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That's what happens when you centralize silicon production to a few players. Integrated circuits are a requirement for modern life. Every country should have it
by hda2 6y ago
That's what happens when you centralize silicon production to a few players. Integrated circuits are a requirement for modern life. Every country should have its own fab, even if not competitive, to cover its own needs during shortages like these. What if the shortage was longer and more severe? Are people living in smaller countries willing to go without electronics?
I hope people will learn from this.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago> Are people living in smaller countries willing to go without electronics? Are people living in smaller countries able to afford redundant fabs?
- tehjoker 6y agoMaybe not, but simply having workable fabs producing reasonable quality on all continents from different governments / companies would go a long way.
- Laforet 6y agoSmaller fabs do exist, but they don't enjoy economies of scale unless they could project very strong demand down the road. Nobody invests in such a venture guaranteed to lose a lot of money. Another issue more pertinent to automotive manufacturing is certification. For example, car makers once had to wait almost a year for Renesas to rebuild their facilities in Naka following the 2011 earthquake despite the company operating fabs in multiple countries. The latter were perfectly capable of producing the product in demand but the cost of certification is so prohibitive that moving production elsewhere was never brought up as an option.
- cma 6y agoArticle say it is wafer and substrate limited, how would fabs in more countries help?
- eunos 6y agoFabrications are capital intensive yet the returns are not high. Something that many VCs/countries quite abhor. Also, mass sanctions last year doesn't help.
- someperson 6y agoFunny because VC was invented to raise money for semiconductor fabs
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoYeah, but 20 or so years ago they realized that luring new grads with foosball tables and free soda to work on getting people to click on ads is a faster and easier way to make money than making chips which is a slow, capital intensive business where you need to think long term and respect gray beards, so there you go.
- harperlee 6y agoI wonder which kinds of chips would result from minimizing capex instead of transistor size. There are some people targeting DIY garage fabs but from what I know they basically target old processes and old chips; I wonder if, once that takes speed, current knowledge, techniques and material availability, that differ from the 70s, will show some proper DIY innovation...
- dehrmann 6y agoI bet it's still cheaper to roll the dice at a 1 in 50 chance capacity is down 20% for a year than overbuild fabs. They're semiconductors, not staple foods.
- dehrmann 6y ago> Every country should have its own X...to cover its own needs during shortages like these This line of thinking gets very impractical very quickly. It's also a recipe for war because interdependence makes countries play well together.
- berkes 6y agoWhile your idea is good, the cause and effect is wrong. Countries don't go to war because they are independent. Countries do have incentive to maintain peace when they are dependent. Two very different things.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> ...interdependence makes countries play well together. This line of thinking led directly to WWI.
- sofixa 6y agoNot really. People thought that countries were too interdependent to wage war, but they were wrong and that had nothing to do with the myriad of reasons for the war ( rivalries, historic and current, Russian development (which put Germany waging war on them on a timeline), Austria-Hungary falling apart and trying to compensate, the UK being skeptical of Germany, France wanting revenge, etc etc etc etc)
- FooBarWidget 6y agoThis is not what led to WW1. It merely failed to prevent WW1.
- Dylan16807 6y agoFabs already run 24/7. Decentralizing them across more countries wouldn't automatically give you any spare capacity. As far as I see it, we need more capacity, and for a situation like this it wouldn't matter if that extra capacity was in 50 different countries or if it was all in a 50 km radius in Taiwan.
- progre 6y agoIt would be nice if silicon required to run critical infrastructure is manufacured localy or at least not by an opponant in a (cold or economic) war. IPhones are pretty low on my list of concerns but I would like to have working powerplants, power distribution and communications.
- samus 6y agoPowerplants, power distribution and other industrial tasks outside of IT don't require latest-generation parts. There are dozens of fabs in many countries that make ICs on older nodes for these applications. Cheap, proven and quite ubiquitous. Anyways, anything safety-critical would likely require re-certification when ported to newer hardware. Edit: just realized that also supply of these ICs stalled. Right now, it's hard to see whether this supply shortages are just due to temporarily increased demand or not. If the latter is the case, it is still easier and cheaper to set up fabs for older nodes.
- progre 6y agoI agree but I worry that some of this capacity will go away because it's not profitable enough. I also worry that although the core functionality of, say a water treatment plant, may run on quite old an easily sourced hardware (most likely Siemens PLC:s where I live) some of the monitoring and coordination stuff is dependent on latest gen hardware.
- samcheng 6y agoAt least Taiwan isn't a country in any kind of war (cold or hot) with the west. They are, however, in a cold war with China. The current technical situation does make peaceful cross-strait relations critical to global technology, however. A hot war between China and Taiwan would send the silicon state-of-the-art backwards by quite a bit, as would any trade embargo post-annexation if China somehow accomplished that peacefully. Taiwan's silicon fab prowess is a pretty potent strategic weapon against a much larger adversary!