Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
ukdefencejournal.org.uk
Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
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Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#2Wasn't the last British owned semiconductor factory in the UK sold to Chinese investors within the last year it so.
The last steel furnace closing too?
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#3Smart to buy a preexisting fab. From what I understand via from various blogs and YouTube research, building a Feb even if your not doing cutting edge tech like tsmc, say going with an openpdk, still requires that special infrastructure. You need seismic dampening for the fab and to be located in a low activity region preferably, you need cheap water that can be refines, you need affordable electricity, and then supporting infrastructure to get the chemicals, the water, the machines delivered. Doing all of this isn't cheap and I'd bet is a lot of paperwork.
Imagine going to some rural area and trying to build a fab, chances are the town has no clue what your impact or needs are and you would be spending lots of money to basically speed up development of the area.
Side not to Semiconductors fab, where do you even buy one. Sure you can buy talent or machinery and then hire engineers to help get everything working, but if you wanted to for some reason buy a fan that already exists, say just the fab location and the equipment, how do you know what company to approach that might even consider selling. Who can even afford these purchases except massive fortune 500 company's breaking a piggy bank, or some massive credit institution, which I doubt would even do this because it would probably be a massive loan to any buyer. Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#4> The acquisition is expected to secure up to 100 skilled jobs in the North East and safeguard a critical part of the UK’s defence infrastructure.
The “North East” in the context of the UK and “the North East of England” are not interchangeable.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#5What lith node is that?
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#6Wasn't the last British owned semiconductor factory in the UK sold to Chinese investors within the last year it so. The last steel furnace closing too?
The last of the steel industry is Indian/Chinese owned and is in the process of closing down [1].
There’s actually 23 semiconductor fabs in the UK, presumably with a diversity of owners [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/10/bri...
[2] tech uk report: https://pixl8-cloud-techuk.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod/p...
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#7Smart to buy a preexisting fab. From what I understand via from various blogs and YouTube research, building a Feb even if your not doing cutting edge tech like tsmc, say going with an openpdk, still requires that special infrastructure. You need seismic dampening for the fab and to be located in a low activity region preferably, you need cheap water that can be refines, you need affordable electricity, and then supp…
> Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party
Governments are happy to subsidise fabs, and VCs are even happier to invest in AI flavoured semiconductors if you can market it that way.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#8> The acquisition is expected to secure up to 100 skilled jobs in the North East and safeguard a critical part of the UK’s defence infrastructure. The “North East” in the context of the UK and “the North East of England” are not interchangeable.
It makes no sense but it’s common parlance. It’s like “Northern Rivers” in Australia meaning “an area on the east coast south of Queensland”. Similarly “The North East” rarely means an area containing Aberdeen, which would make more sense.
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#9> The acquisition is expected to secure up to 100 skilled jobs in the North East and safeguard a critical part of the UK’s defence infrastructure. The “North East” in the context of the UK and “the North East of England” are not interchangeable.
I'd love to know more about what you mean by that -- is it that the North East of England (which this factory is certainly in, it being in County Durham) is not the same as the North East of the UK (which I guess would be Aberdeen)? Or is there more to it than that?
Re: Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes
#10Seems like it was previously owned by Coherent, like some kind of III-V (specifically GaAs mentioned) photonics processes there in the past. This kind of technology is typically quite useful for lasers, LEDs, or potentially image sensors as well. Many LIDAR sensors and even light sources can notably depend on III-V semiconductor sensors. Also widely used by the telecom industry.
Outside photonics definitely useful for high speed electronics, but that would probably take more process development to get going.