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Trump and Chip Makers Including Intel Seek Semiconductor Self-Sufficiency
- busymom0 6y agoArchive for anyone stuck with paywall: https://archive.is/4Xwma https://archive.is/4Xwma
- thoughtsimple 6y ago403 Forbidden. Oh well.
- busymom0 6y agoAre you sure? Seems to work fine for me right now.
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoBringing back manufacturing to the US will be extremely hard. 1) US citizens want top dollar for their labor and the lowest price for the product. 2 opposing forces. 2) The US has lost the experienced labor force that's needed 3) Regulations make it very expensive to start and maintain a factory. 4) The median age in the US is over 38 yrs old. Way past the education and career-building ages. 5) The US has started to limit immigration so importing the talent will not happen. 6) Capitalism rules in the US. And Capitalism says build it at the lowest price possible. Which rules out the US. 7) As the US population ages, more of the country's resources will be focused on health care and the care of the elderly and less on creating a manufacturing workforce. 8) Robotics is not always the cheapest form of manufacturing. Building it outside US will still have its advantages. It's not impossible but it will take a few generations and a consistent US policy to do it.
- mydongle 6y agoIt seems so unsustainable to avoid training your own people and instead exporting these valuable skills to people in other countries which are not guaranteed to be friendly with us forever.
- magicsmoke 6y agoWhat happens when policy makers learn about comparative advantage in undergraduate economics but don't realize it only illustrates a snapshot in time.
- wbl 6y agoI assure you California is not losing against France in winemaking. The China shock was a one-time event that enriched billions of poor people who will be the world's consumers.
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoTrue, but that's been the argument against outsourcing manufacturing for 40+ years. Yet, it is still being done. I think the best the US can do, right now, is to import from countries where it has some clout and can better control manufacturing. It's crazy to think that a big chunk of your products are being manufactured in China, a country that is competing against you.
- Barrin92 6y ago>True, but that's been the argument against outsourcing manufacturing for 40+ years. Yet, it is still being done. And it's generally made the world a better place. Even current conflicts don't even remotely compare to the Cold War. Some historical perspective may be needed but the world is better off if it engages in trade and specialisation. Nobody gains from the US retreating into a new era of isolation.
- remarkEon 6y agoMissing the /s? The entire world now has single points of failure because of this kind of specialization. Sure, it makes certain classes lots of money but it forces others into poverty and when bad things happen suddenly your supply for critical goods is cut off. To say nothing of the geopolitical consequences here, where letting so much of high tech manufacturing accrue in one country presents tremendous risk if anything goes sideways.
- magicsmoke 6y agoThe article is about semiconductor manufacturing. That's not a labor intensive manufacturing industry where the US workforce has a disadvantage in.
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoThat's not necessarily correct. True the US is a top manufacturer but a lot of key personnel are imported from other countries since they can't be found in the US. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Category.aspx?T=IN https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Category.as...
- jcranmer 6y agoIf you look at the data, you'll notice that the dominating H1-B visa category is some variation on the IT workers. You'll also notice that many of the largest companies are Indian offshoring companies. So the number of visas there aren't reflective so much of a skills shortage in the US as a desire to hire foreign people for cheaper.
- wbl 6y ago9) a competitive fab is a massive capital investment
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoHighly polluting too
- FlyMoreRockets 6y agoWhat pollutants does a fab emit? I worked at an Intel fab a few decades ago, and didn't note significant emissions. Maybe I missed something.
- erik_seaberg 6y agoThe way I would put it is, chip fab processes use toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and waste that must be monitored, because historically they just let it leak or dumped it and left Superfund sites in their wake. Probably not as bad as mining but it tends to happen in more populated areas … https://cleanair.camfil.us/2017/11/21/toxic-danger-silicon-valley-superfund-sites/ https://cleanair.camfil.us/2017/11/21/toxic-danger-silicon-v...
- kken 6y agoThis is something that happened in the 70ies. The industry has come a long way since then.
- DXA9zE 6y agoI don't know if it was mentioned in the article but TSMC also has some US-based development under aegis of WaferTech.
- klyrs 6y ago> 4) The median age in the US is over 38 yrs old. Way past the education and career-building ages. I'm 39 and generally dissatisfied with the work I'm qualified to do, and I might need to work another 30 years at the rate we're going (fml). I'd jump on a government grant for training in an industry with promised growth at this point.
- jmeister 6y agoInteresting. Would you mind sharing what industry you work in now please? Also, how’d you feel about working with colleagues who are far younger, say early 20s, just graduated from college? (No snark, genuine curiosity)
- jcranmer 6y ago> 3) Regulations make it very expensive to start and maintain a factory. If we're talking about semiconductor fabrication, I'd be surprised if the regulatory costs were more than a few million dollars... for a factory that will cost a few billion dollars.
