341–350 of 496 posts
Japan, US, India and possibly some EU countries are partnering today to build an alternative to Huawei in 5G. This is coming 10 years late.
We might be repeating the same mistake but now in semiconductors.
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> Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it. I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America! What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
> I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America! Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.
Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
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> But isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N projects gets used for commercial purposes ? The OP forgot to mention that one of the goals in the Horizon2020 projects is to provide incentives to create pan-european collaborations involving industrial, academic, and institutional organizations. In short, they are aimed to bridge the gap between academia and industry, and also create synergies between multiple orga…
As someone who came from academia, now runs a commercial company, and having participated in several large consortia projects (including Horizon 2020), I find your perspective… charming. I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. And where you taxes really go.
Yes, Europeans complain about bureaucracy from the EU and here about the ERC, but the moment someone comes with more 'pragmatic' processes, either you see some 10+MEUR-level abuse quite quickly, or you get some blast about bad management of the tax payers money, and calls for more oversight.
I don't have a solution, and without a united EU military/defense budget I don't see anything DARPA-like emerging. And it seems only European military budgets (still sovereign) and regional budgets (regionalism being, to me, the biggest flaw in the modern EU vision) seem spent on 'low admin we trust you let's try this just convince this panel of scientists and admins' funding. While I think it's great for labs/research funding, for product derisking and creating competitive edges for the local industry, and for SMEs and overall high tech employment, you're not going to create a semiconductor industry like this.
I've seen the results of several ERC consortia projects and am sometimes impressed with what EU-based research (academics+smb+large groups) can do with so little money (on each subject) and, yes, so much admin overhead.
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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 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. 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 un…
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The truth is in between. Was USSR full of internal problems? Yes. Did USA and allies want USSR destroyed and actively work on? Also yes. Saying that Cold War and the arms race had absolutely no role in USSR collapse is either a blatant lie or incompetence.
Exactly. Had the west not interfered, the USSR would recover from the 80s crisis. Instead, they took advantage of its shortcomings and managed to break up the union: Gorbachev is considered by many Russians a traitor, but he was not the only western investment in toppling the Soviet Union. Let's remind that full-on opening of the market was not what the west promised, but it's what they pushed for once the reforms pa…
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.
The declaration essentially said "one oil platform, unpackaged".
There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it was so great the electronic customs declaration system couldn't handle all the digits.
Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.
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> But isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N projects gets used for commercial purposes ? The OP forgot to mention that one of the goals in the Horizon2020 projects is to provide incentives to create pan-european collaborations involving industrial, academic, and institutional organizations. In short, they are aimed to bridge the gap between academia and industry, and also create synergies between multiple orga…
As someone who came from academia, now runs a commercial company, and having participated in several large consortia projects (including Horizon 2020), I find your perspective… charming. I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. And where you taxes really go.
I appreciate your arrogance, but as you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage. Thus your complete lack of arguments, which you tried to hide with snide remarks and an unimpressive attempt to appeal to authority, were dully noted.
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> 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. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key…
"Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.
I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.
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If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with…
> The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). that's hardly in Taiwan's geopolitical interest. perhaps if the EU made some serious political concessions to Taiwan.