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Chip wars: China, America and silicon supremacy
- 40acres 8y agoFull disclosure, I work for Intel. We have a fabrication plant in Chengdu, it's public knowledge that this fab is helping to manufacture products built on the latest process technology. As I've come to learn more about China's tactics when dealing with foreign companies it's become of great concern to me what this plant means for our future. I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands. In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur. EDIT: To add more information [which is all public knowledge so if you're reading this Intel folks don't track me down! :)] its a packaging / assembly plant working on CoffeLake, which is 14nm++, CPUs are NOT fabbed there as Congress forbids it. My concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly and derive IP. Also.. our packaging technology is pretty advanced so I'm concerned with even having an assembly plant there as well.
- jbay808 8y agoWhy did Intel decide to build a fab in Chengdu?
- rwmj 8y agoRules of Origin & tariffs at a guess? Sometimes you can be creative with attributing value to each subassembly such that the place where you finally package something can make it "Made in China" (which in this case might be an advantage).
- rb808 8y agoI guess nearly all laptops are made in China so it makes sense to make the CPUs nearby. Esp if cheap labor, cheap land, and low environmental standards.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- devoply 8y ago> I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur. greed and cheap labor. the exploited become the exploiter.
- solotronics 8y agoThe American government is not a single entity as much as the Chinese government is. Also, if you are a CEO in the US and your tech gets stolen by China what is the repercussion? Nothing really. If you are one of the critical companies in China and the government finds you are letting info leak out I would think there would be major problems for everyone involved.
- chrisco255 8y agoI mean, your business might go down the tubes if you let trade secrets out in the wild, while Chinese manufacturers undercut you on cost.
- markdown 8y agoAny adverse effects would be felt many quarters in the future.
- dmortin 8y agoThe US government? Isn't it Intel's problem in the first place? Don't the leaders of Intel care if their latest processor technology is copied and then used by competitors?
- 40acres 8y agoYes absolutely, and look -- this is not to say that Intel does not have strict guidelines and processes that protect information. Certain things are definitely need to know around here. However, Intel is a business and if they've calculated that the cost of doing business is worth the risk they will take the risk. The government has put restrictions on semiconductors doing certain types of manufacturing in China but I wonder if these regulations are sufficient enough. For instance, you can only manufacture CPUs in certain countries if the process is a couple of generations old. As Moore's law slow down the improvement from generation to generation will become less, are our current regulations sufficient enough to address this coming future? That's my concern.
- _cs2017_ 8y agoYou say Intel decided the risk is worth the reward. Are you suggesting that the trade-off they chose is not the right choice for the US as a country? Why? Wouldn't Intel be the one hurt the most by any IP theft?
- newnewpdro 8y agoI think it's not unusual for companies to be forced to accept such risks if their competitors have already done so and that's enabling the competitors to win. Governments can intervene to keep the playing field level, while protecting the national interests. If it's true that the US has a dominant position in this space, then it's true that the US government has an opportunity to prevent the US companies from shifting manufacturing to where it's likely to result in IP theft in the process of competing with eachother in the manufacturing costs deparment. If all the companies in the space are forced to ignore the cheaper manufacturing option, that self-destructive avenue of competition is off the table on equal terms. However there's still the threat of foreign competition undercutting on manufacturing, if they catch up in the IP department (which IP theft certainly accelerates).
- vokep 8y agoFrom people I've talked to who do manufacturing in China...if you aren't literally watching every single employee, every single moment, your IP is being stolen.
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- setquk 8y agoI’ve considered leveraging this in electronic manufacturing. Send design off to be cheaply fabricated, wait for it to appear on aliexpress as a clone with all BOM cost optimisation done free. Buy bulk lots and resell in local country. Bingo!
- moflome 8y agoI agree. Doing this now for 5G "mesh" based BTLE devices which I hope will drop dramatically in price. Working out low-cost PMIC, crystal and passive component compatibilities for US based chipsets is a bit of a regulatory issue, but the "clones" iterate so fast I expect them to have complete designs available by mid-2019 and hope to make the money on the software / data.
- setquk 8y agoInteresting. I suppose your value add could be EMC, packaging, support and infrastructure on that.
