Taiwan is home to a good portion of the global chip manufacturing market and one of the most important TSMC factories for Apple. Because yes, Apple develops the chips and designs them in collaboration with TSMC to finally be manufactured by them. Currently, TSMC is the leading manufacturing company, well ahead of Intel and other Chinese internals like Huawei chips. This is part of the veto between the United States and China over the use of common technology.
The sophisticated mechanism that would prevent China from accessing Taiwan’s chip factories
We find ourselves in a somewhat tense global situation, particularly with regard to the territories. In Asia, for decades, always There are fears of an invasion of Taiwan by China.. So much so that the Taiwanese foreign minister has already warned about it.
Beyond the political and territorial issues, China would have an interest in carrying out reverse engineering in TSMC processor factories In Taiwan. Reverse engineering is seeing how others do it, then copying, matching, and improving on it. To prevent this, TSMC has a method to disable manufacturing equipment remotely. He’s so far away more than 9,000 kilometers away.
A button after 13 hours of flight that would turn off all equipment
All machines are an essential part of processor manufacturing at TSMC. This advanced equipment comes from a Dutch company called ASML. The same company said it has “a button” to deactivate the machines if necessary. The operation and location of This button is known neither to the companies involved nor to any government.not even Dutch.
How does this panic button work? remotely deactivates high frequency light waves which are used to forge chips. These manufacturing machines are the size of a minibus and must be constantly connected to the network. That’s why, yesoffline they wouldn’t work.
These machines, worth more than 200 million dollars, would stop completely
And what impact would this have on Apple’s chip production? Well, we’ve already experienced a chip shortage due to COVID in 2021 and 2022. For example, Macs it took months to delivernotably the highest configurations like the M2 Max of the time.
An alleged invasion would directly impact Apple’s plans to increase the reach of the M4 chip or the A18 chip. From TSMC has more factories worldwidebut these would be more limited manufacturing lines.
Hopefully this situation it won’t happen after allfor the sake of the people of both countries, the global situation in general and, yes, also for the next iPhone 16 to reach us all on time.
Source | Bloomberg
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