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Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed
- genericone 5y agoFor a somewhat biased take on the situation, Asianometry on Youtube talked about Hongxin last year, this guy's choice of topic coverage is all over the map, but focuses on Asia, Tech, and Politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78
- code_biologist 5y agoReally good video and channel!
- rossmohax 5y agoWhere is Mill CPU? Been almost 10 years since they started talking about architecture, but nothing tangible emerged yet.
- tyleo 5y agoI always appreciate updates on Mill. Their videos are great.
- Sophistifunk 5y agoI asked myself this about 2 weeks ago and went looking. As far as I can tell they're quietly working still.
- mhh__ 5y agoThey're still going, but seeing them semi-complain/semi-get-cold-feet about VC funding on their forum makes me think they might not be totally in tune with reality. From Ivan on the forum "We expected to go out for a funding round (and convert from bootstrap to salary-paying) last spring but, well, 2020. Right now we’re trying to decide when to make a second try at it. The financial market for the likes of us isn’t back yet, and the virus rates are turning up again, which argues for waiting. But the economy and the future market is real iffy, which argues for doing it now. " https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-unicorns-2021-monthly-recap/ https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-unicorns-... this suggests there has been a dramatic increase in VC money to be acquired by the right startups. If I were the mill team, I would get their patents nailed down (which I think they have mostly done), then get some token open source projects out there to show what they actually have in their trousers. Then start giving some talks, public presence, things like that. Show what their toolchain and simulator can actually do.
- n7pdx 5y ago
- pinewurst 5y agohttps://archive.is/FLzAL https://archive.is/FLzAL
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoEconomical and performant chip and jet turbine production are two areas where China can't really take any shortcuts. They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer. They are dumping in the resources, so I'm sure they will eventually get there, but it might be a few decades (in both fields, they can already do performant or economical, just not both at the same time).
- bsedlm 5y ago> They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer yes, they have to repeat all that work, they have to solve all those solved problems again because companies that solved the problems won't share their solutions.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoNot just companies, but the Russians were pissed after China copied some of their jet military tech. They were angry enough that they stopped supplying them with military jet turbine parts for awhile, which really tripped things up for the Chinese because they can't produce their own at the same level (they can make fast, they can make economical, but they can't make both yet).
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoWhy would a company share its trade secrets? It's one of the few differentiators left to most companies. Not to mention the national security arguments.
- bsedlm 5y ago> Why would a company share its trade secrets? indeed, I wish I could answer this. > Not to mention the national security arguments. it is an inteserting excercise to consider this from the rival's point of view
- spamizbad 5y agoNot surprised: $2.3B is chump change in semiconductor manufacturing especially if you're starting from scratch. Double that, add a zero, and wait 5-7 more years.
- chx 5y agoSo 50B? That's nowhere near what you need. Last year both TSMC and Intel announced they are spending a hundred billion each on new fabs (TSMC in April, Intel in July) and they have all the R&D already and good relationship with ASML (and both own a few percent of it, too). But the US banned ASML from selling to China so you need to catch up with ASML and Intel/TSMC at the same time. Now, I don't know when ASML started researching EUV but they were certainly working on it in 1998 -- which doesn't mean it'll take twenty years to replicate it because surely some of it is public but still, it's a big, big project. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA56970339&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=0038111X&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ef4e85e3e https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA56970339&sid=googleSc...
- panabee 5y agowhy haven't alternatives emerged to ASML to help drive down the cost of building new fabs? do you know what the cost breakdown is when building fabs?
- codeulike 5y agoBecause the EUV machines that ASML build are the most complex machines ever built by humans and getting all the bits to work properly takes decades of R+D e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
- jgeada 5y agoAnd note also that all the software that is needed to engineer those things is also not allowed to be sold to China, so that is also another thing they have to replicate. And by the time you catch up on the decades of R&D and trade secrets needed to catch up with where the software is at now, everything has evolved even further ahead. Keeping pace with semiconductor technology is a never ending treadmill of constant innovation. Source: my company is one of those not allowed to sell this type of software to China
- vmception 5y agoI have met so many people that think their semiconductor manufacturing needs are exempt from the supply chain issue or backlog. Typically they all say "We are using this other nanometer size, and so thats not where the backlog is" is there any truth to that statement?