- woolvalley 8y agoThen hire another factory to clone that BOM optimized part for v2 :p
- setquk 8y agoJust wait :) If you look at the really cheap multimeters based on the DT830 design root they were originally derived from early Fluke DMMs circa 1985. Fluke hired Intersil to make the ASIC, Intersil second sourced it, the Chinese cloned it and cost optimised it, and then more Chinese guys cloned the target devices (panel meters and DMMs) and built mass production lines. Optimally they even optimised out the DIP packages as they were expensive and bonded the die straight to the PCB. Down from $500 a pop to $2.
- kevin_b_er 8y agoIntel would do well to be wary. AMD already gave away all their IP to their new CPUs to the Chinese government with the Dhyana cpus.
- gscott 8y agoAMD gave away the farm but the money (I think 300 million) saved the company. All of this new innovation from AMD certainly arises from that money. Now however China has easier access to CPU's to build new supercomputer's find find ways to nuke the USA in new novel ways.
- ethbro 8y ago> All of this new innovation from AMD certainly arises from that money. Just to be clear: Zen microarch design work started circa-2012. The USD$300m deal was circa-4/2016. It's accurate to say the capital from the deal likely helped AMD finalize, produce, and distribute Zen / Epyc. But the microarchitecture design innovation predated the cash infusion.
- CathayRe 8y ago>It's accurate to say the capital from the deal likely helped AMD finalize, produce, and distribute Zen / Epyc. It didn't, it just gave a pass / access to Alibaba and Tencent as well as other Government related project to use AMD CPU.
- ethbro 8y agoWe're not talking about the same thing. You're talking about the deal, I'm talking about what AMD did with the cash from the deal. Look at their balance sheet, and note that without the $300M infusion, the market would have been spooked by their debt levels. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/cash-flow?p=AMD https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/cash-flow?p=AMD
- mtgx 8y agoAmd also gave away the GPU farm when it made a similar deal with Intel. Both are shortsighted.
- deepVoid 8y agoFor that same reason, Intel's chips should not be trusted by other countries. It is highly likely that Intel has planted backdoor into their chips. Thus, China and other nations should foster and develop their own chip industry and abandon Intel altogether. India, Canada, Japan, Europe, Russia should all ban Intel chips.
- hungryhobo 8y agopackaging and assembly is kinda low on the value chain, where china has already developed the know how. That's probably why there's a fab there.
- princetontiger 8y agoThe US became a soft country after the Apollo moon landings. When we look back, the 50s and 60s will be seen as the height of America. Another peak occurred in the late 90s. It's downhill from here, unfortunately.
- zerohp 8y agoA packaging facility is not a fab. It doesn't really give them any advantage in reverse engineering the silicon over someone that buys the end product and de-packages the die.
- microDude 8y agoNope. When you de-package the chip you damage it, especially on small features. They have access to the die bank, which means they have perfect die. Probably, with test pads still exposed. A microscope, etcher, etester, and patience is all you need to reverse engineer.
- hakfoo 8y agoI always wondered about the latency on a successful reverse engineering of something like a modern CPU. I'd expect there's a huge validation stage involved-- flaws in the extraction process could give you a plausible looking but ultimately faulty design to work with, and you have to check and clean that up. Moreover, if you don't have exactly Intel's fab technology and oral-tradition knowledge, you probably have to retool the design to be more suited to the process you have. It might still be a boost over whatever they have to offer now, but by the time it hits the market, it would be a generation or two old.
- drharby 8y agoI can wholeheartedly believe to state of affairs as a nature of economics. Nobody bothers to quantify the risk of corporate espionage
- nickysielicki 8y agoWhen American companies cannot operate freely (in the economic sense) in China and, more recently, when Chinese companies cannot sell their products freely in America, does it really matter? They are basically isolated markets at some point.
- eloff 8y agoThis is hardly the reality, plus the world is bigger than just China and the US.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago> My concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly Would that be substantially more difficult with the finished product?
- akiselev 8y agoIn order to push the performance on high end chips, you have to improve thermal conduction between the wafers and the chip package. This usually requires some sort of material (sort of like thermal paste) that doesn't interfere with the electronics but still provides excellent thermal conductivity. You can't use metallic compounds because it would short the wafer so in practice the material usually has strong bonding properties like a glue. The smaller your feature sizes, the higher the probability that opening the chip to reverse engineer the wafer will rip up part of the silicon you're trying to see. The most interesting pieces of an integrated circuit also tend to be thermal hotspots (i.e. the Intel CPU instruction pipeline vs the cache) which are more likely to be destroyed because they use a stronger bonding material.
