Interesting. What about hiring people from the leading companies? Isn't that how a lot of knowledge transfer happens in all industries? Are non-competes enforceable internationally?
> Interesting. What about hiring people from the leading companies? Isn't that how a lot of knowledge transfer happens in all industries? Maybe it's not that easy. I have no knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing (let alone advanced semiconductor manufacturing), but it strikes me as one of those areas that might have thousands of very specialized crazy hard problems that all need to be solved just right to get thin…
> (and maybe that thousandth of a solution is only valuable in a path-dependent context with all the other solutions that leading company followed).
Yeah, that's a real obstacle, not much of a "maybe" about it.
I have a feeling that this, more than any other factor, is what is driving large-scale international tech IP theft. You have to grab stuff wholesale in hopes of either (a) teasing out isolated nuggets that happen to be applicable to your own efforts, or (b) recreating the surrounding path-dependent context (which doesn't have a well-defined boundary) in order to have a working solution.
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..
Yes, on my mother's side. He was too old for the draft, but got pressed into the Volkssturm (old men and boys) to defend Berlin, and was mortally wounded in it.
Two pictures I have of him, one with a telescope the other with a microscope. Both sides of my family were nerds :-)
He also led a team to Iceland in the 1930s to set some surveying markers to determine if Iceland was expanding, which would prove the continental drift theory. After the war, other researchers went back and confirmed it. I'm kinda sad he died before completing this, and so others got the credit for continental drift.
> If you possess this information and plan to move to (or even visit) China, I imagine US immigration will look at you very closely and not simply allow you to leave to go work for Chengdu Aerospace Corporation. I don't think the US border control system works like that. If you're a citizen, you never need an exit visa. IIRC, as long as you have a valid passport, you can exit and enter as you please, but if there's p…
Do you actually understand how this works or are you theorizing? The no-fly-list exists. Security clearances are tracked.
Folks with security clearances need to inform their employers about any travel plans. If the plans are suspicious, they can lose their clearance.
But they won’t be stopped at the border. They might be fired when they return though.
Interesting. What about hiring people from the leading companies? Isn't that how a lot of knowledge transfer happens in all industries? Are non-competes enforceable internationally?
On top of that, doesn’t one of the leading companies have foundries in China already? Presumably that would be a source for poaching talent.
Anyone who has been through civics 101 in the US knows this. Unless there is a warrant out for your arrest, the US government cannot stop a US citizen from leaving the country. Even if somehow you got on the no-fly list, you can take a boat. Or drive/walk across one of the land borders. Perfectly legally. Security clearances are a red herring. The folks working in Intel/TSMC/TI/etc fabs don't have or need security cl…
> Anyone who has been through civics 101 in the US knows this Anyone who has been through civics 102 in the US knows that there's lots of ways to get your passport taken away, and without one you're not getting far. It looks like Canada's requiring either passports or fancy drivers licenses (only available from some states), and Mexico's at least as strict.
> Anyone who has been through civics 102 in the US knows that there's lots of ways to get your passport taken away...
But that's irrelevant unless one of those ways is to "possess [ITAR-controlled and requires a security clearance] information," as one of the ancestor comments stated. If that's actually the case, someone should be able to cite law/regulation or provide examples of the practice, but no one has.
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?
I expect it is because jet turbine blades need to be precisely shaped to maximize proper airflow; spin around so fast that the shear forces destroy most materials; operate in an environment so hot that it melts most materials (which does not help with the shear forces, I expect); and be as lightweight as possible. Some blades have channels on the inside to run cool air through them to cool them down so they don't melt. I wonder if the egress of the air may be used to help keep the flow laminar, I thought I read something about that in experimental airplane wings. So you have fluid dynamics for the shape and a serious limitation in available materials. I know fluid dynamics is a bit of a black art, and I expect that metallurgy is somewhat similar. Especially at 2000 deg C and 3500 - 25,000 RPM!
Even once you have the blade to copy, you don't know why the features are the way they are. What bits are important? Which areas must have high tolerance? After that, there is the question of how to make it. You probably cannot just mass spectrometer it, put those ingredients in a vat, heat it up, and pour it into a mold. Is the order of ingredients important? The exact ratios? How quickly do you cool it? At what temperature? And how do you get those holes in it? How do you do it economically? You can't just 3D print these, and even if you did, it'd be way too slow.
Not surprised: $2.3B is chump change in semiconductor manufacturing especially if you're starting from scratch. Double that, add a zero, and wait 5-7 more years.
So 50B? That's nowhere near what you need. Last year both TSMC and Intel announced they are spending a hundred billion each on new fabs (TSMC in April, Intel in July) and they have all the R&D already and good relationship with ASML (and both own a few percent of it, too). But the US banned ASML from selling to China so you need to catch up with ASML and Intel/TSMC at the same time. Now, I don't know when ASML starte…
Looks like ASML started planting the seeds of what eventually became EUV in the early 1990s.
why are they impossible to reverse engineer? especially in case of jet turbines, due to their much larger size than chips?
I expect it is because jet turbine blades need to be precisely shaped to maximize proper airflow; spin around so fast that the shear forces destroy most materials; operate in an environment so hot that it melts most materials (which does not help with the shear forces, I expect); and be as lightweight as possible. Some blades have channels on the inside to run cool air through them to cool them down so they don't mel…
I have a theory. Not a good one but it's a theory Any one organisation can only be efficient if the whole organisation can fit in one persons head. It must be possible to reason about changes in one area affecting another. This anecdotally applies to every software system i have worked on - once you don't understand how another part works decisions you make become divorced from reality As such organisations must eith…
I think this is largely correct, although it helps to have many people understand it. When I worked at Micron, the training on the “Traveller Process” was mandatory and you could go very deep in it. There were a lot of people with at least a passing understanding of what everybody else was doing and in what order. The depth was not always there, especially about what could go wrong, and what that would look like. I started in CVD and then gradually moved my work to parametrics to try and figure out how problems were connected to measurements at each manufacturing step. I got into that role because I was an intern and generally not great at being told what to do and what not to do. I think if I had a normal role I’d have been pigeon-holed in one place with little visibility or impact on anything else. I imagine that I would have learned a lot more over, say, 20 years with full exposure to the entire process, but, I don’t know how someone could possibly develop that kind of knowledge being placed in a specialist role. I think the only people that knew the systems were the people that grew up with the complexity, as in, started early on as a specialist in a relatively simple process, and then that same role became a generalist role over the same function, which grew into a massively complex process that now consumes 100 different types of specialist that will never understand each other. Like, at Google, there will never be another Sanjay and Jeff. Nobody today will ever grow into the technical breadth required to understand that system. The parts will fracture and eventually stop working well with each other, until someone starts from scratch with more modern assumptions, but of course it will come from the outside because Google would never pay anybody to do that. To bring it back to the fab, I think the entire industry is close to this point if not beyond it already. It would be impossible to copy the incumbents, but I would guess that starting from scratch would yield a significant advantage, if only that more people in that team would necessarily have to understand more of the system.