141–150 of 496 posts
ITT bashing on EU without understanding it I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unrealistic. EDIT The 2-3 years is when the funds are allocated. Not when the results are expected.
Because somehow this initiative is different from all the other ones?
I might have looked positively at this if the bureaucrats would have actual skin in the game and would be judged by the outcome in 5-10 years. But in the likely case that this will fail and most of the money will be drained through lobbyism etc., nobody will talk about it and they will come up with the next thing they can throw money at to come across as being super innovative. Disclaimer: I used to work at a company…
I might have looked positively at this if the bureaucrats would have actual skin in the game and would be judged by the outcome in 5-10 years. But in the likely case that this will fail and most of the money will be drained through lobbyism etc., nobody will talk about it and they will come up with the next thing they can throw money at to come across as being super innovative. Disclaimer: I used to work at a company…
Maybe you could use your experience to propose a system (whether funding vehicle restrictions or proper incentives) for that not to happen in this case? I think we’d all be excited by that. How can we avoid spending money on lobbyists? Maybe the structure should be more VC-like?
It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
That's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats. It sucks a bit that it's this way but…
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
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ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean you can make good chips. As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer. I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next App…
On the other hand, without the printing press your reach as a novel autor was severely limited - to the point there were no novel authors basically.
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Horizon2020 for instance
I contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money. Software (and hardware) projects were completed, and nothing was ever done with them. We produced over 20k pages worth of paperwork (which was all mandatory if we wanted to get the money), which I'm guessing no one ever read. Don't…
I guess your mileage does indeed vary. I contributed to a subproject of a major FP7 research program, which counted with the collaboration of a major industrial manufacturing company, a state research institute, and a couple of university research groups. In the end, besides a hand full of research papers, the industrial company developed a commercial product which is being rolled out as we speak. The state research institute didn't gained much out of the deal but we did developed institutional relationships that have been fruitful since then.
What you take from a research program is proportional to the legwork you put in. I'm sure some projects aren't immediately fruitful but it's short-sighted to claim that the money is wasted, specially if you take into account that this expenditure is what makes this sort of industrial effort possible.
EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…
The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none…
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ARM IP, even full architectural license, is relatively small percentage of the cost of a semiconductor. Know-how for fables microarchitecture designs is widely distributed. Most fabless work goes to specialized asics. It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML that prevents China from getting into high-end semiconductors, not the domestic microarch…
Does that change with the China eu trade deal?
EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…
> TWINSCAN NXE:3400C is probably the most expensive machine in the world. Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.