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Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%

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

#631

Post by SavantIdiot »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #628
SavantIdiot wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason fabs are spread out is capitalism: if you manufacture the part in the country, you don't pay import taxes (e.g., Intel's Ireland fab debacle). Another part is lax environmental laws. Hillsboro Oregon is embroiled in a suit with Intel where Intel dumped 100x the fluorine into the air that they claimed when D1X was first pitched. Don't need to worry about that stuff in Asia (for now). Also, lead time…

Speaking opinion: in the long term, it is mostly rich people trying to get richer that caused this And the chips in question exist in the first place because...?

Because Gordon Moore, Andy Grove and Robert Noyce wanted to improve integrated circuits to do amazing things with technology. Not rape the planet to become trillionaires. You realize there are other motivations in the world for doing things, other than just money, right? Perhaps you don't based on your reply.

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

#632

Post by vvarren »

throw0101a wrote: post #173
vvarren wrote: post #2

This so-called “transitory inflation” is really starting to seem like it will parlay into full blown inflation.

> This so-called “transitory inflation” is really starting to seem like it will parlay into full blown inflation. A lot of the people screaming about inflation were doing so using the argument that there's too much spending and the "excess" money supply will cause the US to turn into Zimbabwe ( Fed printers go brrrrrr ): demand-pull inflation. The price fluctuations caused pandemic-related supply issues (cost-push in…

My argument doesn’t hinge on the excess spending. Rather, the increase of costs due to a labor shortage, chip shortage, construction materials shortage, etc. is having a compounding effect across the whole economy.

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

#633

Post by dylan604 »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #527
dylan604 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the manufacture of tomahawks is pretty much on stand-by for the order to increase production. Civic pride and what not. Totally has nothing to do with the stock price.

How many subcomponents do they have on hand, especially cpus? I bet not many.

So the opening move would be to invade a non-hostile country to ensure you have all of the chips! Then once that is secure, you can then target the country you actually want to have hostilities with. I can see no flaws with this plan. Execute!

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

#634

Post by namelessoracle »

shadowgovt wrote: post #389
Scoundreller wrote: post #328

Many countries have a funny concept of strategic industries. In mine, dairy is a strategic industry that is coddled by government so that we can have a local source. But every country thinks that so there’s foes and allies that can supply us UHT or powder milk on a moment’s notice. And if our milk supply disappeared tomorrow, everyone over 1y could substitute with 10000000 different things for nutrition. Cars are ano…

> 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.

I am skeptical that a modern automobile factory could be converted to make tanks or airplanes at any kind of scale using current designs.

The stuff is so specialized and automated now that even the workers probably wouldn't have much translatable knowledge as WW2 days. You would i guess have a supply of welders to lean on at least that would ramp up faster than someone fresh.

But I doubt a factory that makes modern cars can handle making M1 Abrams without so much additional tooling and extra equipment that you are halfway to making a new factory anyways. (they could probably handle making light vehicles like cars and bikes at least)

Maybe if we had mass production style designs that were built purpose first to get cranked out. But we don't, and there isn't profit in that for the Military Industrial Complex.

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

#635

Post by Causality1 »

bumby wrote: post #622
Causality1 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cratering agricultural prices so margins are so thin small farmers are driven out of business in favor of huge conglomerates, mind-boggling levels of food wastage on the order of billions of pounds sitting in warehouses until they rot. https://reason.com/2019/03/02/thanks-to-decades-of-governmen...

I agree, those are all blowback of subsidies. But they are also side effects of food abundance. The downsides of food shortage seems much worse. Maybe there’s an argument that we’ve moved passed the era of food scarcity when those policies were enacted and they should be modified. But I think a blanket claim that food subsidies are an inherent bad policy misses their point.

That blanket claim was never made. The made claim was that the ineptitude and mishandling of agricultural subsidies is reason to reconsider calling for government involvement in the chip shortage.

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

#636

Post by bradknowles »

cogman10 wrote: post #541
blueblisters wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US has a bunch of fab engineers as well. The problem isn't having the engineers, it's having the actual higher tech fabs.

