In this case does packaging mean packaging the silicon die to a processor or soc that can then be used? Or does it mean the assembly of the end product, such as a phone or laptop?
In either case it seems like a moot point to complain that this is a major issue for the long term. Shouldn’t assembly lines for said stuff should be much easier to build in comparison to a chip fab?
Also the fact that the Arizona fab only produces a small fraction of TSMC’s total output is kind of obvious. There are a lot of chip fabs, so US encouragement for domestic production has to be an ongoing effort.
It seems like it’s everything after the wafer step and before the consumer step. So they’d ship raw wafers back to Taiwan, put them in cases, wrap them into boxes, then send them to Apple.
Packaging is putting the chip into it’s package, which is the board it’s directly attached to. For CPUs, there’s not much more to it, just attaching the heat spreader and etching it.
GPUs are a bit more involved since they go on a full board with memory, capacitors, and the like. But packaging is the most complex part after chip production itself (and the design process, but that is already happening outside of SE Asia). Think of all of the connections on a CPU socket and consider that the chips themselves are smaller than that socket. You need to solder each of those connections simultaneously without shorting them out to their neighbours.
