# Visiting TSMC in Tainan
I recently made a trip down to Tainan and figured that it might be fun to scooter out
to the Southern Taiwan Science Park.
The Science Park is where TSMC has some of their largest fabs.
UMC, Innolux, and various other very large Taiwanese electronics firms also have locations
there, but TSMC is the biggest.
While I have been to Tainan many times, it was the first time that I came this far out
to here.
And I was stoked.
I have not done a travel video in a long time.
For this brief video, I want to share with you about my trip to the industrial town that
TSMC built.
## Going South
In the late 1990s, TSMC started to outgrow its space in the Hsinchu Science Park, its
first location.
A second science park needed to be built, preferably one in Taiwan's south.
The Taiwanese government chose to put the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan.
At the time, Tainan largely had agricultural and food-based economy.
Probably its biggest company is the food and retail giant Uni-President, which operates
Taiwan's 7-11s and Starbucks.
But surrounding the 400-year old city were vast fields of sugar cane and rice paddies
of the greater Tainan County area - plenty of open land for the company to expand into.
And inside the city was Taiwan's second best university.
National Cheng Kung University is known for its engineering strengths, and this turned
out to be the tipping factor for the central government to choose it.
## Science Park
TSMC turned what had once been a sugarcane field into a sprawling tech ecosystem.
The Science Park today hosts the company's flagship fab - Fab 18 - which alone provides
some 4,000 permanent jobs for the area.
They also extended its supplier ecosystem to Tainan.
The most prominent of which is ASML, which opened up one of their EUV training centers
in the area - adding 500 R&D jobs.
Critically, new TSMC engineers no longer have to travel to the Netherlands to get trained
on using the equipment.
They can do it right in Taiwan.
## Getting There
They share the same name, but the science park is very far away from Tainan city proper.
We left the city in the early morning to beat the brutal heat, traveling up to and then
along the massive Zengwun river.
There were cars and scooters all over.
Tainan City is in general a rather easy-going town.
Most tourist destinations and shops don't open until 10 am.
But here, things were bustling.
Traffic was already starting up at 6 am.
We crossed a crowded bridge at Yong'an road over the Zengwun river.
The bridge connects the prosperous East Tainan area to the science park.
Right then, construction crews were working to expand the bridge and the highway.
Traffic was miserable.
From there, you turn a few more corners and pass through large empty fields of green.
But far off in the distance, you can see the large fabs rise far above the rest of the
surrounding land.
Then suddenly, the roads get better.
There are a multitude of trees on the sidewalks.
And you are surrounded by these massive structures that have to be 70-80 feet tall.
## Fab 14
The first fab that we came across was TSMC's Fab 14.
This is a 300 millimeter wafer GIGAFAB.
At the time of its groundbreaking in 2012, the fab manufactured 20 nanometer process
node chips.
Fabs are built up in phases.
You start with Phase 1, and then over time add additional phases.
Fab 14 is on their 7th phase and it seems like they are still adding more capacity,
with another large building being constructed next to Phase 1.
We saw a large group of construction workers parking their scooters and walking on site
to continue their work.
As we passed the Fab and crossed the intersection towards a TSMC advanced packaging facility,
you can look down the road and barely see Fab 18 in the far distance.
I find it difficult to convey just how massive these things are.
Fab 14 alone is so large that it can take about 3-5 minutes to scooter around it.
It may take the better part of thirty minutes to walk around.
And the area was bustling.
The roads are modern and well-kept, but there are so many scooters, cars, and trucks here.
Many of the light poles have TSMC flags, advertising new positions being opened.
Oh by the way, it was incredibly hot.
Like 35 degrees Celsius and rampant humidity that made it feel so much worse.
## Fab 18
I passed a TSMC water reclamation plant, and I stopped to take a photo of it.
I have done a video about TSMC's work in water, so I was interested in it.
Then we turned and made towards Fab 18, perhaps the most intriguing of all of TSMC's GIGAFABs.
I have mentioned this one many times in recent videos and I was excited to look at it myself.
As we made that turn, we saw a large number of buses pass us, heading away from the Fab.
I reckon that they are bringing workers to their dormitories.
First started in 2018, Fab 18 is where TSMC makes their N5 and N3 chips - the most advanced
chips in the world.
As it turns out, the area is hard to reach.
There is a massive bustle of activity in the streets surrounding the fabs - with scooters
and buses and traffic guards directing their flow.
And all the construction!
I felt nervous stopping and getting off, taking photos while everyone is watching me.
Would someone ask me what I was doing?
Would someone tell me to stop it?
For this reason, I really only got one decent photo of the completed part of the fab that
I have talked about so much in the videos.
I wish that I can get a better look at what is going on inside these construction zones,
but by now the sun and the heat was getting to be a bit too much.
It was time to get back home.
We scootered back around, taking a few photos of two unfinished phases for Fab 18.
We had to navigate around bunches of TSMC workers and construction people, people making
their way to their work shifts.
You can tell that they are TSMC technicians if they are fiddling with clear plastic bags.
I saw a team of TSMC people outside the Fab, getting swiped over with a metal detector
before being allowed inside.
## Conclusion
It is interesting to think about what might be going inside these fabs.
Decades of ultra-optimized processes, unknown chemicals, and nanoscale physics.
All of it arrives here in a sugar cane field in a 400 year old city - and creates the most
sophisticated chips in the world.
The chips in your MacBooks, iPhones, Nvidia GPUs, Qualcomm chips, MediaTek cellphones,
and so on.
Odds are they come from here.
A single place, where humanity is pushing forward into the future.