- userbinator 8y agoMy concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly and derive IP. The Chinese are, along with the Russians, probably at the top of the world's best reverse-engineers. You can bet they'll have already reverse-engineered it even if it wasn't made in their country.
- sfifs 8y agoThis should be a management problem - why is it a government problem? Basically you are saying that your capital structure incentivizes managers to value short term gain over long term costs and so you would like to short circuit that with government intervention. However, when a government intervenes, it will never really leave you alone :-)
- 40acres 8y agoI'm concerned that a company like Intel, makers of some of the most valuable IP in the world, decided to invest in a foreign country instead of it's own when a company like Amazon -- which has great IP but don't get me wrong the Chinese have an equivalent (Alibaba) was able to scoop up prime real estate in NYC and DC. Now Intel has a lot manufacturing based in the US, like I said Congress passed a law to make that happen. But have we looked into why we're allowing Foxconn to get tax breaks to build in "heartland" America but not Intel? An iconic American name?
- dillondoyle 8y agoI'm sure Intel could/does get tax subsidies for land/building. But I don't think that's major the driver of cost for what we're talking about here. It's cost of skilled & specialized labor, and externality costs of supply chain availability.
- warrenm 8y agoSo you think Intel should've setup shop in NYC or DC?
- thrower123 8y agoIs it really any cheaper to build things in China? There are enough broke-ass places in the US where you could open a plant and offer $9 an hour and get the cream of the crop
- fooker 8y agoCan you get ~1000 9$ an hour employees with engineering degrees though? In China and most of Asia, you easily can. While these people won't be MIT grads, you can expect significantly higher scientific temperament compared to $MiddleOfNowhere, Utah.
- RamanathanR 8y agoYou have hit the nail on the head. The reason that Silicon Valley has so many of the Chinese/Indian/Other nationalities is simply because of the volume of available "Good Enough" Engineering talent. In most of these cultures a Master's degree is almost the norm. With this in hand, the practical aspects can often be learnt in training/on-the-job. Given that much of Modern Engineering has been systematically streamlined and commoditized, you really don't need very much "Creative" and "Out-of-the-Box" thinking as much as people who can manage and contribute within the existing framework and systems.
- thrower123 8y agoI assume you can, because holy fuck, are these supposedly engineering grads that I deal with from tata and cognizent and att and others of these gawdawful out sourcing outfitz, fucking terrible. I wouldn't hire for them to mow my lawn. I can't express my distaste such companies any more without entering explicit territory.
- fooker 8y ago> I wouldn't hire for them to mow my lawn You wouldn't but enough people are, apparently, hiring them to do quite a lot of IT work nobody else would touch. Otherwise their business model wouldn't work at all.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago>>so if you're reading this Intel folks don't track me down Should have changed your name for this post that doesn't put Intel in a good light: Just by your posting history they can probably track you down. Black activist--start from there and see if you made any complaints or suggestions to intel. Plus our style of writing is more or less unique. But I agree with others, Intel management (at a certain point) may have interests that might be against the long term interests of Intel. Say, bonuses. That's the worst, but they may also make mistakes in deciding pro-cons. Lastly, say that tech is worth $25Billion to Intel, and after x years is essentially worthless. Intel gets $15Billion from China in tax breaks, and sells more than $10B to others meanwhile. So economically it's worth to Intel and China gets the tech. But it is worth to our NatSec?
- mindentropy 8y agoThe hype of China has been done by the different investment bankers who were going on an on about China in the 2000-2005 time frame. The governments are lobbied by these investment bankers.
- baybal2 8y agoQuestion, out of all places, why did Intel put plant in the middle of nowhere Chengdu?
- jnurmine 8y agoIf this is a widespread issue, I wonder why do companies insist in building/keeping fabrication facilities in China? I would guess the cost structure of chip manufacturing is heavy towards things other than personnel costs... but is that really so? Is the waste management more "flexible"? Is it the price of electricity that is cheaper? Or what is it?
- CathayRe 8y agoBecause you can't access the market without giving in / setting something up in China. Which is the whole Trade War argument about Free market, access and IP. I am not sure how long before the West learn they can expect whatever International "Standard" and "Values" to ever work in China.
