4 ms·
It 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 ar
by progre 6y ago
It 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!