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TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

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Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#171

Post by nickik »

odiroot wrote: post #22
alexanderklein wrote: post #2

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.

I wouldn't be as harsh, but indeed that decision is a bit weird. They cannot really count on cheap labour, or "friendly" economic incentives. And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast. One great thing about Germany is the central location within EU with good logistics overall. Not sure it matters for semiconductor manufacturing.

> And seeing the case of Tesla factory, it's not so easy and fast.

Its not actually delayed much. The incredibly optimistic plan was to be ready in September, but that was Elon Time.

So far the bureaucracy has not really held them back that much.

If you compare progress in China, Texas and Berlin so far its not clear that Berlin is meaningfully slower.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#172

Post by vijayr02 »

grlass wrote: post #27
ipnon wrote: post #5

TSMC is really the keystone for everything else done that ends up getting talked about on this website. They are constantly at the bleeding edge of computer manufacture and pushing it further still. We should feel some sense of amazement to be alive still in the middle of the computer revolution.

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... >

Looks like countries are the intuitive units to capture deviations at this level of scale. From NASA's web page about the mirrors in the James Webb telescope [0]:

"That means if the continental United States was polished smooth to the same tolerances, the entire country – from Maine to California – would not vary in thickness by just over two inches!"

Given the US is roughly 27 times the area of Germany, looks like semiconductor manufacturing requires roughly double the accuracy of space telescopes (1 mm * 27 is slightly more than 1 inch)

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/webb-craft.h...

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#173

Post by raverbashing »

kome wrote: post #160
mejutoco wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of german self-deprecation. Do you have any examples of it?

German self-deprecation? I wish! My impression is that Germans feel to be top notch no matter what. I rarely heard self-deprecation from them, humble brag is what come closer.

Yeah it's not so obvious or evident.

What you're mentioning do happen. But there's a bit of a cultural theme to "play it low" and "be humble"

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#174

Post by kleiba »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #131
volta83 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know of a single person in my Master's degree class in Computer Science in one of Germany's top tech universities who went to the US. And I have most of them as contacts on LinkedIn. I'm not buying your premise.

Sorry, but just because they were in your Master's degree class does not necessarily make them top talent.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#175

Post by ulfw »

MarcusE1W wrote: post #90
suction wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be true, but in Germany, the salary you pay to your employee is also about 1% of all the labor cost for him or her. Which is hyperbole, of course, but Germany is one of those countries where the actual net payout is usually significantly less than 50% of the salary the company provides. I'm not criticising it as I think Germany is a good example of a well-working system but net salaries are low for most.

It’s probably true that the net salary is lower than some other comparable countries, although Denmark for example has also a quite low net salary. I feel the important bit is what you get for the net salary deduction. In Germany you have: - Free Education including University - A decent mostly free health system, health care insurance - unemployment insurance so your life does not completely unravel if you are made…

"A decent mostly free health system"

Where in Germany is that?

You either pay a lot for private insurance (especially when you get old) or you pay a lot for state-backed insurance (which is a lot if you earn above average as most techies do).

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#176

Post by SiempreViernes »

ahartmetz wrote: post #153
wasmitnetzen wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of a single person in my Master's degree class in Computer Science in one of Germany's top tech universities who went to the US. And I have most of them as contacts on LinkedIn. I'm not buying your premise.

The thing about not coming back is probably true (30% the salary?!), but yeah, not many leave in the first place.

Adding to that, is there any general reason for a German, besides money, to go to the US? So if the ones that go mostly do it for the money, they'll most likely stay gone.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#177

Post by carlos22 »

corty wrote: post #85
suction wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tesla story had two sides - Tesla was aware about the high standards that would be applied to their factory, but somehow thought "we're Tesla so they'll create all kinds of exceptions for us if we pay the right politicians". Turns out not every country is as corrupt as Tesla's home country.

Maybe. But I think all the politicians Tesla could have bought are already owned by their German competitors.

Oh thats so not true. The Brandenburg (the state) Ministerpräsident (like Gouverneur) and his team really like to be a big car producing Bundesland. We have Baden-Württemberg (Mercedes, Porsche), Bayern (BMW, Audi) and Niedersachen (VW HQ) and to some extend also NRW (biggest EU plant of Ford) and Sachsen (VW plant). But there is not a single plant Brandenburg. So to be in the game is something they really wanna happen. Especially with something that hyped like tesla. But still there are rules, and you have to follow them.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#178

Post by GregarianChild »

artemonster wrote: post #118
dataflow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Chisel's being hooked into the Java / Scala tool chain give makes setting up automated verification pipelines much easier:

- You can use SBT or MVM to pull in dependencies

- You can wrap up designs as .jar files

- Powerful testing tools like QuickCheck come ready made

None of the above is rocket science, but simply by being there things become easier.

   without knowing anything of the 
   industry, tools,
It's pretty difficult for a student to find out about what is actually used in industry. The semi industry's secrecy doesn't help. But software and hardware people really don't even have a shared language, and misunderstand each other's abilities and pain points. The very term "verification" is understood quite differently between the different communities.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#179

Post by Roritharr »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #131
volta83 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know of a single person in my Master's degree class in Computer Science in one of Germany's top tech universities who went to the US. And I have most of them as contacts on LinkedIn. I'm not buying your premise.

I know several that went to FANGs from TU Darmstadt and are in the situation as described by parent. They even feel socially isolated from Germany as their salaries and wealth are incomprehensible to their former friends and so are met with envy.

Personally I regret not leaving Germany earlier, it's much harder once you have kids.

Re: TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant

#180

Post by gsnedders »

fxtentacle wrote: post #45

If you consider GlobalFoundries to be a valid competitor, then that move would make a lot of sense. Infineon and AMD used to do a lot of research and production in Dresden. The AMD fab has since become a part of GlobalFoundries. But there's still a healthy ecosystem of university research and medium-sized software companies. Or at least there was, when I visited GlobalFoundries in 2014. Also, there has been a growing…

There's also Texas Instruments in Freising (near Munich), which I think is ex-NatSemi, and AFAIK now their only European fab after the closure of their one in Greenock (Scotland).
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