51–60 of 450 posts
Make it Munich, make it Munich, make it Munich
I would also like that, but its highly unlikely :) Saxony is actively pushing towards becoming "Silicon Saxony". Munich established itself as a design hub.
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ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable…
Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >
Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources…
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Why not? From my POV Germany seems good at manufacturing. E.g. Siemens. And cars.
Labor laws would still be sort of OK for a high-tech factory like TSMC. But I think environmental policy would be really hostile to a large fab. Politics seems really fickle about it too. For "old school" industries like coal they try to bend over backwards to make exceptions, but when it comes to new players especially local politics will have little reservations to tanking your multi million dollar projects. This c…
That is also possibly the reason Tesla is in such trouble over their new factory. While they are a car manufacturer, and a modern, hip and green one at that, which politics openly hails as good, secretly they are damaging established interests by the traditional German car manufacturers and their allies in high positions. So the administration will nod and smile, but try to find ways to hinder them.
If i were TCMS, i would not invest in Germany. But as a german, living in Germany, i am happy that they consider an investment in Germany.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >
Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources…
Test, measurement and calibration equipment for new technologies (think 5G/UWB, mmWave, even up to CERN LHC) can be right on the cutting edge of technology. Companies who specialize in these areas tend to have large budgets on research and commercialization.
TSMC would be wiser to invest in the UK - where there is a strong political will to remove barriers to entry - and it is of course where ARM are already based and therefore has a very strong overlap of skills. There is also far less likelihood of exports being restricted during a possible future crisis by the political whims of failed politicians i.e. it is a politically more stable bet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
ha! I guess you haven't worked as a designer or verification engineer, designing chips then? let me tell you: you work with a commitee-designed c++ like abomination language with 300 non-composible keywords that make no freaking sense. all of that crap grew from legacy-upon-legacy of crutches as an attempt to fix the goddamn broken-by-design verilog. Ultimately, this craplanguage + library that is 90% non-debuggable…
Hmmm, isn't there people pushing for better standards, language, tools?
Problem 1. patents. in early FOSS days people got momentum to push hard for corporations to give up compiler patents and other obvious nonsense and let GCC flourish. same situation is here in hardware, the very idea of simulating circuits is a mine field of patents and you'd be sued out of existence.
Problem 2. features. there are a lot of features that you need to push out a working chip into an existence. open source tools or alternatives are SO far behind that they cannot be used or can be used only on something really small.
Problem 3. verification. there are no (VIABLE! that python coco stuff doesnt count!) open-source alternatives to UVM (uvm as a library is open source, but there are either no simulators that can run it). If we had some of the older verificaion languages to go open source (like specman, vera), maybe we had a chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the people who design many of the machines that TSMC use in their plants: ASML. "The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-becam... >
Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise. Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions? Are there any good background resources…
Nice summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 ("Origins of Precision" by "Machine Thinking")