- withhighprod 8y agoIf you are big names like Intel, everything is cheap. Local government could give you insane special rates(remember China has no rules, what you need is just an approval from a single local leader) And the average salary in Chengdu CITY is about $400/month ($800 in tech and they might have master degree)
- liftbigweights 8y agoI see the same comments every time a china topic is posted on HN. I wonder why? > I don't think it would be far-fetched to assume that some very protected and valuable IP has leeched through our doors and into China's hands. China has a "technology transfer policy" for foreign companies doing business in china. So if intel has a fab in china, they agreed to the technology transfer. > In all honestly I really can't fathom how the American government let this deal occur. Probably because it benefited US companies and the wealthy. If china is stealing anything, it's here in the US, not from intel who agreed to trade technology for chinese market access.
- jerf 8y ago"America has legitimate concerns about the national-security implications of being dependent on Chinese chips and vulnerable to Chinese hacking." I've lately been having this fantasy, or day dream perhaps, where China or the US declares war on the other. The world cowers in fear at the impending catastrophic conflict, yet as the hours drag on, it becomes clear that nothing is happening. It turns out that the only net effect of the declaration of war is that 10 minutes later, every piece of military equipment either country has was bricked by the other's hackers and both militaries are now more-or-less sitting on their butts, twiddling their thumbs. In which case the victory goes to Russia, I suppose.
- crazy_monkey 8y agoSomething like this happened before... Last time France fell. :(
- jamesjyu 8y agoCixin Liu (of Three Body Problem fame) has a new novel called Ball Lightning that talks about this exactly. Not a great book in terms of character development or plot, but is chock full of intriguing military + technology scenarios. Worth a read.
- notSupplied 8y agoFantastic read. The scale of the problem escalates so suddenly, I always love how ambitious the scope of his stories are.
- sfgunn 8y agoHe makes me not care about character development, the science is so titillating on its own.
- glalonde 8y agonewly translated. He wrote it 3 years before TBP
- exhilaration 8y ago
- Animats 8y agoThis is a big deal. The US already lost its consumer electronics industry. China's plan for 2025 is to have no dependence on foreign sources in certain technology areas, including semiconductors. Who will buy from Intel then? Someday Foxconn will figure out how to do without Apple in phones.
- rwmj 8y agoDoes Intel have a lead in manufacturing? Surely that was lost to TSMC or Samsung a while back.
- 40acres 8y agoThe waters are muddy because there is no standard to identify what exactly a nano-meter process entails. My personal belief is that feature size will not contribute to the absolute performance of a chip as it has in the past. Packaging technology and other features are gaining share in influence.
- Cyph0n 8y agoWhen it comes to vertical integration in the semiconductor space, Intel comes second to none. Samsung is the closest match.
- vbezhenar 8y agoWhile Apple's chips are not direct competitors to Intel's, many people think that they are very comparable now. TSMC manufactures 7nm chips and Intel struggles to manufacture 10nm. It seems that they have similar characteristics, so currently Intel does not have clear lead. We just need to wait for AMD to fully leverage 7nm chips, they are direct competitors to Intel and it will be obvious if Intel have any lead. While I don't like Intel, I really fear that they'll decide to stop progressing and will continue to use 14nm while they still can squeeze any profits. Those tiny processes require tremendous investments and it's unlikely that new players will appear there, at least old ones should survive and compete.
