字幕列表 影片播放 列印英文字幕 We've got well over 400 acres here, and we are, in fact, in ballroom number one. There will be three other factories, one to the north and two of them that are to the west of this. There's a boom happening in Texas. And we're not talking about oil. America's biggest state has become the hub for manufacturing the country's tiniest microchips. Now, because we have ports, because we have access to materials, because of our low cost of doing business, we are best situated to lead this next generation of chip manufacturing. The integrated circuit was invented at Texas Instruments more than 60 years ago, but it's Silicon Valley in California that's long held the title for, well, advancing technology on silicon. But as the cost of making smaller and smaller transistors has skyrocketed, so has the size of the machines and the amount of land needed to do it. I mean, Texas is spacious, it's huge, and then it has great support for ease of business. Now manufacturing chips on U.S. soil is a growing priority amid mounting geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan. The Chips Act set aside more than $52 billion for reshoring production. Samsung, Texas Instruments, Infineon, GlobalWafers, NXP, Applied Materials, all these chip giants have ramped up operations in the Lone Star State. Apple and Amazon chose Texas for designing their custom chips, too. Tell me why we are wearing these things called bunny suits. These beautiful bunny suits are to keep the product clean. So this is a class one clean room. We change out all of the air every eight seconds. So if you ever see an eyelash on a chip, it looks like a space monster. We got a rare look inside the clean rooms of three huge chip fabrication plants, or fabs, around Texas and took a tour of two more being built for a total of $47 billion in new investment coming to the state. While chip companies have made a flurry of big Texas expansions in the last couple of years, the states actually had ties to the semi industry for more than 90 years since the founding of Geophysical Service, Inc., which four Dallas engineers reimagined in 1951, renaming it Texas Instruments. The transistor, the most basic building block of semiconductors, was invented three years earlier at Bell Labs in California, what would become Silicon Valley. But it was Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments that first filed for a patent of the integrated circuit in 1958. This invention opened up the possibility of miniaturizing chips by creating the entire circuit, not just the transistors, out of silicon. TI Went on to build the first handheld electronic calculator in 1967, and it's still well known today for graphing calculators used in classrooms around the world. It is very much so the calculator company to much of the world. But we are so much more than that, obviously. You have an electronic device, you almost certainly have a TI Semiconductor chip inside of it. So we have 80,000 products that ship out to 100,000 different customers. So whether it's analog, but maybe more importantly, think about anything that you can plug into a wall or that has a cord in it very likely has a TI power management IC in it. Kyle Flessner has been with TI for 30 years. He showed us around TI's RFAB2 in Richardson, just north of Dallas. With this second, bigger fab that came online in September, TI plans to output a combined 100 million analog chips per day at its two fabs in Richardson. So this is our overhead delivery system. We've got about 15 miles of track between these two factories, and those cars can move as fast as seven and a half miles an hour. And Flessner took us to the construction site of TI's $30 billion fab coming to the 45,000 person city of Sherman, 60 miles north of Dallas. We're standing under the waffle table. That's what it's commonly called. So it's a clean room up top. The air comes through, the utilities come through that support all of that tool infrastructure. Our fab uses only 300 millimeter or 12 inch and is fully automated. Samsung is the state's other huge chipmaker. The South Korean giant came to Texas in 1996, breaking ground on a big fab in Austin that's now fully devoted to foundry, making logic chips for outside customers. Samsung opened a second fab there in 2007. Everything is supposed to be bigger and better in Texas. Texas does indeed have plenty of land for the gigantic footprint of modern chip fabs. Now, Samsung is adding a whopping 1,200-acre new site in Taylor, 30 miles north of Austin, where it plans to make its first advanced chips in the U.S. starting next year. Our customers love to come to Texas. It's equidistant from either coast, and we know that some of the world's most prominent fabless companies are actually in the United States. Bringing Taylor on board is just going to increase their ability to source their chips domestically and not have to go into areas of the world where they may have some discomfort. Texas has long been famous for policies that entice new businesses. It's one of only a handful of states with no income tax. Combine that with sales tax exemptions for manufacturing machinery and a variety of other tax waivers, and it's no surprise that a number of major companies have relocated or built in Texas lately. There's Tesla's expanding Gigafactory in Austin, and major companies that relocated their headquarters to Texas recently include Caterpillar, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard and Oracle. Now, the chip industry has its own special set of incentives. In June, Abbott approved the Texas Chips Act, setting aside $1.4 billion to subsidize