars in that incident.
Moreover, the length of time that these chip factory line production stops will directly affect the supply and price of the world-wide chip. For example, in 2015, the Kaohsiung earthquake in Taiwan and the shutdown of TSMC's Chinese and South Branch plants led to a 10% to 20% increase in the price of world-wide logic chips. Similarly, the price of the world's memory chips jumped by 25% in an instant after the explosion of the second largest chip maker Hynix in South Korea at the wafer plant in Wuxi.
As early as the end of 2015, the then President Ma Ying-jeou visited the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. At that time, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Zhang Zhongmou, pointed out that one of the biggest hidden worries in Taiwan is the lack of power, and that Taiwan will face an emergency of power curfew in 2017. Zhang Zhongmou said at the time of his interview that the impact of the blackout on TSMC was "almost inestimable." Of course, each plant of TSMC has a backup power supply, but in the face of the huge power required by the production line, the backup power supply will not be able to support the power supply for a long time. This front desk has also raised the practice of self-built power plants, but it has not been approved.
After the blackout on August 15th, Peng Shuanglang, chairman of AUO, a panel producer and panel producer, also stated that “Taiwan’s electricity consumption is a subsidy property for people’s livelihood. In fact, supply and necessity are adjusted by price, and the higher the electricity consumption, The higher the unit price of expenditure, we are not afraid of being expensive and we are afraid of instability."
Semiconductor wealth will dramatically increase the necessary rapid increase in electricity.
The construction of semiconductors has always been a highly power-consuming process. Among Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturers, TSMC has always been the largest consumer of electricity. According to the material, in the past five years, one-third of the electricity that Taiwan has grown was consumed by TSMC. According to the TSMC corporate social mission report, electricity consumption reached 8.853 billion kWh in 2016, an increase of 11% over the previous year. TSMC's Fab only consumes more than 720,000 kilowatts of power in the Bamboo Branch.
With the development of Moore's Law, it is increasingly difficult for the semiconductor process to spur, and it is estimated that the 5nm process will have to introduce new EUV (ultra-violet light) lithography skills to achieve this, but this will also lead to a surge in power consumption.
It is understood that the main stream source of the current semiconductor system is an Argon-Fluorine laser with a wavelength of 193 nm. When the transistor scale has been scaled down to several tens of nanometers, it is like using a rough brush to write small characters. . The wavelength of the EUV is only 13.5 nm, which makes the EUV lithography machine the key to the 7 nm, 5 nm, and 3 nm process.
The EUV lithography machine that can be produced at present only needs a Dutch ASML, and the cost of EUV lithography machine is very high too. The NXE3400B, an EUV lithography machine that ASML is currently starting at priced at $110 million, is still in short supply. According to reports, ASML had received orders for five EUV lithography machines, of which TSMC had set aside five units and cost 550 million U.S. dollars. This price, you can almost buy the world's two largest civil aviation aircraft - Airbus A380.
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