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EU countries team up for semiconductor push

reuters.com

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Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#291

Post by _visgean »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #117
Jacqued wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my anecdotal experience 60k is typical for developers with 5 years of experience in larger cities, but often you do need to get into management to reach 80k. I think it’s also getting better as all employers need to compete on salaries with remote offers from companies in Paris. I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago.

>I’ll admit it though, if it was not for the ludicrous immigration laws I’d have probably moved to the Bay Area a long time ago. That's kind of a catch-22 right there. If it weren't for those "ludicrous immigration laws", tech salaries in the Bay Area would get watered down significantly while becoming even more expensive to live in, making the whole place less attractive to emigrate to over time, eventually reaching…

You don't see this happening in London where EU citizens are generally free to move until recently - still after decades of free movement you have much higher salaries there than elsewhere in EU.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#292

Post by joelbluminator »

batmansmk wrote: post #288
joelbluminator wrote: post #196

Why isn't Netherlands mentioned btw? What semiconductors companies did Germany , France and Spain built so far? Netherlands has ASML, NXP and ASM...

France: Thomson/Thales ($18B including software dev), STMicroelectronics ($9B). Germany: Infineon ($8B), Qimonda ($1B), XFab ($0.5B), Carl Zeiss ($1.2B). From Wikipedia. ASML ($10B), NXP ($10B), ASM ($1B).

Measuring sales isn't how you do that usually, market cap is the way to go (and then ASML dwarfs the rest). But even by sales seems like NL is leading.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#293

Post by dtech »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #287
burntoutfire wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: - labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries) - lots of disjointed small-to-medium markets (with different laws and languages) make expansion on continental scale much harder than in the US

>- labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries) That's just not true now and hasn't been the case anymore since like the 2009 financial crisis. In most of Europe it's trivial to fire an underperforming non-unionized employee as the countries have adapted more business friendly laws to remain competitive after the financial crisis. Sure, there may still be some grey beards somewhere with old bullet…

Compared to the US it's still very hard to fire people in most EU countries. In large parts of the US you can fire anyone at anytime [1].

On the other hand Silicon Valley is in California and has some of the strongest labor laws of the US, so if this is such a huge factor why is everyone in SV?

Even under the assumption that it's an important factor, would it be worth it for EU to adopt such policies considering the very real human cost?...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#295

Post by MangoCoffee »

rossdavidh wrote: post #254

So, as someone who used to be an engineer in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, this reminds me a lot of Sematech. That was a joint venture between American companies in the 90's, when there was a concern that we were falling behind Japan. I'm sure there will be people who try to claim otherwise, but my view from inside AMD (at that time still doing its own manufacturing) was that nothing much ever came out of S…

>If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing

TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.

this semiwiki article point that out.

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/29364...

"TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few."

TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.

bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#296

Post by joelbluminator »

foepys wrote: post #246
Tade0 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's because at least in NXP's case the reason why headquarters are there and not somewhere else is that the Netherlands are a tax haven for IP-heavy companies.

Here is some more information about one of the schemes where Dutch law helps avoiding taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

Small countries like NL and Ireland don't really have a choice. Without giving tax incentives multinationals would just choose the bigger markets (China, U.S, India, Germany maybe). Is it "fair" that the U.S and China dominate everything between themselves?

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#297

Post by flexie »

Isn't the problem that European tech companies are sold to American companies? There are and have been countless of European chipmakers but they are usually bought by Americans.

European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments.

I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and also private wealth to accumulate and grow easier than European counterparts. The American government simply allows its business and private individuals to accumulate money via off shore companies in the Caribbean. The US deliberately allows this.

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#298

Post by formerly_proven »

xadhominemx wrote: post #283
yaantc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you refer to Cymer, they're doing the light source. A critical part of the system certainly, but not the whole. Then mirrors are done by Carl Zeiss in Germany. The blank photomask come mostly from 2 Japanses companies. On such complex systems there's room for many critical providers. Still, the integrated product comes from ASML.

The light source is by a very wide margin the most difficult and critical component of an EUV tool. The US still dominates wafer fab equipment - Cymer plus Applied Materials, Lam, and KLA. The only major non-US supplier is Tokyo Electron who is also quite strong. ASM International is a good but niche European supplier.

ASML doesn't seem like a niche supplier considering it generates more revenue than all but one of the major suppliers you list.

Applied Materials - 17bn

ASML - 11bn

Tokyo Electron - 10.8 bn

Lam - 9.5 bn

KLA Corp - 4 bn

Cymer (2012, before acqusition) - 600m

Re: EU countries team up for semiconductor push

#299

Post by ju-st »

pa7x1 wrote: post #137
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most competitive chips in the world are produced by machines made in the Netherlands at ASMI/ASML AFAIK, ASMLs fancy EUV tech comes from a Bay Area company they acquired a while ago and not from the Netherlands.

Do you have a reference? AFAIK it's 2 other German companies that are key in the production of EUV photolitography machines; Zeiss for the lenses and Trumpf for the lasers. I see reference for a company bought by ASML in California, HMI. They were bought in 2016 but the development of EUV technology predates it by many years so I find it unlikely that it had an important role in it.

Cymer was apprently the first to produce a EUV light source but their lasers were not commercial viable. Trumpf lasers are used in the commercial EUV machines. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d...
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