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EU countries team up for semiconductor push

reuters.com

331–340 of 665 posts

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#331
Since Reuters appears intent to abbreviate the full list of countries, here's all of them:

Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/joint-dec...

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#333
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML The US companies do what they do best: innovate business models and find ways to vendor lock in and own the market. But who's been doing all the research keeping moore's law alive? Lithography? For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing a…

> 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.

>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.

I find it telling that it's mostly europeans who make these types of comments. The EU has tremendous barriers to labour mobility that most europeans don't even realise - differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant. And i cannot emphasise the bureaucratic hurdles enough when moving countries. Despite the EU crying itself hoarse about labour mobility, only around 5% of EU citizens relocate between EU countries. The majority of that 5% is people moving from poor to richer countries. The comparable number in the US is 20%.

Most rational people realise that despite all its flaws, some of the most key factors in US tech dominance are the existence of a large talent pool, all of whom speak the same language, the existence of a large market all of which operates in the same language and finally VCs willing to take on risk.

Corrupt politicians are not hobbling European tech success any more than corrupt US politicians are hobbling its success. The EU will not reach Silicon Valley's levels of success, at least not in my lifetime.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#334
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need for advanced nodes for micro-controllers. Typically even advanced µC use 40nm, planar, where the TSMC leading node is 5nm FinFET. ST also does FD-SOI 22nm if I remember well, but that's the densest node they have and nowhere near the current state of the art at TSMC. The thing is, micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes. They don't have a lot of logic (it's all relative, but compared to a PC CPU…

> micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes...They don't have a lot of logic Why MCU-bound application logic are simpler than PC apps? If that is the case, we shouldn't have seen improvement in embedded MCUs in 20 years, yet every year the clocks are increasing, the flash/RAM size is doubling, ... I have a theory/fear that in future, the line between embedded-dev and web-dev would be blurred...

As long as mcu's with less ram/flash will be sold for less(which is standard business strategy to optimize revenue), in high volume designs people will use c/c++ to optimize.

As for low volume designs, if reliability is important, rust would be a good candidate.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#335
Genuine question - Has any major tech innovation/ product come out European industry (mainland EU) over the last couple of decades ? (not Academia)

Their biggest tech companies are Spotify and Skype. That's pretty underwhelming given that Spotify's biggest innovations are in product development and Skype became a subsidiary of an American company within 2 years of its existence.

Additionally, the 2 companies that seem to have industry tech talent: UK and Sweden, are not part of this deal.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#336
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "Central Europe" makes sense when talking about stuff common to Central Europe, in particular Germany. Otherwise, the term you want here is Eastern Europe. And yes, there is this particular kind of people who feel offended by this. Largely the same people who get offended by gay marriage. Why should we care?

No the term has a various definitions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe the person people might get offended because you are wrong.

It doesn't. The map in the infobox sums it up pretty well. Poland is both Eastern Europe and Central Europe, but there's no point in using the latter term when describing something that doesn't apply to all of Central Europe.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#337

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

Journalist or, more likely, EU press release office not very knowledgeable on the semiconductor industry choosing to mention the three largest countries by population in the headline, and the rest in a list embedded in the article. Journalist at Reuters probably just took the official press release and edited the grammar/wording a bit. I agree that the selection should probably be Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy if looking at the relative importance in semiconductors, but probably choosing by country population is a standard thing they do to avoid complaints.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#338
post #297

Isn't the problem that European tech companies are sold to American companies? There are and have been countless of European chipmakers but they are usually bought by Americans. European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments. I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and…

> I think most of this is tax driven.

Disagree. Research has consistently shown that American multinationals consistently apply better corporate management practices than their European counterparts.[1] This is especially true in IT-intensive industries.[2] This is true even when comparing American multinationals operating in Europe.

Any sufficiently large company in a globally integrated, competitive industry, is going to reap potentially large efficiency gains by replacing European management with American management.

[1]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/... [2]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#339

So, as someone who used to be an engineer in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, this reminds me a lot of Sematech. That was a joint venture between American companies in the 90's, when there was a concern that we were falling behind Japan. I'm sure there will be people who try to claim otherwise, but my view from inside AMD (at that time still doing its own manufacturing) was that nothing much ever came out of S…

With the success of Apple M1, TSMC and Samsung will grow faster than Intel. Taiwan,Korea,Japan and US will control the semiconductor industry in the near future unless a game changing technology is introduced. Taiwan semiconductor companies's stocks are going banana after US slap sanction on SMIC. UMC stock has not changed much in years jumped 250% in last few weeks. (UMC invented foundry as service, then TSMC copy t…

How near is your near future? Isn't China planning to achieve major progress until 2025? They aren't bound by patents in the same way as western companies. Why should they not be able to reproduce the knowledge? For nuclear energy, solar cells, moon rockets and high speed trains, they have already been successful.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#340
post #12

How will they be keeping talent? I heard workers in IT are paid low compared to other jobs and especially compared to similar jobs in North America, what stops them. from just going to US/Canada?

Besides not wanting to work/live in the US/Canada for cultural reasons (I personally don't want to raise children where school shootings are so frequent that not all of them are even reported in the news anymore), there is also the visa situation, natural disasters (earth quakes, raging wildfires on the west coast, hurricanes on the east..) and then some.

I grew up in the US and now live in France (been here for 8 years now). I assure you, it's not that scary.
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