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The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. But you can't just 'build a fab' can you? Thats the point. You need a shipment of ASML's mag

The government would be better off just building a fab themselves. But you can't just 'build a fab' can you? Thats the point. You need a shipment of ASML's magic EUV machines and a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills for running a large cutting edge fab.

mkr-hn 6y ago
You only need those for the latest and greatest. A lot of options open up if the priority is any decently fast processor over the latest. Multi-CPU systems fell out of favor in the consumer space because single CPUs got so fast with these processes, but multiple CPUs with an older process is fine in this scenario.
- elihu 6y ago
  ...or just be content with a slower chip.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills In a WWII scenario, how long does it take to rapidly retrain a bunch of people with these skills. We have no shortage bunch of brilliant, quantitatively minded people trading derivatives and writing ML models to recommend TV shows. In a total war scenario, I assume most would be drafted for the war effort. Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- incrudible 6y ago
  > Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two. We have a chip shortage going on for months now, if all it took was two months and a bunch of smart people, those billions of dollars in chip orders would've made it happen. That tells me it has to be a bit more complex than you think.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    Has any major organization started or entered the semiconductor fab space in the past year? From speaking with industry analysts, my understanding is we could spin up additional capacity. The issue is that most everyone fears the shortage will be over after the Covid supply chain disruptions, and therefore any new investments will not recoup their necessarily long payback periods. This is a very different calculus than a WW2 type scenario. Fully mobilized, the government would almost certainly pay up for microchip capacity today, regardless of the long-term payback residual. If there was evidence of deep-pocketed firms trying and failing to get into semiconductor fab in 2020, I'd change my opinion. Like if Google or Amazon were trying to open their own fab plants, but were failing, then I might suspect that a WW2 fully mobilized war effort would run into difficulties. But as far as I can tell, the issue is that nobody wants to jump into the fab business, regardless of the temporarily higher profits over the next 2-4 quarters.
    - baq 6y ago
      A 10nm/7nm fab costs $10B and takes years to build, assuming you've got a process which works - developing that from scratch will take you a decade before you can even design the fab. You could compare the enterprise to a smaller scale NASA.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of <100nm process node manufacturing. We had many brilliant minds working on these problems for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money over these decades to achieve each milestone of development. Now each of these firms (and each of their suppliers) has trade secrets that go deep, and barring some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds in any less than the time it already took to discover and develop them in the first place. There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab tech requires a ton of downstream tech: the fab machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts were developed and manufactured... and the machines that were required there as well (repeat...). Also the raw materials, especially rare earth minerals.
- jjk166 6y ago
  It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come across steps that just take time.
majormajor 6y ago
If you think there's a scenario that justifies it in 10 years, you start today. In our quest for ever-more-just-in-time-efficiency we've forgotten that it doesn't work for certain things.
samus 6y ago
Military-grade equipment and ammunition don't require cutting-edge manufacturing nodes. There are fabs for older nodes aplenty, and new ones don't require cutting-edge equipment from ASML. Also, since older fabs are usually kept around, there is going to be demand for older tech and spare parts. To sustain AI and other applications that require cutting-edge tech, the best strategy would be to either stockpile chips (not really feasible since the tech is deprecating) or to build spare capacity, along with the necessary supply chain.

mkr-hn 6y ago

You only need those for the latest and greatest. A lot of options open up if the priority is any decently fast processor over the latest. Multi-CPU systems fell out of favor in the consumer space because single CPUs got so fast with these processes, but multiple CPUs with an older process is fine in this scenario.

elihu 6y ago
...or just be content with a slower chip.

dcolkitt 6y ago

> a bunch of their engineers and a bunch more technicians and managers with the right kind of skills In a WWII scenario, how long does it take to rapidly retrain a bunch of people with these skills. We have no shortage bunch of brilliant, quantitatively minded people trading derivatives and writing ML models to recommend TV shows. In a total war scenario, I assume most would be drafted for the war effort. Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
incrudible 6y ago
> Semiconductor engineering is complex, but probably not so complex that your average Math Olympiad couldn't pick it up in a month or two. We have a chip shortage going on for months now, if all it took was two months and a bunch of smart people, those billions of dollars in chip orders would've made it happen. That tells me it has to be a bit more complex than you think.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Has any major organization started or entered the semiconductor fab space in the past year? From speaking with industry analysts, my understanding is we could spin up additional capacity. The issue is that most everyone fears the shortage will be over after the Covid supply chain disruptions, and therefore any new investments will not recoup their necessarily long payback periods. This is a very different calculus than a WW2 type scenario. Fully mobilized, the government would almost certainly pay up for microchip capacity today, regardless of the long-term payback residual. If there was evidence of deep-pocketed firms trying and failing to get into semiconductor fab in 2020, I'd change my opinion. Like if Google or Amazon were trying to open their own fab plants, but were failing, then I might suspect that a WW2 fully mobilized war effort would run into difficulties. But as far as I can tell, the issue is that nobody wants to jump into the fab business, regardless of the temporarily higher profits over the next 2-4 quarters.
  - baq 6y ago
    A 10nm/7nm fab costs $10B and takes years to build, assuming you've got a process which works - developing that from scratch will take you a decade before you can even design the fab. You could compare the enterprise to a smaller scale NASA.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
I did some materials engineering coursework in college, and I think your comment significantly underestimates the technical complexity of <100nm process node manufacturing. We had many brilliant minds working on these problems for decades, but it took time, skill, effort, and money over these decades to achieve each milestone of development. Now each of these firms (and each of their suppliers) has trade secrets that go deep, and barring some unlikely breakthrough of brilliance, these secrets can't be independently discovered by the brightest minds in any less than the time it already took to discover and develop them in the first place. There's also the problem of supply chains -- modern fab tech requires a ton of downstream tech: the fab machines, the parts in them, and the places those parts were developed and manufactured... and the machines that were required there as well (repeat...). Also the raw materials, especially rare earth minerals.
jjk166 6y ago
It's not a question of knowing how to build industrial capacity, it is actually building that capacity. Before you can build a fab, you need to build all the machines that go into a fab, and before that all the machines for building those machines, and so on and so forth. 9 women can't make a baby in a month, at some point you come across steps that just take time.

majormajor 6y ago

If you think there's a scenario that justifies it in 10 years, you start today. In our quest for ever-more-just-in-time-efficiency we've forgotten that it doesn't work for certain things.

samus 6y ago

Military-grade equipment and ammunition don't require cutting-edge manufacturing nodes. There are fabs for older nodes aplenty, and new ones don't require cutting-edge equipment from ASML. Also, since older fabs are usually kept around, there is going to be demand for older tech and spare parts. To sustain AI and other applications that require cutting-edge tech, the best strategy would be to either stockpile chips (not really feasible since the tech is deprecating) or to build spare capacity, along with the necessary supply chain.