I always find these discussion around the business of chip production interesting and since there's always many knowledgeable people on these I wanted to ask if anyone has a good recommendations for books on the business of chip production?
EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
201–210 of 496 posts
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#202Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.
That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firm…
Well, the current European culture is deeply shaped by a immense counter reaction to those times when daring and enterprising men blew up the world twice.
That's why consensus building and failure avoidance are common in Europe. People want good enough without moonshots.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#203EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…
The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none…
> .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it.
The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats. It sucks a bit that it's this way but…
Yep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market. To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
I love this analogy!
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it. The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money. And as far as I know, none…
> The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key…
>"Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor."
Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am not familiar with successful EU initiative. The EU Cohesion Fund is one. Since 2007, ~133 billion € got invested in the poorer countries of the EU to improve trans-european traffic infrastructure (TEN, aka road, rail, waterways) and environmental projects (e.g. villages hooked up to proper sewage pipes with treatment plants at the end, instead of dumping sewage to the groundwater / into rivers and seas).
Yet after spending 133 billion € the vast majority of Romanian, Bulgarian and many more countries villages do not have sewage pipes for example
Even if that’s true (which I wouldn’t know), I don’t see how that can be sufficient to declare a project that aims to improve things a failure.
Let’s assume that project was for the poorest 10% of the EU. That would be 44 million people. €133 billion divided by 44 million is about €3000 per inhabitant.
I don’t think one can expect such an amount to bring roads, rails, bridges, and sewage treatment systems up to standards of the richest parts of the EU.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#207EU has the tech. ASML is #2 company in EURO STOXX 50 index with 5.69% weight. ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory. TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probabl…
If the EU treats this as a strategic capability and not commercial, the spending is much less of a consideration. The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0] The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with…
Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies.
The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
ASML is impressive for sure, but having the litho doesn't mean you can make good chips. As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer. I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next App…
RISC-V Foundation just moved[1] from the USA to Switzerland in late 2019 due to geopolitical concerns. Also, the European Union is heavily betting on the RISC-V for its future hyperscale HPC systems[2][3][4]. I would believe that next-gen European CPU budget declaration is part of this dynamic. And I really hope it will work out. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-... [2] https://www.euro…
The RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland primarily to help the big Chinese processor companies to work on RISC-V.
Regarding the EU heavily betting on RISC-V, what gives you confidence that this will work? The history of EU funded projects to catch up with the US in AI, in cloud computing (like GAIA-X), in quantum computing, in the space race? HPC is not a mass-market, how should this niche be economically viable to amortise the huge cost of processor development? HPC in the US (and other countries) is often connected to military spending (although this is not always openly expressed). Processor development is extremely expensive, to the extent that Intel is now struggling to finance catching up with TSMC's fab process. Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity? ARM is about to be swallowed by Nvidia, and a lot of Arm's micro-architecture development is done in the US already. Now compare the micro-architecture design capacity with that in China (the world's biggest processor market).
I really hope it will work out.
Given 40 years of failure to catch up with the US, and now China, I am sceptical! I expect this to end up like previous EU attempts at catching up: the monies available will be much smaller than originally announced (by at least an order of magnitude), spent over much longer a time-frame, but more importantly, mostly flow to existing EU-based companies that are good ad lobbying, e.g. Siemens, and French conglomerates.
Another prediction: China will soon dominate RISC-V, since they are now forced, by US sanctions, to move away from Arm. I cannot see big Chinese processor companies moving to local ISAs such as Loongson. Alibaba announced a RISC-V processor at ICSA this year [2]. The big US players (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) have much less of a need to move to RISC-V.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
[2] https://conferences.computer.org/isca/pdfs/ISCA2020-4QlDegUf...
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#209Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.
That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firm…
I run a tech company in the Netherlands. I can corroborate most of this.
Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equity. In the Netherlands, this tax is around 50%.
Worse: depending on the exact legal implementation of the equity, you may end up having to pay the tax, based on its value on paper, before actually selling the equity, whose actual market price may be far lower. One could end up losing money just by having equity.
In the Netherlands, having a bankruptcy on your name makes you an ecomonic pariah. The process of going through a bankruptcy is not pleasant and comes with many responsibilities. Starting another company will be difficult. You will not be able to get a loan anymore. Oh, and your phone bill counts as a loan.
There is also a very weak culture of venture capital investment. There are very few such investors, and where they exist, the amounts they offer is tiny (like 10x lower) compared to US VCs, even though they ask the same amount of equity.
I am also not very impressed with the amount of advice/expertise VCs can offer over here.
The Dutch government likes to talk about how much they stimulate the tech and startup scenes. But when capital is concerned, their default answer is that you're supposed to get a loan. Lenders, unlike venture capitalists, are risk-averse (which they have to by law), meaning that they MUST get their loan paid back no matter what, which means that your business plan MUST be profitable, guaranteed, and that you must provide some sort of personal collateral, such as your savings or your house.
The sort of companies the government is thinking of, is for example a factory, where you need capital up front in order to buy machinery. The demand is known, so you know what profit you will roughly make. But this sort of thinking doesn't work for areas with high risk or a high degree of unknown.
For example let's say that you want to make a Twitter. You need money to pay for developers' salaries. But what will your profit be in year 3? It could be 1 million, or 0 (because nobody wants it). When banks hear this, they want a collateral equal to the loan amount. Why would I even get a loan then?
The best thing I can say about the Netherlands is the WBSO subsidy. When you do tech research and development on an area with risk (where risk is defined as being risky to you, e.g. because you have no experience with a particular topic or technology), then the government provides a subsidy for the amount of man-hours spent on this R&D. R&D includes software development too. This subsidy is implemented as a salary tax break.
Plus, when it turns out that your WBSO-subsidized product actually generates profit, then you get a corporate income tax break on the profits generated by that product. This is called the Innovatiebox.
WBSO and Innovatiebox are really nice once you have initial capital and have taken off. They won't help you when you start with near €0.
Re: EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
#210Intel must be thrilled