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How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

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81–90 of 257 posts

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#81
post #6

When these types of things are funded one always gets the sinking feeling that the money is just getting stolen and/or wasted by savvy insiders who know how to write grants or who know the right people. In fact, I think that's a reasonable assumption and some proof is required to show that it is not the case.

It's hard to fake a building going up.

The building is the easy part, almost trivial part.

Getting the enough ASML machines to supply a fab for an advanced process (and they have a backlog that is almost a decade long), starting up the whole complex logistical process to feed the fab (with lots of single source suppliers that are already committed to the existing fab capacity), getting all the necessary personal and skillsets started and getting the fab working, creating all the little feeder companies that are necessary around the fab, all that is hard work. It is is something that the US has largely lost most knowledge of how to do with all the outsourcing of industrial capacity.

And all this has to be done agains the upwind pressures of our service economy. Our politicians are largely lawyers, our financial sector focuses on short term returns, and our companies are rife with lawyers and MBA layers taking their cut out of the necessary investments in manufacturing and engineering. None of this is encouraging for the necessary long term slog to bring back industrial capacity, particularly something with as complex and deep logistical tail as semiconductor manufacturing.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#82
post #50

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't fabs need plentiful water? Why Arizona and Texas...?

Don't mean to alarm you but Texas is a coastal state

But Texas is also the size of the four states to its east. Georgia is a coastal state. If you pull from Brunswick, GA and send it to just outside St. Louis, that distance is covered within the single state of Texas.

That said, we don't pull sea water to supply water for industry - desalination is too costly.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#84

While I have some sympathy for the policy makers attempting to do this they do appear to be oblivious that to the outside world, especially their allies, the meta-lesson is any critical industry will eventually be onshored by the printing of hundreds of billions to price you out if necessary. This isn't a recipe for long term peaceful co-operation. It's ridiculous to criticise China on one hand, and then emulate ever…

Don't underestimate how powerful American (soft) influence is; many Taiwanese happily support these policies.

But yes; Taiwan will end up losing on two ends: Massive tech transfer to the US. And a loss of access to its biggest market - mainland China.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#85
post #50

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't fabs need plentiful water? Why Arizona and Texas...?

Fabs need ultra pure water and it's cheaper to recycle the water they use than rely on city water supplies. So they need a ton of water initially but once they're up and running they don't need much water after that. Because of this, even a desert environment like Arizona is fine.

What about the vast energy required by fabs? Do you have a special tax to reinvest and maintain the grid or do they pay the same rates as a normal Arizona grocery store? Texas is hardly a paragon of a stable grid given the blackouts the past few years.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#86

America's basic socioeconomic structual model is highly flawed and any company wanting to do manufacturing here will see obvious disadvantages compared to Europe or Asia. 1) Employers are responsible for employee health coverage, inflating employee costs by a significant degree. The rationale for this model among the investor class is that it makes employees dependent on their employer and limits the power of unions,…

On point 1, it would be interesting to see the per employee costs both in taxes and payrolls/benefits between mostly identical companies in the US and somewhere like Sweden. I imagine it might be higher in Sweden.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#87
post #26

While I have some sympathy for the policy makers attempting to do this they do appear to be oblivious that to the outside world, especially their allies, the meta-lesson is any critical industry will eventually be onshored by the printing of hundreds of billions to price you out if necessary. This isn't a recipe for long term peaceful co-operation. It's ridiculous to criticise China on one hand, and then emulate ever…

Will you explain what “emulate every move they’ve made ten/twenty years later” means? I don’t understand this comment.

Breach of WTO rules, free trade principles, market distorting industrial policies.

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#88
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is only done in China, Japan, the United States, Germany, and Italy. Since some of the newer semiconductors are shaped at 99.9999999999% (literally, 10 9s) pure, only a few places in the world can do the purification. China, and only China, can do 99.9999999 (Seven 9s) at scale, which is good enough for solar panels.

Sorry, let me clarify: I'm assuming that the requirements are so stringent that all quartz ore needs to be purified. So I'm wondering how much the initial ore purity really matters.

The process is more complex and the energy more intense the more 9’s you need, because the contaminates in quartz are different depending on where it was mined. This complexity is why there’s only one place in the world that can do it at solar panel demand scale — and that’s because China dumped a ton of money into the process and doesn’t have strict pollution laws. If you can start with purer quartz, you’re way ahead of reaching scalable refinement.

Here's a great video on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIRfWyyOFPg

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#89
post #17

The world’s largest deposit of ultra pure quartz, which is needed for the very high end processors, is in North Carolina. The renaissance is real, or is about to be.

What is quartz used for beyond oscillators?

Quartz = SiO2 --> Silicon and Oxygen QED

Re: How real is America’s chipmaking renaissance?

#90

While I have some sympathy for the policy makers attempting to do this they do appear to be oblivious that to the outside world, especially their allies, the meta-lesson is any critical industry will eventually be onshored by the printing of hundreds of billions to price you out if necessary. This isn't a recipe for long term peaceful co-operation. It's ridiculous to criticise China on one hand, and then emulate ever…

Don't underestimate how powerful American (soft) influence is; many Taiwanese happily support these policies. But yes; Taiwan will end up losing on two ends: Massive tech transfer to the US. And a loss of access to its biggest market - mainland China.

I mean do you not have to hedge again china just landing troops on taiwan? I think the pandemic chip shortages threw into sharp relief that we are totally dependent on imports (and for higher end chips on taiwanese imports almost exclusively). If china decides to blockage or invade Taiwan it would be cataclysmic.
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