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Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

electronicsweekly.com

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Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#241
post #148

It's going to be a while before we are not depending on China. If you look at this 2020 Apple List of Suppliers: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supp... you can see the large variety of companies they they rely on for manufacturing. Plugging this into Excel, you get the following distribution: Country Count: China 156 Japan 40 US 30 Taiwan 26 South Korea 23 Vietnam 21 Malaysia 15 Philippines 1…

China 156 Japan 40 US 30 Taiwan 26 South Korea 23 Vietnam 21 Malaysia 15 Philippines 15 Thailand 15 Singapore 14 India 9 Germany 8 United Kingdom 4 Austria 3 Mexico 3 Belgium 2 Brazil 2 Czech Republic 2 France 2 Indonesia 2 Australia 1 Cambodia 1 Costa Rica 1 Finland 1 Ireland 1 Israel 1 Italy 1 Malta 1 Netherlands 1 Norway 1

Much love! Thanks for the formatting :)

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#242
post #2

Investing in local chip fabs is long overdue. These are incredibly important for geopolitical stability and should be distributed world-wide. We've centralized too many fabs in too few places in the search for low cost.

Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.

copper, silicon, gold, aluminum are sourced from many countries so they wouldn't need any raw materials from any particular country. Also the machines used to make the Fabs are sourced right next door in the Netherlands

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Intel is investing in ARM/RISC-V and x86 will be with us a bit longer (probably even 10+years). I would be more concerned about AMD then I'm about Intel tbh.

AMD recently acquired Xilinx, who makes ARM SoCs https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html

Intel acquired Altera in 2015, Altera has been producing FPGAs with ARM cores since 2011 at least (https://www.embedded.com/altera-integrates-arm-processor-in-...).

The Xilinx devices above are also FPGAs with ARM cores (a natural evolution from FPGAs with soft cores, MicroBlaze in the case of Xilinx and Nios in the case of Altera).

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.

Right now, the raw material will come from China because that's where the resources are developed. But once a fab is in place, it makes sense to push more to develop local resources, or at least among more diverse allies. It doesn't make sense to do that now, because you'd just be shipping local resources to a foreign fab, so that's still a bottleneck. But I think having a local fab is the tipping-point.

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Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#245
post #2

Investing in local chip fabs is long overdue. These are incredibly important for geopolitical stability and should be distributed world-wide. We've centralized too many fabs in too few places in the search for low cost.

Will it make much of a difference, though? Sure they can fabricate the chips, but a lot of the raw material needed will come from places like China.

Which raw material specifically?

Norway is the fifth largest exporter of Quartz. Turkey is third. I think there's enough Quartz in Europe for silicon.

For silicon wafer manufacturing there's Okmetic Oy in Finland and Siltronic AG in Germany.

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#246
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to Chinese people about Taiwan. They are very emotional about it (anger and hate). Don’t expect China to act logical.

Please don't make such generalizations. The average Chinese person is no more responsible for Chinese foreign policy than the average American is for American foreign policy.

The point was that China’s leaders are emotional about it too. They grew up with the same propaganda.

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#247

It will be clear that this money was wasted within ten years. What a government needs to do to attract real manufacturing entrepreneurs: - pro family policies (for people) - pro immigration (for people) - cut environmental laws (for capex make-right) - cut business taxes (for gm make-right) - cut personal taxes (for people) - fight back against china-sponsored economic maneuvering at the multilateral level (to create…

> - cut environmental laws (for capex make-right)

I'm with you on all but this. Cleaning up the environment is a very expensive, time consuming process. There's still about 20 superfund sites in Santa Clara County due to its heyday of tech manufacturing.

Our local community has been fighting for the cleanup of a 60 year old disaster. That they agreed to clean up 20 years ago. But they've barely started.

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#248
post #207
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very important for national stability. A highly-interconnected global economy is arguably better at securing international stability.

Quoted post unavailable.

If you’re talking about global supply chain disruption, isn’t that more about lack of robustness than it is about interconnectedness? I don’t see how preemptively reducing global trade in the years leading up to this pandemic would have helped, unless you just mean that we would have gotten used to doing without certain things earlier.

Re: Germany paying $5.5B for Intel fab

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but it is the monopoly supplier of the single most important device for fabs. If ASML (and all their knowledge) disappeared off the face of the earth today progress in semiconductors would probably be set back a decade or two. The fact they are a single company in one country that the global industry depends on for progress in semis should be of concern.

Would it be? Or would it be one step back for a few years and then two steps forward by the 10 year mark due to renewed competition?

It took decades for ASML to successfully develop EUV lithography. It was widely thought to be impractical prior to that. No one else was willing to even try.
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