With respect, we don’t have that many fab engineers any more. At least, not of that quality. And most of the ones we do have are already locked up by other employers, like Intel, IBM, and the other companies that still have some fabs here in the US.

Sure, we can do small scale cutting edge prototype fabs, but the few production fabs we have here are not TSMC quality (go ask Intel), and they are already fully allocated. Many of those might not exist here in the country at all, if it weren’t for the requirements from the US military and certain other classified customers to have certain types of chips made here domestically.

We used to have a lot more fab engineers here in the US, but we outsourced those jobs and sent them overseas. And the people who used to do that work have moved on to other careers, or retired.

And the reason why Silicon Valley has so many EPA disaster area cleanup sites is because of the fabs(and related businesses) that used to be endemic in that part of the country. Fabs aren’t clean businesses to run. You’re going to have to find a place where you can run those dirty kinds of businesses, and that’s either going to be extraordinarily expensive, or even impossible, due to legal restrictions on the use of toxic chemicals, etc….

There’s a reason why those fabs are overseas. And all those reasons are why it’s going to be extraordinarily hard for us to pull that work back. There’s a reason why Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have both said “those jobs aren’t coming back”.

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

#637

Post by bradknowles »

cma wrote: post #503
jvanderbot wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just subsidize it. I'm not asking for the Fab Czar, I'm asking for the NSF, DARPA, and national subsidies for it. Accelerated permitting, tax breaks, tarif support, state vs national investments, accelerated green cards for key personnel, and price breaks for a "buy US Chips" initiative for the first 5 years until things get serious and exports ramp up. I'm spitballing over morning coffee, but come on, this seems obv…

EUV LLC was already heavily funded by DARPA in the 90s and is why we are able to have export restrictions on ASML machines used by TSMC for the latest EUV nodes etc.

And people seem to be forgetting that ASML is a Dutch company. It’s the worlds leading producer of the chip lithography equipment, and the other quality companies in this space are in Japan.

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

#638

Post by vondur »

jvanderbot wrote: post #417
Scoundreller wrote: post #328

Many countries have a funny concept of strategic industries. In mine, dairy is a strategic industry that is coddled by government so that we can have a local source. But every country thinks that so there’s foes and allies that can supply us UHT or powder milk on a moment’s notice. And if our milk supply disappeared tomorrow, everyone over 1y could substitute with 10000000 different things for nutrition. Cars are ano…

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:…

Heck, didn't Apple finance expansion of TSMC so Apple could ensure that they received priority when ordering chips?

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

#639

Post by bradknowles »

cronix wrote: post #489
Kye wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't TSMC working on expanding into the US?

Yes, but from what I understand, it won't be the most advanced plant making the smallest feature sizes, so it's not like Apple is going to be utilizing that plant (maybe for ancillary chips, but not main processor). Understandably, TSMC keeps a tight reign on their top-tier production methods, which is their reason for being #1. It's also 3 years away from opening in AZ (2024). Then they have to fine tune the equipme…

And the machines they’re going to be running take years to build. And they have to be built custom for each site. Not just for each site, but also each location within the site. Just moving a machine a couple of feet can cause massive delays as they have to effectively rebuild the machine for the new location.

ASML has engineers who go out and spend months or a year or more, just taking various measurements of the location inside the building at the site where the machine will be operating. Then those engineers go back to Eindhoven to oversee the building of that machine from the ground up, and run through proving cycles. Then the whole thing has to be taken apart and shipped and then rebuilt at the site. And then there are months afterwards as the team does further work and testing before they can finally use that machine for production purposes.

The Saturn V rocket was much easier to build and move. Nothing the rocket industry has can compare to the difficulty of building and moving these machines.

Disclaimer: I worked as a consultant at ASML for several months, helping them to rebuild their Unix infrastructure systems that they used to support the engineers who did all that design and build work.

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

#640

Post by bradknowles »

namelessoracle wrote: post #596
Johnny555 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understo…

Note that Samsung is frequently considered to be the second best chip fabrication company in the world, behind TSMC. That’s part of why Samsung is the single biggest supplier of technology to Apple.

Canon is the other major vendor of chip lithography equipment, but I don’t know where their EUV processes are, or what the major chip manufacturing companies are in Japan that they would be sourcing for.

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