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y ago
- NicoJuicy 8y agoI'll repeat it again, my solution would be: Support for Made in India 2025. Greed won't disappear, but you can shift the balance to a more western friendly country. They are already destroying a lot of countries. They borrow money to them, so the Chinese can build their infrastructure. But there are almost no locals involved, so all the artificial inflation goes to China. The belt is just an excuse for colonizing the world ( or at least the harbors, strategic airports that they themselves have built, see Sri Lanka, they are the first to comply). I think a lot of those countries that built a dam with Chinese money forget that maintenance costs a lot also. Reference: FIFA football stadiums Ps. Feel free to share your concern
- KSS42 8y agoThey are adopting the USA's playbook. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit... According to Perkins, his role at Main was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects that would primarily help the richest families and local elites, rather than the poor, while making sure that these projects were contracted to U.S. companies. Later these loans would give the U.S. political influence and access to natural resources for U.S. companies India would do the same if it had the capital resources.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoThe USA playbook is only 30% of China's, they are literally bankrupting them off everything. + There is a difference, companies can have PR issues now without just paying off some key figures ( internet). Not saying that it's not possible, but it should be ( and is) harder than the pre & internet age. China hasn't got that problem, because they control their internet. And trying to control yours ( free internet through satellites)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- erikpukinskis 8y agoAfrica will have a permanent debt holiday when Wakanda IPOs itself on Ethereum
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoI've personally observed this 'war' from a couple of angles. First is in the process equipment required to fabricate the chips. China has endeavored to create its own chip equipment industry, the way that Japan did in the 80s and Korea did in the 90s. I was personally involved in development of 3 product lines by a Chinese capital equipment firm, that have been in development for 10 years. They were a customer for our system component. To kick start the effort, they paid expert, targeted process consultants from the US. To date, none of the 3 have cracked into volume shipments to the fabricators. Ten years in, both Japan and Korea had built equipment that could at least compete domestically. In Japan's case, internationally. The Chinese progress was stifled by ineffective engineering management that ultimately drove our program manager to resign. Recently, I visited Korea and was told that Chinese semiconductor companies are recruiting semiconductor process engineers from Korea, paying them 3-5x their Korean salary under 5 year contracts, effectively buying out their career. This could be an effective approach to garner the technical expertise needed, but I wonder whether it will simply repeat the outcome of the equipment effort: Experts were brought in and paid well for their knowledge, but it could not be realized due to business cultural or management style constraints. This is my personal and obviously limited experience, but in the end, fabricating semiconductors is a multidisciplinary endeavor of great complexity. Success depends equally on commitment, pragmatism and effective collaboration, as it does on technical excellence. That is the price of entry to leading edge technical achievement and I'm not sure the Chinese industrial firms are there yet.
- princetontiger 8y agoAt what point does the US just ban all Chinese visas?
- fspeech 8y agoYou need customers who use your equipment to close the product improvement cycle. Both Japan and South Korea have (or had) competitive chip manufacturers who could help their domestic suppliers improve. Chinese equipment makers don't have such luxury. Their potential fab customers are hobbled by US export control and are surviving on thin margins. So they couldn't or at least haven't been able to get into the positive feedback loop.
- halhod 8y agoHN may be interested in the longer briefing that this editorial is based on - https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the-semiconductor-industry-and-the-power-of-globalisation https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the-semiconduc...
- jshowa3 8y agoFor all the comments I see about China stealing IP, just remember, IP can be stolen anywhere, even in America. We have a couple production plants in China. I haven't seen any concrete evidence that the employees are stealing IP. And if they are, they do a poor job of reproducing it because they're almost never as good as the real thing. Not to say it doesn't happen, but I just find it humorous that a lot of buzz is around China precisely because most manufacturing is from there and not other nations. There's also a lot of claims in reports, but no hard proof. There's also no examination of the victims practices or its done very poorly. Not practicing good IP protection like obfuscation in your code, encryption, anti-tamper mechanisms which, from my experience, many American companies don't practice, is just asking for trouble. They may be doing this, but its never mentioned in news articles. Of course, given enough time and resources, most things can be cracked. However, that's no excuse to make it easy.
- ciupicri 8y agoThe last part sounds like blaming the victims.
- LMYahooTFY 8y agoPointing out something a victim can do to secure themselves isn't "blaming the victim".
- _cs2017_ 8y agoFrom a global perspective (rather than US- or China-specific), what exactly is the cost of IP theft? Obviously, the reduced incentives to do R&D (if you cannot monetize it as well, you'll invest less). That by itself could be pretty devastating. On the other hand, what are the advantages of IP theft? One that I can see is that it creates more competition. I don't know if it helps much in the long run though: if the competitors are just copying the leader, it's probably not adding any value. Any other pros and cons?
- zanny 8y agoThe more general cost is if your country ignores IP while another doesn't you have an immense competitive advantage if the country you are "stealing" from can't in some way punish you economically for it. I'm personally an IP abolitionist but can recognize that China is abusing its position here. It doesn't hurt the US nearly as much as it does Southeast Asia, India, Japan, Korea etc that by and large obey US IP law. That was in part what the TPP was meant to enshrine in more formalized, consistent, and persistent terms - the Asian nations agree to obey US IP imperialism while the US gives them advantageous trade opportunities over China. A large degree of why it was so heinous was because of how biased it was in favor of the US because of how desperately the countries surrounding China wanted a competitive edge over their ability to ignore US IP. In many ways Trumps China tariffs are giving a lot of these nations what they wanted without getting anything in return from them.
