Except in manufacturing, getting your yield up and tuning a process is basically 'just work'. You define a space of parameters you want to explore and then you brute force it by building samples at each parameter step and then analyzing it.

This can be pipelined and parallelized to some extent, but then you have to convince enough PhD level employees to do night shifts, because each process step is basically a miniature physics or chemistry experiment that has to be monitored and tuned constantly (at this stage).

It's one thing to make one perfect transistor, it's a totally different ballgame to make 10 billion perfect devices with better than 90% tool uptime, and an essential component of closing that gap is brute force experimentation.

I just think that if TSMC can find such PhD level employees in Taiwan, why couldn't other competitors find them in places way more abundant in those types of people? Convincing them is a matter of paying them more, there are plenty of highly educated physicians who work night shifts. And it's not like TSMC could hide this secret sauce either, so you would think that before dumping another 20 billion in a new investment, Intel would consider simply replicating what they could easily observe from TSMC.

I remember reading something that TMC has links with the local universities to train talent, and nearly guarantee them a job in the end... Ireland has an Intel Fab here, and I don't think there are many courses around here doing chip development... Mind you, not sure Intel Ireland does chip development, but could be wrong... they have something like 6k employees, god only knows what they are doing...