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EU countries team up for semiconductor push

reuters.com

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Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#281

Post by acqq »

acqq wrote: post #98
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans who are able to get jobs in the tech industry do not have to worry about expensive healthcare, at all. The US is very much a tale of two countries - but people here making a lot of money have a great quality of life.

As far as I understand it's not about "get in" it's more about "get in every time" that is the issue having: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment combined with that "one illness/accident away from the catastrophe."

To explain, Europeans aren't happy when they learn about either of these "features." They typically can expect more protection in Europe, albeit with the tendency of worsening in the last decades, where the influences... come over the Atlantic.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#282

Post by [deleted] »

sitkack wrote: post #164
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had WW2 never happen or the US not be in such an advantageous geographical position away from the "trouble" , SV might not exist today. The snowball/butterfly effect is real.

SV, Hollywood, the Aerospace-Defense Industry. All of it by purposeful accident. I feel like some in tech want to take responsibility, somehow that American's are just better tech-bros than anyone else. It was mostly chance. Call it what it is, a gift. And take care of it, they only get made by luck.

[deleted]

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#283

Post by xadhominemx »

yaantc wrote: post #139
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML AFAIK, ASMLs fancy EUV tech comes from a Bay Area company they acquired a while ago and not from the Netherlands.

If you refer to Cymer, they're doing the light source. A critical part of the system certainly, but not the whole. Then mirrors are done by Carl Zeiss in Germany. The blank photomask come mostly from 2 Japanses companies. On such complex systems there's room for many critical providers. Still, the integrated product comes from ASML.

The light source is by a very wide margin the most difficult and critical component of an EUV tool. The US still dominates wafer fab equipment - Cymer plus Applied Materials, Lam, and KLA. The only major non-US supplier is Tokyo Electron who is also quite strong. ASM International is a good but niche European supplier.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#284

Post by tyu2 »

guai888 wrote: post #194

Semiconductor sector usually has a No. 1 player which takes more than 50% of the market share of a specific application or business model. It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders. Unless Europe has a game changing technology or business model, I am not optimistic about the outcome. They should think about working with Taiwan or South Korea instead of going alone. US end up persuad…

> usually has a No. 1 player which takes more than 50% of the market share

> It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders.

With more than 50% market share it's the least crowded field there is, basically a monopoly formed by a very high barrier of entry, because not everyone has billions to risk on complex long term projects, private investors prefer shorter term returns. But it doesn't mean it's difficult to catch up or that the leader produces something good, on the contrary, monopoly means low quality, slow innovation, high price, easy to catch up by just throwing money at it, it just takes government involvement to do it.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#285

Post by pantulis »

adrian_b wrote: post #276
pantulis wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Transmeta. Anyway, these alternative/exotic computing models also remember flops like the old Transputers. But it is necessary to invest in those anyway.

While the Transputers vanished eventually, their legacy is living in absolutely all modern multi-socket workstations and servers. The Transputer method of partitioning a multiprocessor system, into processor chips provided with memory interfaces (now DDR), I/O interfaces (now PCIe) and communication interfaces for interconnections with the other processors, instead of using shared buses as before, was revived in some…

Yes, Inmos disappeared but their legacy totally lives on.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#287

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

burntoutfire wrote: post #251
arnaudsm wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management". 100% agree. Considering the incredible education system and engineers we have, the 2 only things restraining Europe from reaching Silicon Valley level are corrupt politicians and risk-adverse VCs.

Also: - labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries) - lots of disjointed small-to-medium markets (with different laws and languages) make expansion on continental scale much harder than in the US

>- labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries)

That's just not true now and hasn't been the case anymore since like the 2009 financial crisis. In most of Europe it's trivial to fire an underperforming non-unionized employee as the countries have adapted more business friendly laws to remain competitive after the financial crisis. Sure, there may still be some grey beards somewhere with old bulletproof contracts but for anyone entering the tech workforce now, getting fired is a rubber stamp basically especially since tech workers are not unionized and sometimes benefit from less protection than even some blue-collar professions which are unionized.

For example, in Austria you can fire anyone for no reason at all as long as you give them their notice period(usually 1 to 3 months) without them being entitled to any other financial compensation from their employer. Moreover, non-competes are legal here without any form of compensation and you can even fire employees while they're on sick leave. All this legally!

The whole you can't get fired in Europe maybe only applies to Scandinavia or France but it's mostly a meme nowadays.

Actually, contrary to popular belief, tech workers in California might enjoy better protection than tech workers in some European countries. Let that sink in for a bit.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#288

Post by batmansmk »

joelbluminator wrote: post #196

Why isn't Netherlands mentioned btw? What semiconductors companies did Germany , France and Spain built so far? Netherlands has ASML, NXP and ASM...

France: Thomson/Thales ($18B including software dev), STMicroelectronics ($9B). Germany: Infineon ($8B), Qimonda ($1B), XFab ($0.5B), Carl Zeiss ($1.2B). From Wikipedia. ASML ($10B), NXP ($10B), ASM ($1B).

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#289

Post by noodles_nomore »

imtringued wrote: post #127
norwegianwhale wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stick to government jobs, you will do well.

Considering the workforce surplus nothing will be lost even if all of the money was 100% wasted. However, the effects of fixing the rest of the economy will still massively pay dividends.

100% waste will fix the economy?

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#290

Post by dtech »

selectodude wrote: post #265
rmrfstar wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach Can you point to some industry literature that explains this? If this is true, it is a lot more surprising that Intel is talking about going fabless. You build a lot of expertise by rolling the dice on new techniques that don't pan out on the first iteration. People wouldn…

>People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design. Unfortunately Boeing doesn't have a huge list of customers that are willing to spend what it costs to switch to a new airframe. They sell to airlines what airlines want to buy. Airlines wanted a 737 with higher bypass engines and that's exa…

Their customers are not responsible for putting a defective product with insufficient operator training which has cost hundreds of human lives.

Maybe they are responsible for pressuring Boeing too much, but Boeing put defective airplanes on the market

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