- _cs2017_ 8y agoI agree that IP theft hurts countries that don't partake in it. However, I was asking about the effect on the world as a whole. Taking some wealth from one country and giving it to another isn't directly changing the amount of wealth in the world. But some second order effects may come into play that do change the global wealth.
- pzone 8y agoThe reduced incentive for innovation from US firms hurts global wealth just as much whether the IP copycats are in the US or if they're in China.
- kappi 8y agoStory that all chinese technology is stolen is not true. They have lot of talent and hardworking folks in cutting edge technology. Vast majority of employees in US chip companies doing cutting edge technology are also Chinese. Most of US engineers chase easy money in web technology etc. Same concern was raised by Peter Theil about VC investing not in hard tech. Ycombinator is also classic example of investing tons of money in only short term tech. Most of silicon tech needs 5-7 years or even more.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoYou are Chinese? Raw guess. But the entire setup of China is made for stealing tech from companies who invest there, this doesn't mean anyone isn't hardworking or hasn't got any talent. I know Chinese are hardworking. Also, hardware needs a lot of capital in Western countries, workers are expensive. Starting for yourselve ( with software) and gradually growing is a lot "easier" if you aren't rich.
- kappi 8y agoI am not Chinese. I work in chip company and vast majority of EE engineers are Chinese. White americans may be 1-2% percentage at the junior level. It may be less than 10% overall. There are some older white americans but they all will retire soon. Like I said before, nobody to blame. Follow the easy money.
- ghettoimp 8y agoI don't know where you work, but this seems like a weirdly racist thing to say. Based on my experience, it's also complete bullshit. I work at a chip company in the US. Our (chip engineering) workforce is probably about half White Americans. The other half are predominantly Indian, with significant numbers of other Asians. (It's also almost entirely male, because 2018.) At my previous employer, also a chip company in the US, the workforce was even more heavily skewed to White Americans. Probably at least 70%. I can point to a great number of very smart, hard-working, dedicated, and capable co-workers in every one of these racial groups.
- hatergonnahate 8y agoHonestly, let's just blow the planet away. USA nuke China, China will nuke every single country around it and the boom, the planet disappeared
- doctorpangloss 8y agoWhen your industrial based depends on cheap labor, like in China, it's always possible to compete by legislating wages down. You can solve your economic woes with a stroke of a pen. But people have to live shittily. When your industrial base depends on IP, like in the US, it's very challenging to defend secrets, especially in a free society. Competing on IP alone is very risky. You have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on security. But at least I can live wherever I want, freely vote for who represents me, don't get sent to prison camps to make living space for the ethnic majority, have pretty clean air and water, aspire to treat the downtrodden humanely, treat people who aren't my blood relatives humanely, trust my social systems, travel freely, say whatever I want, and do something with my life other than engineering, making money or achieving subsistence survival. The investment in human capital, that makes American labor so expensive, makes it durably valuable regardless of technology, government or foreign relations. Wait isn't that supposed to be the tradeoffs part?
- deepnotderp 8y agoThe semiconductor industry isn't really dependent upon cheap labor
- specialist 8y agoCheap water, lax environmental regulations.
- fspeech 8y agoWhy does packaging a chip depend on cheap water? No. You put your factory there to show good faith with the Chinese government: that you're in their corner, you can be depended upon and you are willing to share some of the gains.
- Cyph0n 8y agoYou would be surprised by how much water and electricity a modern fab consumes.
- xvilka 8y agoA bit of unrelated, but since it is important for chips development posting it here. There is an initiative [1] to make FPGA/ASIC design tooling more universal and interconnected with sharing the LLVM-like low level intermediate representation (HDL), which is more powerful than Verilog or VHDL. At this point many people see FIRRTL[2][3] as a viable candidate for this position, with some enhancements. [1] https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19 https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19 [2] https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html [3] https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL https://github.com/freechipsproject/FIRRTL
- wangii 8y agoHardworking, ambitious, and honesty: you can have only two. now pick.
- known 8y agoReverse engineering may not work always When the LS 400 was disassembled for engineering analysis, Cadillac engineers concluded that the vehicle could not be built using existing GM methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS#Industrial_significance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexus_LS#Industrial_significan...