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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

#391

Post by jeanjogr »

wott wrote: post #344
brmgb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the big ones in France (Thales, Airbus, Safran, Technicatome, Alstom). Until the 80s, France pretty much had a planned economy.

Yes, but each of the numerous political announcements (on the French level as well as on the EU level) of "we're going to build a giant of [this industry], this time for real" which were made since the 90s have always ended up in something ranging between complete vaporwave and utter failure. Basically all French industrial successes were recorded between the end of WW2 and the end of the 70s/ beginning of the 80s, f…

> That was not helped by the motto of the 90s, when the 'glory' was to become "a company without factory"...

Was that so silly? AMD seems to be doing alright.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#392

Post by the_crocodile »

yvdriess wrote: post #132
ralfn wrote: 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 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. ASML machines do not produce chips, they're just ones doing the etching. There is a ton around what you do with it, and how all the rest of the chip is produced. They don't come with pre-programmed transistor gate templates. Each fab company has its own libraries of…

A point of clarification. ASML does lithography, which creates the patterns for the chips. The big players in etch (removing layers of material following the pattern) are Lam Research and Applied Materials, both American companies.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#393

Post by TrueTom »

magicsmoke wrote: post #353
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…

The EUV source inside ASML's lithography machines is from the German optics company Zeiss, and the lasers used in that system which generates EUV wavelength light by bombarding tin droplets is also from another German company, Trumpf.

Also quite a lot of scientific lasers are from Toptica.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#394

Post by zepearl »

mrtksn wrote: post #381
norwegianwhale wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I fully agree - travelling and doing something in foreign countries together with people that come from different backgrounds & religions & nations completely demolishes prejudices, helps to learn to adapt and to respect other people and to develop the mindset needed to try to understand how other people think and behave, etc... . 25 years later I'm still using stuff that I learned during that period.

I'm rarely totally in favour or against something but in this case I can see only positive things.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#395

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

trasz wrote: post #244
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you Finnish? I'm really curious what happened to all those hardware and electrical engineers developing phones for Nokia/Microsoft before they went bust, respawned as HMD, packed up and moved their production and R&D to China. Did they pivot to other industries in Finland? If so, which industries? Were they valued as much in the other industries or did they take significant pay cuts? Or did they have to pack up a…

Lots of them work for Huawei.

That kinda sucks as EU know-how is propping up the US and Chinese tech giants instead of local ones.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#396

Post by russli1993 »

Under this line of thinking, EU or Britain should think twice about approving Nvidia's purchase of arm. Arm's British's one of the most influential technology company in the world. And with Apple's M1 and other arm chips movements lately, the future of computing will be moving to arm from x86. Arm is not financially strong right now, but there are so much potential to improve it's financials. Make arm remains an British company and build it in Britian should be one of the method to realize this semi dream

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#397

Post by stiray »

rossdavidh wrote: post #254

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…

Linux kernel? KDE? QT?

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#398

Post by fakedang »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #76
TulliusCicero wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't want workers in IT, look at the USA, other than silicon valey (1 state), they all hire from India, and the salary from other states are comparable to what you find elsewhere in the world, including China None of this is even close to true. What are you smoking that leads you to believe non-Silicon Valley US IT salaries are comparable to Chinese ones?

How much are senior software developers making in China?

Depending on the firm, loads actually, adjusted on a PPP basis.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#399

Post by ISL »

rossdavidh wrote: post #254

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…

I suspect that a long-term path out of this sort of thing has two key ingredients:

1) The commoditization of foundry technology. 2) The hardware equivalent of the reproducible build.

The first is necessary for nation-states to feel comfortable building and maintaining national-security infrastructure.

The second is necessary for the rest of us. If we are able to purchase an open-hardware CPU and verify its integrity through hardware/metrology checksums in addition to a software checksum, society will have made a step forward. The hardware checksums might be expressed through moire-patterning visible in x-rays, for example. The CPUs on which such technology might be developed need not be fancy - if a proof-of-concept works on cheap chips, the extension to the high end is apt to be feasible.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#400

Post by herodoturtle »

analog31 wrote: post #386
herodoturtle wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I'd prefer that you continue to use nuanced English that is logically sound, because I (and I imagine others) can learn from you.

The fact that you took the time to clarify my confusion is the ideal consequence I'd say.

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