Month: March 2021

Enlarge / Parler leadership is a bit shadowy at the moment. (credit: Pavlo Gonchar | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

Former Parler CEO John Matze is suing the board of the troubled social media company, alleging that funder Rebekah Mercer and board members she placed engaged in a scheme to steal his share in the company he co-founded.

"While Mercer readily acknowledged and broadly boasted... that Parler was an enterprise worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a billion dollars, she and others orchestrated a theft of Matze's 40 percent ownership, claiming that it could be taken from him for a mere $3.00," Matze claims in the suit (PDF).

The complaint calls the maneuvering "outlandish and arrogant theft," adding that "this scheme is epitomized by oppression, fraud, and malice, for which Matze is entitled to receive punitive damages" of at least three times the "millions he is owed in compensatory damages."

Enlarge / The new fabrication plants will likely be somewhere near the company's existing campus in Chandler, Arizona. (credit: Laura Segall/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger—a former chip designer who took the top slot from finance specialist Bob Swan this February—announced plans to expand Intel's manufacturing muscle this week.

Gelsinger wants to spend $20 billion on two new fabrication facilities in Arizona. Gelsinger says the expanded capacity will take on manufacturing for third-party chip designers in addition to Intel's own CPUs—similar to the business model of TSMC, the Taiwan-based fabricator that builds processors for many "fabless" industry giants, including Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm.

The move comes in sharp contrast to many analysts' predictions that Intel would spin-off silicon fabrication entirely. Intel has had great difficulty shrinking its manufacturing process beyond 14 nm, adding to its ability to keep up with AMD—which has benefited greatly from TSMC's successful process shrink to 7 nm.  Since then, TSMC has added volume production for 5 nm process, with a further shrink to 3 nm expected later this year.

A significant portion of the Micron fab is bathed in yellow light to protect the light-sensitive coating on the wafers. Chips on the wafers are created using a photographic process. Each of the cameras, which are the machines on each side of the aisle, costs about $70 million. (credit: Micron)

Semiconductor supply chains have not been having a good year. Shifts in demand brought on by COVID-19 have slammed into a series of fab and factory fires, the effects of which have been cascading throughout the global economy. Now, the semiconductor industry is being threatened by Taiwan’s worst drought in 67 years.

Chip shortages have rippled through various industries in recent months. Automakers have cut back production, citing supply issues. Automotive shortages are somewhat of the industry’s own making—when the pandemic hit over a year ago, automakers cut production and chip orders. Meanwhile, demand for consumer electronics surged, snapping up excess fab capacity. When car and truck sales rebounded months later, semiconductor manufacturers had no slack to meet demand. Recently, even consumer electronics companies have been finding it hard to secure a steady supply of chips for their products.

Taiwan’s drought began when typhoons failed to make landfall last year. Today, drought conditions cover a significant portion of the densely populated western third of Taiwan, extending from Hsinchu south to Kaohsiung, an arcing span of more than 150 miles on an island that’s only about 240 miles long. Water levels in major reservoirs have been as low as 10 percent of their capacity, and they’re currently being stabilized by water piped in from Taipei, which has so far avoided the worst of the drought.

Enlarge (credit: TSMC)

When Li Ta-sen was a little boy, he used to walk to school through fields of sugarcane taller than himself. Some 40 years later, he is making a living by selling off the same fields as a property boom takes hold in his hometown of Shanhua.

The reason for the construction frenzy in the once shabby rural town in southern Taiwan is simple: the arrival of the world’s most advanced chip factory.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the largest contract chipmaker in the world, is building a plant to make 3 nanometer chips, semiconductors expected to be up to 70 percent faster and more power-efficient than the most advanced in production now and which will be used in devices from smartphones to supercomputers.