companies that manufacture in the state, as well as universities willing to build related R&D centers. Texas ranks number one in the United States for tier one research universities, and within a 100-mile area of where Samsung is going to be located, they have access to so much incredible intellectual talent. It's not hard to see why Abbott aims to keep Texas at the center of the national conversation about reshoring chip manufacturing. More than half a trillion dollars worth of semiconductors were sold globally in 2022, and chips accounted for more than 300,000 jobs in the U.S. Chips are vital not only for powering our cars, phones and computers, but for national security, from military communication systems to fighter jets and advanced weaponry. And when peaking demand during the pandemic coincided with supply chain disruptions, the resulting chip shortage made it abundantly clear how much the world relies on chips made in Asia. As of 2021, 92% of the world's most advanced chips were made in Taiwan by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. And China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan, a move that could cut the U.S. off from the majority of advanced chips. One thing that we've learned with international hostilities, and that is we can't be relying upon hostile countries for our everyday needs. So the United States of America needs to make sure that we are manufacturing everything that we need. We learned that during the time of Covid, and we shall not make that mistake again. Over the last 30-plus years, the U.S. share of global chip production has plummeted from 37% to just 12%. That's because it costs at least 20% more to build and operate a new fab in the U.S. than in Asia. Labor is cheaper there. The supply chain is more accessible and government incentives are far greater. The Chips Act aims to change that, setting aside 52 billion for companies to manufacture in the U.S. And Texas hopes to get as much of those federal dollars as possible. Since the National Chips Act was introduced in 2020, more than 50 new semiconductor projects have been announced in the U.S., creating some 44,000 new jobs and totaling more than $210 billion of investment. More than $61 billion of that is happening in Texas, with six projects expected to create more than 8,000 jobs. The $17 billion Samsung fab we saw being built in Taylor is one of the two largest projects, but the biggest investment by far is the $30 billion Texas Instruments fab coming to Sherman. For a city of 45,000, that's a huge investment in our community. Our entire city tax base was around $4 billion. This particular space is about 370,000 square feet. So it's one of our largest, actually our largest wafer fab that we have in production. But when it comes to new chip fab investments, Arizona has taken the lead with a $20 billion fab coming from Intel and a $40 billion site from the world's top advanced chipmaker, TSMC. Still, Texas is in close second, and it's the state with the highest number of chip fabs in the country. TI, for instance, has had another fab in Sherman since 1966. Texas Instruments went a long way in putting Sherman on the map. The support we've had from the state legislature and then also the federal support in this industry, Texas continues to be a hub for where we can build this manufacturing industry. German-based Infineon Technologies is one of the world's biggest providers of automotive chips, and it makes many of them in Austin. The number of chips in an automotive, in an EV, any automotive in general is drastically increasing, and all the connectivity, everything communicating within the car, around the car is increasing the chip content in every vehicle. Infineon has been in the U.S. for 25 years. In 2020, it expanded manufacturing in Texas when it bought Cypress Semiconductor for about $10 billion, taking over its Austin fab, where we got a tour. So it's about two football fields in length, all the way from the front to the end, and it's close to 100,000 square feet of clean room space. That's because we're building so many chips at the same time. We have wafers in here that are the beginning of their multi-month life in this fab and wafers that are about to ship out to back end facilities. Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors also has two fabs in Austin and recently made plans for a $2.6 billion expansion that would add an additional four-story Fab. X-Fab, a chip company that's been in Texas for more than two decades, also recently announced a $200 million expansion of its Silicon Carbide fab in North Texas. As the world's second biggest maker of advanced chips, Samsung is a huge draw for other semiconductor suppliers to come to Texas, especially with its coming 1,200-acre advanced fab, north of Austin. When you start bringing in a fab like that, you need to build the ecosystem. And the supply chain is really important. And there's a lot of discussion these days about onshoring supply chains. Of the $17 billion price tag for Samsung's Taylor Fab, $11 billion is going to machinery and equipment. Similarly, TI told us the tools will account for at least 65% of its new fab costs in Sherman. Tools like the $200 million EUV lithography machines made by ASML, the only devices in the world that can etch with enough precision for the most advanced chips. ASML has offices in Dallas and Austin, and the tools made by Applied Materials, the world's next biggest provider of semiconductor equipment, in Austin since 1992. We have been a part of the technology high-tech ecosystem for more than 30 years in Austin. That's where our main workforce is and we continue to grow. And also recently we announced we are going to further expand in Austin, Texas. How helpful is it that some of those tool companies like Applied Materials, have facilities here in Texas? I think it's absolutely critical. They have their expertise that is here, should we identify a problem. Having that on site in hours rather than days is a huge benefit to the efficiency of our operations. As TI expands in Sherman, there's another big supplier expanding manufacturing there, too. Taiwan-based GlobalWafers, through its U.S.