Earlier quoted context omitted.
November 6, 2024.
Help me understand.
After the next general election. Optics
Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
341–350 of 657 posts
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs. Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common. One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the…
> Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. This. We are talking about Atom scale here. I have as much admiration for skilled mechanics as the next guy. I heard about a lathe operator at Patek Phillip who could turn an arbor to within 1 micron precision, just by listening to the pitch the cutting tool made when trimming it down. And when chip features were on the micron scale, humans in the loop m…
I'm probably revealing exactly which fab, but one issue the fab had is when it was built it was placed fairly close to the interstate. That did no matter when they were at something like 500nm. However, as they slowly pulled the node size down they started noticing random errors within their chips. It took a while to track it down but it turns out semi trucks driving past the interstate were causing defects in the chips.
They ended up installing shock absorbers everywhere to counteract this problem.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you I would say that supply chain is upstream of chip-production. The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so. It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.
The chip supply chain is a lot shorter and more concentrated than the mining supply chain. If you're thinking of "rare earth" metals in particular, it's probably better to focus on the refining rather than digging out of the ground. Between South America, West Africa, and Australia there are lots of mines for most of the metals, but only refining in China (because it has been highly subsidized by both monetary and re…
There's substantial wafer capacity in the US, from silane production, through polysilicon granule production and wafer making. There are several different wafer makers in the US with both 200mm and 300mm wafer capacity.
Some of the silane and polysilicon companies are US owned, but I don't think that any of the wafer makers are US headquartered anymore.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices. (ie, not investing in EUV, assuming SAQP would work forever, ignoring the consequences of everything being power-limited...) This kind of decision is hard, because it's a technical-economic tradeoff, and the latter is more voodoo than math. And that's not even addressing whether you get surprised by things like the LLM boom...
You say: > It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices. That's like saying Saudi Arabia made some bad policy decisions. If you are in Saudi Arabia, nothing has a higher return on investment than petroleum. If you invest in anything else, you are leaving money---A LOT of money--on the table. The result is that capital is drained out of any other business, and the country gets so dependent…
Was it not possible to build two fabs and make $48 billion?
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US is spinning $1T new public debt every 100 days and there's no credible path to return to a sustainable trajectory. How are you calculating this? The full-year deficit is running at less than $1T... You aren't counting it when Treasury rolls maturing bonds over into new debt, are you? That's normal and irrelevant. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... There's a few things worth menti…
Your link indicates a $1.7T deficit for FY23 which is not "less than $1T". That's roughly twice the figure you offer as " sustainable" ($700B). It's been widely reported [1] that the US debt reached $32T in June 2023, $33T in Sept 2023, $34T January 2024, achieving those milestones roughly every 100 days. The projections indicate an exponential increase, which doesn't help the case for sustainability. Sovereign debt…
You're right, I mistook the year-to-date figure for the full-year projection.
That said,
> It's been widely reported [1] that the US debt reached $32T in June 2023, $33T in Sept 2023, $34T January 2024, achieving those milestones roughly every 100 days. The projections indicate an exponential increase, which doesn't help the case for sustainability.
These figures aren't interesting because they include debt that the government owes to itself (intragovernmental debt). The debt held by the public is presently around $27T.
When actually considering long-run sustainability, you don't just consider the real GDP growth rate (as I did above). You really need to consider several factors:
1) Deficits
2) Nominal GDP (i.e., disregarding inflation)
3) Nominal interest rates
If you have a ton of inflation, you can effectively reduce the debt burden in terms of a % of GDP, since the GDP grows with inflation and the debt does not.
This is the data series that should interest you:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
You'll note an explosive increase due to the extreme pandemic deficit spending (and during the financial crisis), but lately it's actually not an "exponential increase".
The bottom line is it's not as though these are uncharted heights, or that we're presently on an uncontrolled exponential trajectory -- but, we have "run out of room", and if we have another crisis, we're going to be unable to engage in the kind of deficit spending that we have in the past without serious consequences.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having seen a few 'high tech' places myself: there's high tech, and then there's _high tech_. Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. One you can learn in an afternoon; the other takes years to learn.
> Assembling a motherboard is to semiconductor fabs as flying a toy drone is to landing a Boeing 747. I disagree. I live next to a fab and have coworkers that have worked the fabs. Humans in fabs are taken out of the loop as much as possible. That's because when dealing with nanoscale structures, human error is simply too common. One of my coworkers worked at the fab during a period where they had humans running the…
I think we agree? The point is that a semiconductor fab (like a 747) is so highly automated that you don't need a bunch of low- or medium-skilled folks to drive forklifts; you need a few high-skills folks to design, monitor, debug & optimize the huge system(s).
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#347WRT to lack of a skilled workforce, here is an interesting anecdote. I remember back in the late 90's, Intel had to fire most line workers in their FABS, and hire people with Ph.D.'s in solid-state physics. I actually knew one of these people who were fired: She was our housecleaner. And--like the supper-smart garbage man of the Dilbert Cartoons, she was very smart. Smarter than me. I know because she helped me solve…
It wasn't just intel, it was every semi-conductor manufacturer in the valley (hence the inability to find other work).
They closed because it was cheaper to build in other countries, or to outsource from contractors who build in other countries (where organized labor doesn't exist). The U.S. lost thousands of high-paying (and tax-paying) labor positions and atrophied the skills that went with them. Intel profited from it.
These people were disproportionately minorities, disproportionately well-represented by unions, and had made a lot of progress in improving their working conditions re: use of terribly corrosive chemicals. All of that backslid when labor went off-shore.
Now, the taxpayer has to pay Intel $8.5B to bring back manufacturing capacity to the U.S.; nice job, if you can get it. It'll be really interesting to see who takes these jobs, and how quickly we can rebuild the muscles that Intel shareholders profited from decomposing.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you underestimate the amount of people with high school education doing very precise, skilled work right now. Do you think skilled machines tend to have PHds or even bachelors? Im not saying its as simple as CNC. I am saying that I doubt you need an IQ of 130 or a PHD. Start investing in the people whose labor were undercut. In fact a skilled machinist or technician seems like a much closer match (in terms of…
Skilled machinists?
It takes education and practice to take a CAD model or technical drawings and run the machines to produce it.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This award isn't about innovation, the best way to do things, or job requirements. This about supply chain security and national defense. So many of our components are made overseas and under governments who are not close allies. This is in order to operate things in our country. When you have the FABs in the US and under US control you can handle international foreign policy and the security of the nation differentl…
Fair enough. But then the question is: How did this happen in the first place? If the Pentagon is playing out scenerio after scenerio after scenerio, how did we allow ourselves to be so embarrassingly venerable? And now the taxpayer is on the hook for $8.5B and growing? There's a certain smell to all this.
> How did this happen in the first place?
Texas Instruments didn't give guys like Morris Chang enough opportunities to advance.
That's why TSMC was founded.
Re: Intel to Receive $8.5B in Grants to Build Chip Plants
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately no, it's socialism for us too - just the wrong end of it. The government and their friends are the socialism winners, the rest of us are the socialism losers. But we do it to ourselves at the ballot box every time, and very reliably.
I don't know what the heck you are talking about. Socialism is not the kind of bs like capitalism or communism, it has no winners nor losers everyone is in the same boat. Anything else is just some crooked politicians, could be billionaires but don't have to, getting more rich and powerful and say whatever they have to say to keep it this way.
I don't see how socialism is any different. It is still the state taking from one person to give to another.
How is anyone in the same boat with Socialism? Unless your metaphor is that some paddle and some don't, but everyone goes the same speed