Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40% • Hacker News Board

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#591

Post by gregors » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

dave_sullivan wrote: post #470

jvanderbot wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... the most expensive fab is 33 Giga$. TSMC is 17G$. pennies on the dollar in our 1-3Trillion infrastructure bill. Make america fab again. EDIT: it appears this is in the 2T infrastructure bill. https:…

Government can't make a website, let alone a chip fab. Talk to Intel and ask them why we've fallen behind. Do any VCs want to fund a direct Intel competitor? I doubt it. Making chips seems to be quite a bit more complicated than making and launching rockets, I don't think even Elon Musk could do it.

The UK Gov seems to be doing an ok job - https://github.com/alphagov

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#592

Post by jvanderbot » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

blueblisters wrote: post #513

jvanderbot wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... the most expensive fab is 33 Giga$. TSMC is 17G$. pennies on the dollar in our 1-3Trillion infrastructure bill. Make america fab again. EDIT: it appears this is in the 2T infrastructure bill. https:…

Building it is one thing. Making it operational without importing talent and running it profitably is another. Taiwan has some of the best fab engineers who work at US minimum wage salaries. Of course you can pull them away with higher pay like China is doing, but that means profitability will likely go for a toss.

I agree with your points, but poaching talent is just fine in my book. And profitability should be considered, but not required. Most national defense programs are ``profitable'' in that they are paid by us. Chips are a cheap strategic win in the scope of things. TSMC's entire operating budget is a miniscule line item next to the cost of threatening supply chain to downstream industries, or strategic loss from TSMC being nationalized by China (or ... going to war to defend against that)

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#593

Post by humaniania » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 6:56 PM UTC

sonthonax wrote: post #393

shadowgovt wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every country props up its auto industry, so why worry about a domestic supply? War. In the event a war breaks out, a running auto plant can be re-tooled relatively rapidly into a light and heavy armor plant. It's not even a question of whether allies could supply tanks and troop transports; it's about having domestic capacity to make them because enemies could execute blockades and disrupt allied resource supply.

Is that still true now?

Nuclear armed countries going to war is supposed to be an extinction level event. That's the whole point. It's supposed to be unthinkable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#594

Post by jvanderbot » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #535

jvanderbot wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US isn't starting from scratch. And presumably the total cost includes all the R&D cycles. TSMC was started by a Texas Instruments employee. But, if we assume they were, just double the cost as a sign-on bonus for all the engineers and poach away. This is problem that can be solved with money, and not a lot of it in the grand scheme of things.

You vastly underestimate the institutional knowledge necessary to operate state of the art fabs. Intel has been at the forefront of the field for decades, and even they are stumbling vs the current challenges. TSMC was founded over 3 decades ago. That it was founded by a TI employee says nothing about the situation today. The US is subsidizing a TSMC plant here, which should help the situation, as it'll give us acces…

I agree that I'm underestimating the startup cost. That's inevitable, I think. I can only counter by saying that I think we're also underestimating the benefits of being self-sustaining at the scale of TSMC, especially with the changing political landscape re: China.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#595

Post by gnopgnip » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #154

wonderwonder wrote: post #87

So new cars are going to be come more expensive due to supply limitations and in turn used cars will continue to become more expensive as they can rise to a certain % of the new car price. At the same time housing prices continue to sky rocket. Seems like not a great time for someone just stepping into adulthood and financial responsibility.

> just stepping into adulthood and financial responsibility. I am older than that (40 and my wife is 35) and while we have been independent professionals for a while, we now have a 1 year old so this summer for the first time in our lives we bought a house and a car. It was definitely harder to find a house (mainly less availability driving competitive bidding) and it took a little longer to find a car and we ended u…

CPI is showing a 45% increase in used car prices over the last year.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#596

Post by namelessoracle » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #519

namelessoracle wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everyone understands that computer chips are needed for everything these days though. The population can relate just fine. It's just there's no one rich and powerful who wants to make the investment that is making it an issue.

I'm not sure that the population can relate to building a semiconductor ecosystem in the USA -- when a state gives incentives to bring movie production there, people think "Well look at all of those jobs and movies give our state great exposure", but when the government wants to spend billions helping to build a next-gen fab plant here, then it's like "wait, I paid thousands of dollars for my phone and computer, why…

People understand just fine. They understand that pretty much everything they own these days has a computer chip inside it.

Using a simple example people understand they can't get consumer electronics like Xboxs, Playstations, and Switches because of the electronics shortage. People understand there is a car part shortage due to electronics. These aren't high information people talking to me about this. It's understood there's a chip shortage right now by the general population.

People are fine with and nobody really argues that America should support a steel industry. Frame the argument the same way and most people would be ok with supporting a technology infrastructure local to America.

The other issue that hasn't been touched on is that a chip subsidy will probably only benefit 1 or 2 states, where as agriculture and other commodity level subsidies get spread out so there's less political will to make it happen. (along with a zero sum attitude in politics that if X state is getting money it means my state is not getting that money)

It's actually a pretty critical geopolitical issue, sense there's a real chance that China makes a move on Taiwan soon (soon being within the next 10 years), which will result in either the destruction of alot of the chip infrastructure or China with global control over chip infrastructure.

I'm kinda surprised countries like Japan and Korea aren't making moves to address this by starting their own fabs. (Maybe there are?)

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#597

Post by inglor_cz » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

freemint wrote: post #534

jvanderbot wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would it cost to set up TSMC inside US borders? One president cycle? 4 F-35s? One SLS? A nuclear submarine? According to this page, sorting by cost, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... the most expensive fab is 33 Giga$. TSMC is 17G$. pennies on the dollar in our 1-3Trillion infrastructure bill. Make america fab again. EDIT: it appears this is in the 2T infrastructure bill. https:…

> Make america fab again. America does fab. However not newest nodes at high capacity. It just doesn't take building an identical factory and hiring away engineers. There is a complete supply chain of specialist companies which produce or fix the part the part that goes into a machine that that ... . Not mentioning that those construction costs are at economies of scale of building factories. Such a thing can't be bu…

Yeah, people underestimate the complexity of chip production. It is not one fab that you need to build, it is an entire ecosystem around it.

EU has lately been thinking about localizing chip production here, but they seem to be stuck in the same fallacy: we need a huge, gleaming fab on our soil. No, that is just the tip of the iceberg, unfortunately.

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#598

Post by freemint » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:06 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #346

1e-9 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a positive feedback loop, not a negative feedback loop. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback .

It’s negative WRT the chip production rate.

Negative Vs positive is about the eigenvalue of the feed back loop not about the weighting how it affects external signals

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#599

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:08 PM UTC

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #229

dimitrios1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to a market inefficiency isn't to involve a more inefficient entity.

Then what's the solution? Seems like the government is the only entity that can intervene if market forces are counter to supply chain resilience. This is partially the justification for agricultural subsidies in the US, so clearly there is precedent.

[deleted]

Re: Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

#600

Post by KaoruAoiShiho » Thu, Aug 19, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

a9h74j wrote: post #578

doikor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the 2011 earthquake they came to the conclusion that for some hard to source parts you have to keep a big stockpile. Basically if a part can only be produced by one or two parties there is too much risk of that source going away and disrupt everything else. This also applies all the way down the chain so if you got part A that can be made by 20 contractors but if all of those contractors depend on the same sour…

Should this be called the left-pad moment of just-in-time?

Not really, Toyota handled the shortage the best and was the last to cut production. The supply disruptions simply lasted too long to be possible to compensate for.