Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Take three somewhat flat stones to start out. Alternate rubbing the surfaces together in a random fashion. As you continue the high spots of the stones will be ground down and the surfaces will become flatter and flatter. In the end you can get very precise flat surfaces. Two stones is not enough, you can then end up with two spherical surfaces. With three this isn't possible (imagine two of them are convex, when you…
TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
111–120 of 450 posts
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#112I find it surprising that they are choosing Germany - after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there (embroiling it in so much red tape that Elon wishes he could pull out if it weren't for sunk cost). It seems that Germany has a very good ability to convince and lobby these mega-manufacturers to base themselves there, but a very poor ability to actually let them succeed after making that…
> after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there Requiring it to follow the rules? As a portion of GDP, manufacturing is a bigger part of Germany's economy than nearly any other developed country. It is even higher as a portion of GDP than _China_ (edit not China, see below). Pretty much everyone except Tesla seems to cope, so I'm inclined to assume that this is more a Tesla incompetence…
Dial down your tone - it is unwarranted.
Rules and red tape was exactly my point. Why would TSMC choose to run that gauntlet willingly and potentially fall foul of the same hurdles that Tesla has encountered? One of the big problems Tesla had was around water supply. Do you have any idea how much water a chip fab uses?
My point around export restrictions was in reference to the EU blocking vaccine exports this year because it suited them. There would be heavy incentives for them to do the same for semiconductors in a future supply crisis like there is right now.
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Then why hasn't this been an issue for any of the existing fabs? Semiconductor manufacturing has been a large welcome prestige thing pretty much anywhere.
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that for a high-profile engineer or lead who expects to make 400k at least per year, the company would actually have to pay him 800k to make that much net. Labor cost in Germany is sky high. That times a thousand is not insignificant.
According to [1] if you make 400k a year your employer has to pay 413k in total [1] https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-...
Yes, if you get 400k gross, your employer has to pay 413k, but you only get 221k net after deduction of taxes and obligatory insurances (according to that very same calculator).
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#115I find it surprising that they are choosing Germany - after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there (embroiling it in so much red tape that Elon wishes he could pull out if it weren't for sunk cost). It seems that Germany has a very good ability to convince and lobby these mega-manufacturers to base themselves there, but a very poor ability to actually let them succeed after making that…
> after everybody is seeing what Germany is doing to Tesla's Gigafactory there Requiring it to follow the rules? As a portion of GDP, manufacturing is a bigger part of Germany's economy than nearly any other developed country. It is even higher as a portion of GDP than _China_ (edit not China, see below). Pretty much everyone except Tesla seems to cope, so I'm inclined to assume that this is more a Tesla incompetence…
> As a portion of GDP, manufacturing is a bigger part of Germany's economy than nearly any other developed country. It is even higher as a portion of GDP than _China_.
What are your sources? That doesn't seem to be true according to both [0] and [1]. Both put Germany at 18-19 and China at ~26.
[0] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/Share_of_manufactu...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?most_rec...
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that for a high-profile engineer or lead who expects to make 400k at least per year, the company would actually have to pay him 800k to make that much net. Labor cost in Germany is sky high. That times a thousand is not insignificant.
According to [1] if you make 400k a year your employer has to pay 413k in total [1] https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-...
[deleted]
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that for a high-profile engineer or lead who expects to make 400k at least per year, the company would actually have to pay him 800k to make that much net. Labor cost in Germany is sky high. That times a thousand is not insignificant.
According to [1] if you make 400k a year your employer has to pay 413k in total [1] https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gehaltsrechner-...
I assume they mean 400k net, if the employer pays 413k you only get 206k after tax. While the tax burden seems huge in this case, it's not that different in the US, though. For example you'd get around 225k in California (with no deductions).
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#118Earlier 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…
Any thoughts on Chisel?
as much as it pains to say me, but IMO its a wasted effort. we don't need new design languages. VHDL/Verilog "pain points" as RTL are tiny and don't require solving, we pretty much figured out design. Verification, on the other hand, is still an evolving (now stagnating) mess that needs inputs.
The biggest offender on that project list is FIRRTL. Cleary outgrew as someone's university work of "hey, lets do IR, but for RTL" without knowing anything of the industry, tools, etc. At best you can do the same with one reduced canonical simplified verilog source-to-source translation. at worst it does not do the primary function of "being" IR for RTL, because it should've been a graph, not another language with simplified syntax.
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a German myself: Why would you not invest? Infrastructure, state of mind? I'd really love to see more high-tech companies invest here, after we've managed to kill the solar companies... :-/
Top technical talent scarcity and cost. In Silicon Valley, you can find a dozen 600k$ engineers relatively quickly to scale up a random startup. In Germany... the salaries these people would be making would be This disparity in the valuation of top engineers cause many to emigrate, and once you are in the US, it is impossible to financially justify taking a 5x pay cut to go back to Germany. (You can justify it "non-f…
You're saying in SV, they're 600k$, but in Germany they're only 100k$, but it would be 2x expensive to hire them?
Why don't you pay 600k$ gross then, they get 300k$ net, and thus 3x what they'd get otherwise in Germany, but don't have to move to the US? Seems like a feasible strategy to me.
Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant
#120Earlier 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…
>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.
You can build a machine like that and most machines are built like that because simply reproducing the precision that is already in the machine is cheaper than building a complex intelligent system that knows how to compensate for flaws in precision. Think about how many 3d printers do auto leveling in software rather than simply make the bed perpendicular to the print head by hand. Those old manual milling machines and lathes didn't have all that fancy software so they simply reproduced their own flaws.
Well, given a smart enough human he can compensate for the flaws in the tools and get to a higher degree of precision.