Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#71

Post by AceJohnny2 »

kodemager wrote: post #34
bfung wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect some or most of this secret sauce is more like institutional knowledge and not one single person knows how the whole system works (to produce high quality chips at scale). Or maybe there IS one person, but that’s the CEO/founder, haha. Regardless, it’s similar to software companies claiming to run agile, but always reverting to the “get it done, waterfall deadline” mode. It takes good effort and detailed kn…

> Agile’s been around for over 10years and people still don’t do good versions well) Agile software development has been around since the early 90’ies. Scrum is from something like 1995. The reason people fail to implement it so often is that project management sort or doesn’t work in software development, and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you…

> and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning.

That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#72

Post by ChuckMcM »

I would not be the least bit surprised if it cost $150B to $250B to capitalize a new 'state of the art' semiconductor fab.

I'm a bit surprised they didn't shoot a bit lower and just try to replicate ASML's machines. Those are one of the unobtainium pieces that cost so much in a new fab.

In my experience the only way to compete with a long established player is to learn the business from the ground up and expect a loooong learning curve. What that might look like with semiconductors is building an ingot plant that can sell ingots that the established player can use. Then start slicing them and selling passivated ingots for a bit more margin, then use "marginal" ingots to make large node (like 140nm or 90nm) chips in the good areas to develop training around the workflow. Ideally those chips have some nominal market value and sales can act as a 'discount' on your investment (say it costs you $1B to make the chips and you sell them for $500M, you've basically invested $500M in learning the work flow instead of a full $1B).

Expect this to take 10 - 15 years minimum, 25 years more typically. Invest in university programs to train process engineers, physicists, and circuit designers. "Seed" several universities with small 300mm fabs to give students real experience rather than just "book learning." Aggressively weed out people who cheat to get through school.

Its a really really huge deal to take on this task. It was insanely complicated in the 90's and now it is even more so. The only thing China has going for it is that it doesn't need to repeat the mistakes made in the last 30 years that other semiconductor companies made and so their path is a bit more "straight line." But if experience is any guide, there is no shortcut to doing the work, no matter how much money you spend.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#73

Post by 908B64B197 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #72

I would not be the least bit surprised if it cost $150B to $250B to capitalize a new 'state of the art' semiconductor fab. I'm a bit surprised they didn't shoot a bit lower and just try to replicate ASML's machines. Those are one of the unobtainium pieces that cost so much in a new fab. In my experience the only way to compete with a long established player is to learn the business from the ground up and expect a loo…

> Invest in university programs to train process engineers, physicists, and circuit designers. "Seed" several universities with small 300mm fabs to give students real experience rather than just "book learning." Aggressively weed out people who cheat to get through school.

This requires a deep cultural change. Because of high pressure cramming exams that favors rote, Chinese students are incentivized to just cheat from a very young age.

Also, keep in mind that no matter how much you invest, studying at an American university opens the door to working in America and getting a western passport, something more and more Chinese are desperately trying to do.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#74

Post by bcrl »

kurthr wrote: post #69
bcrl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, there is no free lunch. Just look at Intel's missteps on their 10nm process. There's a company with decades of experience building semiconductors and $77 billion in revenue last year that took close to 4 years to recover from initial mistakes with their transition from their 14nm process to a 10nm class process. If Intel has that much difficulty, just imagine how many orders of magnitude harder it is for a sm…

Well, to be fair their 10nm is everyone else's 7nm and they were trying to do it without DUV litho, for reasons? However, their style of process/chip design is very hierarchical with HUGE teams to get the implementation out in the 3-4year cycles (there are multiple overlapping teams). This was driven over the successes of decades of scaling. Then it failed. Now they are behind. If they had been able to pivot early th…

I do wonder at what point Intel will no longer be able to function being the sole source of products running through their own fabs. Companies like TSMC can amortize the cost of fab construction and process development over a much larger swath of the electronics industry. Combined with the fact that Intel no longer has Apple as a customer for new products, they could be facing enormous change by 2030. AMD couldn't support their own fab, and I think that's still a risk factor (albeit much smaller than it was for AMD) for Intel if the cost of new fabs keeps going up by factors of 10 or more every generation.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#75

Post by inter_netuser »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Economical and performant chip and jet turbine production are two areas where China can't really take any shortcuts. They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer. They are dumping in the resources, so I'm sure they will eventually get there, but it might be a few decades (in both fields, they can already do performant or economica…

why are they impossible to reverse engineer?

especially in case of jet turbines, due to their much larger size than chips?