- forgot_again 6y ago1) There are many ways to lower costs to make US chips competitive. 2) That's simply false. 3) Regulations can be dealt with. This current administration seems quite willing to do away with them. 4) The median age in China is 38 years too. This is an irrelevant point. 5) Rare talent needed for chip manufacturing will still be able to come in even with updated immigration rules. 6) See point 1. Also things are more complicated than that. 7) This makes no sense. 8) Subsidies and advanced automation will help here.
- magicsmoke 6y agoBased on the article, it looks like only TSMC and Samsung can make 10nm chips as a service for other companies, and despite also being able to make 10nm chips Intel hasn't opened their fabs to contract work. Anyone know why this is? In the article it looks like Intel's spokesperson said they were willing to start offering their 10nm process as a service with fabs in the US, but I'm wondering why Intel didn't offer a foundry service earlier.
- my123 6y agoThey did, see the Intel Custom Foundry history. The scheme failed when 10nm itself failed, making Intel partners be in a bad situation and regretting having chosen ICF in the first place.
- con 6y agoIf you are on an iOS/iPad OS device, you can use my Shortcut to circumvent the paywall: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/11a5ce44a9dc44e6b525b22ca62ee286 https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/11a5ce44a9dc44e6b525b22ca62... It clears the cookies of the current page, takes the URL and uses Google to redirect you back to that URL, causing the page to assume that you clicked on a search result and are a first time visitor.
- KarlKemp 6y agoI kinda prefer well-balanced mutual dependency. This current wave of sinophobia is seriously worrying. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, the Soviet Republic and NATO countries had significant trade relations, providing not just economic benefits but a stabilising mechanism identical to MAD in principle, but with far less actual MADness in a worst case. China's ascent is going to happen. And contrary to this relentless US campaign to escalate, I cannot even come up with what exactly the US considers China's agression? Is all this talk of everything up to and including war seriously proportional to the thread that is... China being chosen to build some 5G infrastructure? The British saw their Empire crumble after investing hundreds of thousands of lives and evenly distributing an entire Island's worth of forest in hull-shaped carcasses at the bottom of the world's seas. For that, they were left with nothing but a decent long drink and three cricket teams to lose against. Luckily, they have something not entirely unlike a deep-seated sense for civility and took it with some humour and only minor collective psychosis. Is the end of the American Empire going to be a Republican Id in a total meltdown of nationalistic rage set off by this seemingly unavoidable narcissistic injury that China's ascend represents? The prospect of America with diminished economic and cultural power, completely losing the optimism, openness, and sense of responsibility that carried it through the 20th "American" century, and retaining only the brute power of its oversized military as the only remaining source of agency is, frankly, terrifying.
- forgot_again 6y agoRespectfully, there are a great many things wrong with the opinions in this post. I'll try to address them all with as few words as possible. Chip self reliance is a good thing from a general geo-political standpoint, regardless of China. China's aggression manifests in many covert operations, mainly information warfare. The ruling CCP is diametrically opposed to most Western political and social values and itself feels very threatened by democracy and personal liberty. As such it is working very hard to destabilize the West and expand it's hard and soft power to export its authoritarian model around the world. The end of the American "empire" is hardly guaranteed to happen any time soon, and while some weak willed and naive pseudo-intellectuals may be willing or even eager to roll over and let it die, many others with clear eyes recognize the benefits of your culture and country having power. With power comes wealth. With power comes pride. With power comes influence. And with enough power comes global stability, which is what the US currently provides. Why would anyone in their right mind willingly give up such power? No, we will do everything we can to maintain it because it absolutely has real value that benefits all Americans. Fundamental values, lives, wealth and influence are all at stake here. Those who do not recognize or do not care are fools. Let us hope they never get a hold of power.
- duxup 6y agoI'd be curious how this plays out economiclly. How do they change the economic playing field that lead to semiconductor production elsewhere?
- busymom0 6y agoI remember reading that Apple is switching to making their own chips next year on their MacBooks too. Wonder how that would impact the chip market.
- redisman 6y agoIf they’re doing it next year they’re definitely not doing it in the US
- Exmoor 6y agoSwitching to manufacturing their own chips or using their own chips in Macs? The later has been a rumor for many years now and could happen, although they've likely used it to leverage Intel into better pricing. Manufacturing their own chips requires billions and billions of dollars and years of work building a fabrication plant and would not be something they'd be able to do under the radar.
- PhantomGremlin 6y agoArticle complains about "reliance on Asia" but neglects to mention a giant elephant of a problem. PACKAGING I had to shout it! Sorry, HN guidelines. Intel makes chips in USA fabs, then sends them abroad, mostly to Asia, to be packaged. Same for anyone else making chips in the USA. I'm retired now but I highly doubt this has changed recently. It's been going on since the 1970s if not earlier. There are probably a few chips made for the US military that are packaged domestically. But over 99% are sent overseas. Edit: To take it further, I bet that nowadays over 90% of everything related to electronics manufacturing has moved overseas. It used to be that you could fabricate PCBs domestically. You could have them stuffed with chips and soldered domestically. But now very little volume capability exists for that here. It's all "offshore", because MBAs decided that would be cheaper.