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How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

economist.com

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Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#221

Post by LudwigNagasena »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #207
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a law in many countries that you have to carry your ID with you, eg Germany. The police may do random check in high risk areas. Do you think Germany treats its citizens without dignity?

The point is that this isn't Germany and there is no such law here.

If there is no such law in Texas, then surely detaining random people who are not white enough and putting them in jail would be a significant topic of discussion rather than an offhand comment on HN. 40% of Texas are Hispanic — a demographic that would be under the most suspicion. That is a lot of people in jail for no reason and without any legal reasons. The whole state would probably get bankrupt after a few lawsuits by those unfairly arrested citizens.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#222

Post by Affric »

kakwa_ wrote: post #115
frognumber wrote: post #67

My question: As an American, why should I work in IC fabrication? I'm competing with low-cost Asians who set a cap on my salary. Work conditions, income, and everything else is worse than SWE. I switched away from electronics early in my career, and it seems like a strict win. As much as I believe in on-shoring, I'm not sure those issues can, will, or should be fixed.

For the "can" part, looking at the numbers, it looks possible. If I take TSMC, they have: * $73b revenue * $32b income * 73000 employees (2022 numbers from wikipedia) That's a really high margin, and a really high revenue per employee. This means there is probably room to accommodate for higher wages. The concern I have revolves more around the US work culture. Employees tend to switch company frequently. Given how c…

> The concern I have revolves more around the US work culture. Employees tend to switch company frequently.

It’s not just cultural and it’s hinted at in the second part of your comment. Lack of regulation in employment means you’re penalised financially for staying in one job. Most employees have little say in their pay and conditions.

Employees wages are rarely commensurate with the value they provide to a firm.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#223

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

What's the end goal here? To onshore only chip production to the US? Or are we talking about onshoring entire electronics supply chains?

How about all the other stuff that's required besides the dies themselves... chip substrates? packaging? Passive components? Onshore PCB manufacturers (that are actually affordable)?

We build 10 to 12 layer boards with BGA x86 CPUs. There's a MASSIVE premium on trying to have complex PCBs made in the US. The last time I looked I found a lot of PCB mfgs in Mexico, but they're seemingly owned by the Chinese.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#224

Post by rovolo »

bluGill wrote: post #146
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the most resilient part of TX power grid" A roommate of mine once quipped on something: 'that's like saying my crap smells better than yours'. Feel free to correct me, I'm not an expert, but Texas runs its own state-only independent grid, it got completely pants in the ice storm a few years ago, and at the time a lot of articles said the Texas grid is fundamentally less resilient that other power companies. Is any o…

The laws of physics suggest an area about the size of Texas is all the bigger you can make a grid. AC is much better than DC for areas of that range, because you can adjust voltages with a cheap transforms. However if you get too large and feed the grid from multiple places, there gets to be a point in the middle where power from one end is driving the grid negative while the other is driving positive. You can get ar…

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The Eastern Interconnection is far larger than the Texas Interconnection and it's connected via AC. Are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection has inefficiencies due to its size? Or are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection isn't fully synchronized somehow?

I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a synchronous system (1967-1975) to learn more about the difficulties with scaling interconnections. It mentioned frequency oscillations causing voltage variations close to the East-West connection (p11), which sounds like the issue you're describing. If that is the issue though, then Texas isn't the size limit for a grid because the Eastern and Western grids exist and are far larger.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8594689

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#225

Post by _kbh_ »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #194
colechristensen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. I would say exactly the opposite, the vaccines were made quite quickly and there weren't major supply issues. The Defense Production Act (er... central planning as you put it) was used to say what was going to happen when with money to back it up and…

> The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us). First of all, other countries managed to develop and produce large amounts of vaccine in very short timeframe during t…

Whilst I agree with some of your post I think the following is incorrect.

> and some of that is cutting-edge gear (such as the Storm Shadow missile).

Storm shadow is 20 years old from first deployment and 29 years since development started. Its replacement is being actively developed since 2017, it’s hardly “cutting edge”.

It’s just new enough that the Russians have trouble countering it.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#226

Post by benreesman »

There’s a lot of discussion on this thread about how US workers (even outside extreme CoL hubs) are just too expensive to do cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication.

Why? Ease up a bit on immigration for skilled workers, subsidize however many CHIPs Acts it takes to get the motor running, export a higher standard of living for skilled workers thereby, and margins on the most elite manufacturing sector on earth stay…really friggin high?

How productive does the global economy have to get before paying people well stops being a non-starter?

We didn’t used to fuck around on this: Bell Labs, Western, DARPA, the Apollo Program. Shareholders got a solid, low-beta return, workers got benefits and an education for their kids, and technology improved at an explosive rate.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#228

Post by [deleted] »

rovolo wrote: post #224
bluGill wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics suggest an area about the size of Texas is all the bigger you can make a grid. AC is much better than DC for areas of that range, because you can adjust voltages with a cheap transforms. However if you get too large and feed the grid from multiple places, there gets to be a point in the middle where power from one end is driving the grid negative while the other is driving positive. You can get ar…

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The Eastern Interconnection is far larger than the Texas Interconnection and it's connected via AC. Are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection has inefficiencies due to its size? Or are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection isn't fully synchronized somehow? I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a syn…

[deleted]

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#229

Post by bluGill »

rovolo wrote: post #224
bluGill wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics suggest an area about the size of Texas is all the bigger you can make a grid. AC is much better than DC for areas of that range, because you can adjust voltages with a cheap transforms. However if you get too large and feed the grid from multiple places, there gets to be a point in the middle where power from one end is driving the grid negative while the other is driving positive. You can get ar…

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The Eastern Interconnection is far larger than the Texas Interconnection and it's connected via AC. Are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection has inefficiencies due to its size? Or are you saying that the Eastern Interconnection isn't fully synchronized somehow? I tried reading this IEEE article about the time the Eastern and Western Interconnections were connected into a syn…

About is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Yes you can go bigger than Texas size, but Texas is still big enough.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#230

Post by madengr »

slingnow wrote: post #167
frognumber wrote: post #67

My question: As an American, why should I work in IC fabrication? I'm competing with low-cost Asians who set a cap on my salary. Work conditions, income, and everything else is worse than SWE. I switched away from electronics early in my career, and it seems like a strict win. As much as I believe in on-shoring, I'm not sure those issues can, will, or should be fixed.

You're right. Why should any American ever work in any job that doesn't favorably compare to SWE salary and working conditions? Everyone should quit their jobs and become a SWE. It's just that simple, right? /s

My wife was a process engineer in microelectronics. She is now doing data engineering and ML, and doubled her salary. She will never return to that industry.
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