-based subsidiary GlobiTech, is spending $5 billion to build the country's biggest silicon wafer factory. The base discs that chips are made on. The wafers are actually sawed out of this ingot and polished and ultimately end up being this bare silicon wafer. They were looking to build the first plant of its kind to be built in America in 20 years. So we were in competition with Ohio and South Korea to bring that plant to Sherman. When it comes to why GlobalWafers and Texas Instruments chose Sherman, water was a major factor. And what you see behind us, that is a process cooling water line that is used to cool the tools as they're operating. It takes a lot of water to make chips, right? It does take quite a bit of water, but it'll probably be somewhere between 1,700 and 2,500 gallons per minute. Previous councils and mayors have bought water rights at Lake Texoma, one of our largest inland lakes in America. So we have plenty of water, which is gold currency. But water isn't plentiful in all parts of Texas. About a quarter of the state remains in drought. Where will that water come from here, especially in periods of drought? So we have the Texas Water Board that's working on that and legislation working on this session to make sure that with a growing population in Texas, we will be able to provide for the water needs not just of businesses, but also for our growing population. In 2021, Samsung used about 38 billion gallons of water to make its chips. Now, what you see here are the cooling towers behind us. And we've got a very aggressive goal this year in Austin, on our Austin campus. We want to reuse over 1 billion gallons of water this year. This factory will be twice as efficient in reuse and recycling than our existing facilities that are in production. Flessner says the 300 millimeter wafer size being made in Richardson and Sherman will help. We can produce 2.3 times the number of chips on this wafer, and yet it only costs us fractionally more to manufacture. But also it's better for the environment because there is less waste in our electricity and water usage per chip is substantially improved in the 300 millimeter form factor. Making chips also takes a massive amount of power. Each of those advanced chip etching EUV machines that Samsung will use in Taylor is rated to consume about one megawatt of electricity, 10% more than the previous generation. One study showed Samsung used more than 20% of South Korea's entire solar and wind power capacity in 2020. So behind me is our natural gas-powered power plant that's 750 megawatts. So we are feeding a good percentage of the grid for Texas. We've got power and water. When you have those two things, then you're already ahead of most other communities, nationwide. But Texas also has a uniquely independent grid that largely cuts it off from borrowing power across state lines. In Denton, Texas, where the winter storm and power crisis continues this afternoon, outages are ongoing as low temperatures... In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, leaving millions of Texans without power and causing at least 57 deaths. We asked Governor Abbott about grid reliability in the face of mounting needs. I already signed 12 laws to make the power grid more reliable, more resilient and more secure. And so we can definitely assure any business moving here they will have access to the power they need, but also at a low cost. Samsung, Infineon and NXP were forced to shut down their Austin fabs temporarily during the blackout in February 2021. Infineon told investors output levels wouldn't return to normal until June that year. Now, Samsung, Infineon and other chip companies have switched entirely to renewable power. This site is on 100% green power, and that's sourced from wind farms here in Texas. We're also able to recycle the majority of the water we use on site. In addition to resource challenges, chips are also facing hard times right now when it comes to sales, amid a broader downturn for tech and an overabundance of inventory in the wake of the chip shortage. Intel, the third biggest advanced chipmaker after TSMC and Samsung, aims to cut costs by up to $10 billion over the next three years. In Texas, it's selling its 61-acre Austin research hub. Samsung, meanwhile, reported dismal Q1 earnings in April and cut production of memory chips in response to falling prices. But it's doubled down on the foundry side of its business, making logic chips in Texas, where Samsung hinted to CNBC it will be expanding beyond the first fab announced in Taylor. $17 billion investment on that site as a first factory. But we have 1,200 acres and that first factory is taking up about 250 acres of it. So we have room to expand. And early this year, Texas Instruments suffered its first sales decline since 2020, but that hasn't slowed down its fab expansion in Texas. We're in the relatively early stages, but we are making tremendous progress towards having production out of this facility in 2025.
B1 中級 美國腔 How Texas Became The American Chipmaking Hub 16 0 林宜悉 發佈於 2023 年 07 月 20 日 更多分享 分享 收藏 回報 影片單字