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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

#381

Post by mrtksn »

norwegianwhale wrote: post #370
mrtksn wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, those are simply the biggest ones that would be recognised by Americans. Another recognisable project would be the Erasmus program or interrail, or ESA(remember the cute spacecraft philae, yep that was not NASA but ESA https://twitter.com/philae2014?lang=en ). EU has tons of projects with smaller or even larger scale, usually in areas that are not supposed to yield profit but has large impact to trade and…

> Erasmus program or interrail By which upper middle class kids get a free year of holidays abroad at the taxpayer's expense. No results expected. Finishing studies, getting a job and family formation can be postponed to early thirties. Our young generations are having so much success in the job market, housing, and family wise.

>By which upper middle class kids get a free year of holidays abroad at the taxpayer's expense. No results expected.

I don't know why you would say that. Me, my brother and a lot of people I know benefited from these programs and we are not even a middle class. Now we do better but back then the times were tough.

Frankly, a semester abroad with Erasmus is more of partying and networking than studying but people keep these connections and the poorer people who could have never been able to afford it can actually afford it.

Many times, poor people stay poor because they lack networking and perspective. Erasmus is a fantastic program, especially for the disadvantaged students, at least they know what's out there and know some people.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#382

Post by anonuser123456 »

ralfn wrote: post #111
arnaudsm wrote: post #8

This is a great decision! I never understood why Europe under-invested in semi considering the talents they have and the strategic nature of it. Intel is dying a slow death, ARM is leaving UK's control, and TSMC is slowly taken over by China. The tables are turning.

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 does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.

My understanding is that Intel believed EUV would be very late. As such, it committed to Intel 10nm (TSMC 7nm) without EUV, which turned out to be too complex. At the same time, TSMC banked on EUV early. This gave them a headstart over Intel once Intel started down the EUV path.

The tables could have been reversed. EUV could have been very late, and 10nm non-EUV might have worked better. Hard to know these things when you are making plans 3-5 years ahead.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#383

Post by 908B64B197 »

WanderPanda wrote: post #321
Normille wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and risk-adverse VCs. I think this is the big one. I don't know exactly how realistic this is. But from this side of the pond [Europe], it seems like, in the US there are VCs willing to throw millions [billions sometimes] at companies which are little more than a couple of guys with a silly idea, which would get you laughed out of your bank manager's office over here, if you went in asking to borrow a few hundred eu…

I don‘t subscribe to this at all. If there was such a huge opportunity in investing in European startups VCs would take it. Its not like they are nationalistic, they would equalise the arbitrage opportunities in no time

Truth is they do...

I've met a lot of European founders in the valley.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#384

Post by freeflight »

haram_masala wrote: post #197
madeofpalk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you just answered the question why people wouldn't want to move to such a country. From the outside, America does not portray itself to be a particularly stable or desirable place to live.

I'm sure it does if you read Russia Today and Xinhua.

If you want to go down that route I would say the opposite [0] plays a much bigger role why some Americans can't accept that their country ain't "The best thing ever since sliced bread, #1!" [1].

In reality different people have different priorities, so no single country ever can be "the best", as that solely depends on the individual priorities.

It's also not like RT and Xinhua are making up the stuff they use to agitate against the US, like most propaganda it's usually based on at least a kernel of truth.

For example the US incarceration rate is a pretty blatant outlier, particularly among developed countries, a factual reality that clashes very harshly with the self-propagandized idea of "Country of the free". The regular "race riots" in the US, and their scale, are a clear indicator to still unresolved issues on that end.

Disregarding these as "It's only Russian/Chinese propaganda!" is exactly the kind of mindset that leaves these issues unresolved and tolerated as "normal".

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#385

Post by 908B64B197 »

stefan_ wrote: post #207
publicola1990 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even Airbus is widely thought to being dependent on under the table government funding to keep it afloat, and keep its pricing competative. The line between private and government is blurred when EU is usually involved as well.

I don't think there is a single airplane manufacturer in the world that is not either straight up government funded or government guaranteed.

Bombardier!

When slapped with tariffs later judged to be illegal the Trudeau government didn't do anything, allowing Airbus to get ownership of their flagship plane.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#386

Post by analog31 »

herodoturtle wrote: post #352
analog31 wrote: post #342

In kind of a similar vein, many years ago Germany decided to become kind of the silicon valley of optics and photonics (e.g., lasers and their ilk). While I don't think they are the dominant player today, they are certainly a force to be reckoned with, and they seem to have a developed a decent pipeline of ideas and people from university and government labs to a private sector that is probably subsidized. Granted, i…

> it suggests to me that a national program to strengthen an industry isn't guaranteed to be a failure "Isn't guaranteed to be a failure". Sorry, I struggle to interpret sentences like this. English isn't my first language. Please clarify? Are you saying that "it is not definitely a failure"? I can't figure out if it's the above, or if it is this: "won't necessary fail" More specifically, I'm not sure if the implicat…

Optimistic. I would say: Definitely not a failure.

And I apologize for using unclear language. I should be thinking about a wider audience when writing in an international forum. Thanks for pointing it out!

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#387

Post by topspin »

eastendguy wrote: post #301
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.

"corrupt politicians"... really? Do you have any examples of large scale corruption inside EU? I don't. I think the majority of EU politicians are doing fine.

Nothing that would meet some arbitrary, establishment defined definition of 'corruption.' The fact that the sons and daughters and son-in-laws and daughter-in-laws, extended family and close friends all end up in cushy no-show non-profit chairmanships where they launder corporate donations to family foundations, drive their fleet of foundation owned cars, live in foundation owned mansions and accrue their foundation pensions is the sort of perfectly legal corruption people have in mind. The sentiment appearing here is correct; not a cent of the money invested by the EU in semiconductors will escape the clutches of establishment grandees and instead find its way to anyone that knows how to compete effectively with prevailing foundries, so don't expect to find any European manufactured chips troubling TSMC et al. in this lifetime.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#388

Post by 908B64B197 »

eldaisfish wrote: post #333
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.

>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 signifi…

> differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant

It has never been cheaper and easier to operate in several languages. Seriously, translation and internationalization is as cheap as it can get (and most folks in Europe are at least bilinguals!).

What they need to focus on is a unified marketplace and harmonized regulation. Now each tiny country has it's special snowflakes regulations (how to accept payment, who and how to pay taxes, huge amount of paperwork to get employees and ultra-restrictive labor laws). I mean it's good as a job program to keep EU civil servants employed, not so much to bootstrap a tech ecosystem!

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#389

Post by lou1306 »

screye wrote: post #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 see…

BioNTech is German.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#390

Post by unix_fan »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #106
Aerroon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is ahead of the US in crude steel production, but we're about 6 times behind China.[0] ARM is in the UK and not the EU. It's owned by a Japanese company and soon an American one. Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications. [1] Some European countries are ahead when measured per capita, but only some and that's not an important figure h…

>ARM is in the UK Except that ARM has many offices outside the UK developing important IP. Their Mali Bifrost and Valhall GPU architectures are mainly developed in Scandinavia by former Falanx Microsystems of Norway, aquired by ARM in 2006, hence the norse naming.

Their graphics aren’t exactly class leading, and the team designing the CPU cores is in Austin..
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