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#76

Post by inter_netuser »

bfung wrote: post #16
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Economical and performant chip and jet turbine production are two areas where China can't really take any shortcuts. They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer. They are dumping in the resources, so I'm sure they will eventually get there, but it might be a few decades (in both fields, they can already do performant or economica…

I suspect some or most of this secret sauce is more like institutional knowledge and not one single person knows how the whole system works (to produce high quality chips at scale). Or maybe there IS one person, but that’s the CEO/founder, haha. Regardless, it’s similar to software companies claiming to run agile, but always reverting to the “get it done, waterfall deadline” mode. It takes good effort and detailed kn…

I can assure you the CEO would be the last person to know how the whole system works, in case of semiconductor chips, to the detail sufficient to reproduce it again from scratch should the entire company suddenly resign somehow.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#77

Post by balsam »

WalterBright wrote: post #55
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #4

Economical and performant chip and jet turbine production are two areas where China can't really take any shortcuts. They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer. They are dumping in the resources, so I'm sure they will eventually get there, but it might be a few decades (in both fields, they can already do performant or economica…

My grandfather figured out how to grow large haloid crystals, which were used in camera polaroid Carl Zeiss "Bernotar" filters. He kept the process a secret, which died with him. My family gets contacted now and then by researchers trying to figure out how to do it.

Wait, Bernauer is your grandfather? He was killed in the war..

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#78

Post by dontcare007 »

klipt wrote: post #42
nwiswell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for semiconductors a lot of the magic is distributed tribal knowledge among engineers and the sophisticated equipment used to fabricate the devices (all major suppliers are in the US, Europe, and Japan). So theft is not really a complete solution, although it can help.

So if there were a war and the existing equipment got bombed, the world would basically be set 10 years behind on computing?

No post body was provided.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#79

Post by webmaven »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #71
kodemager wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agile’s been around for over 10years and people still don’t do good versions well) Agile software development has been around since the early 90’ies. Scrum is from something like 1995. The reason people fail to implement it so often is that project management sort or doesn’t work in software development, and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you…

> and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning. That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)

> That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)

That doesn't seem like ADHD to me. Getting to a super-productive flow state is notoriously difficult to do reliably for everyone, and getting stuck on a stupid typo you can't find even though you know it is somewhere in the 50 lines of code you're looking at is likewise a fairly common experience.

Folks with ADHD may actually be better at achieving a hyperfocused state of flow, but the flip side of that isn't hunting for a typo, it is falling down a rabbit hole of yak-shaving, procrastination (productive or otherwise), and other distractions.

Somewhere in between is the experience of trying to hold more and more context in your head at once, resulting in a feeling like your brain has been pummeled and leaking out your ears, staring at some code that has become entirely illegible. This can be the result of ADHD-driven yak-shaving, but more commonly is the result of needing to comprehend huge chunks of a badly architected system before you can make a change with any confidence.

Re: Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed

#80

Post by chx »

codeulike wrote: post #48
panabee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why haven't alternatives emerged to ASML to help drive down the cost of building new fabs? do you know what the cost breakdown is when building fabs?

Because the EUV machines that ASML build are the most complex machines ever built by humans and getting all the bits to work properly takes decades of R+D e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw

Wasn't the atomic bomb the most complex machine ever built? Hanford alone had more than 50 000 people working towards it, at Oak Ridge the K-25 building was 1,640,000 square feet...

Although we could mention the B-29 which actually cost 50% more than the entire Manhattan Project -- or, to be closer to present day, the F-35.

Post reply on HN