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Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

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Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#181

Post by balls187 »

ripe wrote: post #125
numpad0 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how often would you refer to people from India as Asians, should you use the word?

In Britain they call people from India Asians all the time. Immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are the biggest nonwhite group, and that’s the word they are known by. In the US, I think people often use “Asian” to euphemistically refer to people they used to call Orientals. The latter term is considered problematic. The new term hasn’t improved their treatment, though.

> In the US, I think people often use “Asian” to euphemistically refer to people they used to call Orientals.

I wonder why that is; while at the same time, Kamala Harris is widely considered the first Asian American Vice President, because her mother is a Tamil American (as am I).

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#182

Post by tehjoker »

dylan604 wrote: post #96
tehjoker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this thinking. Why would we want to impoverish others? After all, it's not like these power brokers give a shit about the American public, it's about great power competition.

Is it better to be beholden to another party, or be the one the other party is beholden to? Which also means you are more self-reliant. If trade relations soured to the point no more chips exported to your country, how would your country handle that? How long would it be before other fabs could even come close to competing?

I agree. I think realistically, the US will always have its own fab capability for the foreseeable future. I think if the capability were spread around the world though as I described above, it would be pretty difficult to cut off any one country.

If you wanted to get really out there, I wonder if it would be possible to place certain capabilities under international control. I think this is already the case with the ITER fusion project, we don't usually do this with commodities.

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#184

Post by keanebean86 »

godelski wrote: post #167
keanebean86 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An option would be to replace the laser and tin with some tape. [1] I know tape is a consumable item but is considerably less professional compared to a laser. [1] https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/news.2008.1185....

A laser is not just light. It is a specific wavelength. X-Rays are a spectrum. The EUV/soft X-ray is a part of that spectrum. There's also other properties that you want from the laser. But this tape-x-rays won't be easy to control or uniform in wavelength. Making it not a laser, even if you could collimate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser

Thanks for this info. I assumed there was a specific reason they used this setup. I was joking about using tape.

Too bad we can't make x-ray leds.

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#185

Post by genmud »

ironmagma wrote: post #43

This could be great. Personal anecdote time, when I was using ESP32 there were some things it couldn't handle due to a very unconfigurable WiFi interface -- captive portal advertisement via DHCP specifically. (Before people get their knickers in a twist, it was connecting to a box that had no internet access, so there was no hostage situation there.) It turns out there are basically no open source or even American op…

There are tons of options that aren't ESP32s. Many just aren't in the package that you are used to with a ESP32. Nordic, NXP, SiLabs and Microchip all have pretty comparable offerings at a similar price point for bare ICs (and if you are doing anything outside prototyping/small volume, you shouldn't be buying modules IMHO anyways).

If you are talking about ESP32 modules, there are still options but they are typically a bit more expensive, like $1-2 more last time I checked. However, there are ARM based wifi/bt modules that you can get as cheap as $1.50-$2.00 for an FCC certified one. Check out Fanstel BlueNor [1] as an example. The huge advantage being you get to use ARM tools instead of the Xtensa stuff, which depending on your workflows can be a definite plus (though I believe they recently added xtensa support in LLVM, so that might be a bit of a moot point).

They are definitely going to be difficult to compete with on the new ESP32-C3 line price-wise once they ramp it up though. At the end of the day though the ESP offerings have a bit of tradeoffs when you look at battery life and performance compared to other offerings. I believe they are working or may have fixed the power usage/sleep problems though on the C3s.

When it is all said and done though, I think the ESP32-C3 is going to probably take over the sub $1-2 IOT space, at the end of the day batteries are cheap and if you are designing your product to be plugged in... who cares.

What personally burns me with Espressif is they charge so much for their ICs. Like sometimes the modules are cheaper than the bare chips, even at 1k quantity, which is kinda irritating when you are space constrained.

[1] https://www.fanstel.com/bluenor-summaries

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#186

Post by mjevans »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #177
derefr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping them from using hard x-rays? Those are really easy to emit. (Genuine question; not trying to suggest that they're all idiots who just never considered using hard x-rays.)

Interaction with the mask material, I imagine. With hard x-rays, most of the photons generated will just sail right through, not interacting at all, or (worse) ionize the material being exposed. Personally, I'm surprised that there aren't ways to generate this energy by nonlinear mixing of light from two lasers that are separated by the desired frequency.

Lasers are an Electro-Magnetic emission of which the output is a synchronized at a specific and regular frequency.

If you have two lasers at about 700nm and 1000nm, and they 'start' at a synchronized point, then 7mm (7000nm) of emission later they'd have a repeat of the cycle begin again.

During that cycle the interference pattern would probably have an interesting shape, but I very much doubt it'd be useful for semiconductor production. Maybe a math or physics graduate could elaborate on if there's a name for this kind of pattern and if there are any uses I'm not aware of.

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#187

Post by blackrock »

Nokinside wrote: post #123
rakah wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EUV is hard, but isn't part of the reason why only ASML can make those machines because of the CRADA they have with DOE as a member of the EUV LLC? I believe this agreement was why ASML wasn't allowed to sell their solution to China recently. I bet Intel will have no trouble buying EUV to bring in-house - especially if that serves US strategic interests.

ASML EUV machines are the combined result of basically everybody in the business except maybe Canon and Nikon. Motorola, AMD, Micron, Infineon, IBM, Intel, Samsung, TSMC, lasers and plasma physics from LLNL.

What happens when China cracks the laser and plasma physics, and builds their own indigenous EUV machine?

I hear the last thing standing in their way is the light source from Cymer (sp?).

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#189

Post by mjevans »

dathinab wrote: post #144
r3trohack3r wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think National Security might have something to do with manufacturing of electronics moving outside the US. The war on crypto called for manufactures to either provide two versions of their product, or move manufacturing to a place they could export a single product: https://www.eff.org/pages/decrypting-puzzle-palace

IMHO (ok not very humble) any ware on crypto, weather it's in the past or modern approaches to it is stupid a f and I want to give a metaphorical kick to anyone pushing it. What many people which push it don't seem to realize is that such approaches undermine national and personal security and any benefits gained for it are likely outstripped by the long term drawbacks. Drawbacks like making it easier for foreign act…

What if that backdoor was in firmware like ME or PSP or another baseband layer?

Re: Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia

#190

Post by Element_ »

Animats wrote: post #115
Nokinside wrote: post #54

As he says here, the decision not to take risk and jump to EUV with TSMC and Samsung was the mistake that started this downfall and it snowballed. The decision happened somewhere in the pathfinding stage into 10nm. When Gerald Marcyk was running Intel components research back in the 2001 Intel was already considering using EUV lithography for the 45nm technology node that would come out 2007. It turned out that the s…

A lot of people were hoping someone would come up with a better way to make "extreme ultraviolet" (soft x-rays, really) light than the horrible kludge used now.[1] Syncrotrons were tried. (Whatever happened to Lyncean?[2]) What's used now looks like a physics experiment, not a production process. Drops of tin are hit with lasers to emit X-rays, which are then focused with mirrors on the mask and wafer. This takes a s…

Wow that's the most interesting power point I have viewed in a long time! What a complex machine!
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