[krapht]

> Why have the US defend the island if it offers no additional value?

The US defended S. Korea for ideological reasons, and it will do the same again.

But even if you're cynical about these sort of things, the TSMC plant in the US will only provide enough chips for DoD usage. It definitely can't support the commercial sector.

[FirmwareBurner]

>the TSMC plant in the US will only provide enough chips for DoD usage

Huh? DoD doesn't use any TSMC fabs, they have their own security accredited fabs for that on US shore that mostly cater to US government customers and not much else.

Similarly, TSMC and most other consumer fabs, have no desire to take any DoD contracts in peace time, as the legal and security related paperwork are not worth the huge hassle and low margin prices the government is willing to pay in peace time compared to what Nvidia, AMD, Apple, etc. fork up.

[crmd]

TSMC makes semiconductors used in F-35 fighters and a wide range of “military-grade” devices used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

https://www.csis.org/analysis/semiconductors-and-national-de...

[metaphor]

DoD primes integrate COTS systems, many of which heavily integrate COTS components, e.g. FPGAs designed by Xilinx and manufactured by TSMC.

What the parent is referring to is DMEA's Trusted Foundry Program[1], of which TSMC is not an accredited supplier of foundry services.

[1] https://www.dmea.osd.mil/otherdocs/accreditedsuppliers.pdf

[genmud]

Which ironically they are trying to move away from(custom ASICS), towards more fpga based systems, since they can be somewhat harder to reverse engineer (battery back your memory/processor and scramble the bitstream when the device is tampered with).

[FirmwareBurner]

TSMC makes commercial off the shelf chips fore everything, and the DoD happens to make use of some of those off the shelf parts as well, like the FPGAs in the article, but they aren't bespoke designs made to order from the DoD like the ones made on the fabs specific for that.