AMD's Lisa Su touts Taiwan role in tech revolution at Tainan talk

Taipei, June 7 (CNA) Taiwanese supply chain partners like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) will be crucial for U.S.-based Advanced Micro Devices, Inc's (AMD) next-generation technologies, AMD's Tainan-born CEO Lisa Su said Friday.

At a forum in Tainan, the AMD CEO said she was excited to be making her first trip to the city in a decade, as her hometown celebrated its 400th anniversary.

Noting "the incredible week" for Taiwan at Computex in Taipei, which had seen global tech leaders talk about technology, partnership, and the future, Su jokingly said: "The best is on Friday," referring to Friday's forum.

In the discussion titled "AI Era Dialogue," Su said artificial intelligence (AI) is "the most important technology that we've seen over the last 50 years" as it has the opportunity to transform every aspect of people's everyday lives.

She said that all of these require computing from businesses and devices, but also areas such as healthcare, automotive capability and research capability.

"And Taiwan is a center for computing," the chip giant boss noted.

As AMD's mission is focused on high-performance computing, which requires "making big bets over many, many years," Su said it is essential to work with those who can build the most advanced technology, many of whom are here in Taiwan such as TSMC, and those in the IC design and the supply chain.

She cited the CoWoS technology as an example of TSMC's advancement.

As Moore's law is slowing down, other ways to continue the computing capability are needed, and one area is in advanced packaging with CoWoS, Su said.

CoWos is a 3D packaging technology launched by TSMC that enables the integration of multiple dies and memory cubes into a single package. It therefore can support the continuation of Moore's law by allowing more transistors to work together.

Moore's law is the observation made by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles roughly every two years.

"Today, our most advanced AI products have over 150 billion transistors, and 12 chiplets that are put together, which is very, very advanced," she noted.

Taiwan is "so important that it has the supply chain and the ability to bring all these pieces together," Su added.

The AMD boss also quipped that Taiwan is the only place where one can say CoWos, and everybody would understand what it is.

Su was joined by Jason Chen (陳俊聖), chairman of Taiwan-based Acer and an alumnus of Tainan's National Cheng Kung University, in this discussion at the Southern Semiconductor Forum in Tainan. With several newly planned science parks, the southern city was described as a potential major player in the next semiconductor boom driven by AI.