Isn't it not how market works, by paying good price and allowing fabs to compete for it?
Anyone care to share why downvoting?
Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's much more effective at extremely high frequencies used in compact radars, like the kind used on fighter jets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#GaAs_advantag...
Yea fo sho', and it was the Cray 3 supercomputer actually based on gallium arsenide at the time, meaning faaasssttt clock rates, about 6x faster than compeititors in terms of Hz. So that would be something like a 50 ghz processor today, wild
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Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea fo sho', and it was the Cray 3 supercomputer actually based on gallium arsenide at the time, meaning faaasssttt clock rates, about 6x faster than compeititors in terms of Hz. So that would be something like a 50 ghz processor today, wild
My phone is faster.
Your phone operates roughly 10x slower in terms of Hz.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#84It’s hardly gonna be mass production with 100 staff, hardly worth mentioning. I think Motorola had a fab in the South West once upon a time. And Inmos in Newport in the South East.
Newport is in South Wales.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand it, Britain will no longer be able to produce steel from iron ore, only from scrap. Which doesn’t sound good strategically.
It actually makes sense strategically. Britain already has more steel than it will likely ever need, in fact it's one of the world's major exporters of scrap metals. But it depends on imports for iron ore. Why import iron ore (and coking coal, for that matter) when the resource you need to make better, more valuable steels more efficiently is already here?
Because it's questionable whether that's even possible.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
My phone is faster.
Your phone operates roughly 10x slower in terms of Hz.
According to page 10, the Cray 3's clock speed was 500 MHz: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Phones beat that by a factor of x2-x4.
And has 1-16 processors of 1 gigaflop each; depending on how much precision you want, a phone can beat that by a factor of just over x2000.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quantum sensors rely on very precise control of doping conditions. Also these kinds of alloys are used in photonics computing, which is used to interact with qubits. Sounds like that’s what they’re talking about here.
sure, photonics could make sense. what do you mean by 'quantum sensors'? are there any sensors which are not quantum?
In the sense in that literally everything in the world is quantum, sure. But no, I mean sensors which derive their input channel from explicitly quantum effects. Gravometers, magnometers, atomic clocks, etc. are often quantum sensors.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
sure, it's totally possible that the advantages of photonics or optoelectronics could win out, and iii–v semiconductors are pretty important for optoelectronics, though not for pure photonic systems like second-harmonic generation. sometimes people even use gaas for that, especially historically what are iii–v based squid qubits? google scholar is not helpful except for finding https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf…
brain fart on my end, you're definitely correct that SQUIDS are not something demonstrated quite yet, I should have said Josephson junction, but even that seems more niche than I had thought when I wrote the comment.
your comment oscillates between incorrect and incoherent. squids have been demonstrated for decades (i didn't assert they hadn't been) and are made of josephson junctions, whose nicheness is not at issue in this discussion. i hope you get better because you clearly were not well when you wrote this
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It actually makes sense strategically. Britain already has more steel than it will likely ever need, in fact it's one of the world's major exporters of scrap metals. But it depends on imports for iron ore. Why import iron ore (and coking coal, for that matter) when the resource you need to make better, more valuable steels more efficiently is already here?
Because it's questionable whether that's even possible.
Of course it is possible! Around 25% of the world's steel is already produced by electric arc furnaces. 100% in some countries, and over 70% in the USA.
The UK exports 7-8 million tonnes of scrap steel every year, while producing about 5 million tonnes in blast furnaces. There's more than enough feedstock to replace all the UK blast furnace steel production with EAFs and still have some left over.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most likely reason for war is to move the competition with China onto a military footing rather than an economic one. The US would win the first, and that result would help the second. If you’re seeing western powers gear up for war, it might be to secure their economic future rather than a just intervention
So they would start a war and kill people for economy's sake? In this case what make them any different from any other war criminals?
I think that’s the point. I’m old enough to remember Bush and Blair wanting UN support for Iraq but ditched the idea when they wouldn’t get it. And young enough that my parent’s generation have never seen a war and so don’t remember why the UN was created in the first place. We live in dangerous times with very poor leaders and politics