- nwiswell 5y agoYes. The "size" you are talking about is the "process node". It's basically a shorthand for how large the transistors are. These nodes are not fungible, once a chip is designed and a mask set is taped out it must be fabricated on that specific process node. Even if you have a chip designed on an older/larger node, it cannot be fabricated on a newer/smaller node without significant expense and delay. Older nodes are generally in lower demand, although strictly speaking they are a tighter supply bottleneck, since nobody is incentivized to build fabs at older process nodes. But the picture is even more complicated than this. Virtually all semiconductor fabs specialize in certain kinds of chips. Even at roughly the same process node, a DRAM fab cannot easily retool to make NAND, a NAND fab cannot easily retool to make logic (CPU, GPU, FPGA...), a logic fab cannot easily retool to make MEMS or image sensors, and so on. In fact, not only are individual fabs tooled to make particular kinds of chips, but individual fab operators will generally have their own "design rules" at a certain node. So suppose that you have an ASIC you've been making at TSMC 22nm; just because GlobalFoundries has capacity at 22nm doesn't necessarily mean you can just have them start making your chips.
- code_biologist 5y agoYour reply looks carefully written but "is there any truth to that statement?" "Yes." confuses me. Maybe the parent's question is not well formed. Would the best direct answer be? I have met so many people that think their semiconductor manufacturing needs are exempt from the supply chain issue or backlog. [because they are not on a leading node] Their semiconductor manufacturing needs are not exempt from the supply chain issue or backlog. [for the reasons you explained]
- nwiswell 5y ago
- fakeslimshady5 5y ago
- quantum_state 5y agoFeel if ppl think completely out of the box, they may get enlightened and get good at it much sooner and cheaper …
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoI have a theory. Not a good one but it's a theory Any one organisation can only be efficient if the whole organisation can fit in one persons head. It must be possible to reason about changes in one area affecting another. This anecdotally applies to every software system i have worked on - once you don't understand how another part works decisions you make become divorced from reality As such organisations must either simplify, so they are reason-able or they must split into markets (which seem to be very good at getting efficiency out of complexity) - or hire people with bigger heads ! (this does not mean a niche for AI - at least not yet) I think what I am trying to get at is that someone at Intel must understand how it all fits together - and someone at Boeing etc
- jl2718 5y agoI think this is largely correct, although it helps to have many people understand it. When I worked at Micron, the training on the “Traveller Process” was mandatory and you could go very deep in it. There were a lot of people with at least a passing understanding of what everybody else was doing and in what order. The depth was not always there, especially about what could go wrong, and what that would look like. I started in CVD and then gradually moved my work to parametrics to try and figure out how problems were connected to measurements at each manufacturing step. I got into that role because I was an intern and generally not great at being told what to do and what not to do. I think if I had a normal role I’d have been pigeon-holed in one place with little visibility or impact on anything else. I imagine that I would have learned a lot more over, say, 20 years with full exposure to the entire process, but, I don’t know how someone could possibly develop that kind of knowledge being placed in a specialist role. I think the only people that knew the systems were the people that grew up with the complexity, as in, started early on as a specialist in a relatively simple process, and then that same role became a generalist role over the same function, which grew into a massively complex process that now consumes 100 different types of specialist that will never understand each other. Like, at Google, there will never be another Sanjay and Jeff. Nobody today will ever grow into the technical breadth required to understand that system. The parts will fracture and eventually stop working well with each other, until someone starts from scratch with more modern assumptions, but of course it will come from the outside because Google would never pay anybody to do that. To bring it back to the fab, I think the entire industry is close to this point if not beyond it already. It would be impossible to copy the incumbents, but I would guess that starting from scratch would yield a significant advantage, if only that more people in that team would necessarily have to understand more of the system.
- amelius 5y agoNot even Apple can do it.
- cromwellian 5y agoModern semiconductors seems a lot like the F-1 engine on the Saturn V. Even if you had the blueprints for it, you couldn't build it without doing a lot of work to rediscover all of the missing details that were in the minds of the engineers and tradesmen who built it. Also, (I didn't read the original article), but there's been some suggestion that some of these companies, like HSMC, were really just investor scams. They raised a whole bunch of money, promised a lot, but didn't actually know how to do what they said they did. Kinda like a Chinese Silicon version of Theranos. I think HSMC even had an ASML EUV machine, but never got to use it.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoI would not be the least bit surprised if it cost $150B to $250B to capitalize a new 'state of the art' semiconductor fab. I'm a bit surprised they didn't shoot a bit lower and just try to replicate ASML's machines. Those are one of the unobtainium pieces that cost so much in a new fab. In my experience the only way to compete with a long established player is to learn the business from the ground up and expect a loooong learning curve. What that might look like with semiconductors is building an ingot plant that can sell ingots that the established player can use. Then start slicing them and selling passivated ingots for a bit more margin, then use "marginal" ingots to make large node (like 140nm or 90nm) chips in the good areas to develop training around the workflow. Ideally those chips have some nominal market value and sales can act as a 'discount' on your investment (say it costs you $1B to make the chips and you sell them for $500M, you've basically invested $500M in learning the work flow instead of a full $1B). Expect this to take 10 - 15 years minimum, 25 years more typically. Invest in university programs to train process engineers, physicists, and circuit designers. "Seed" several universities with small 300mm fabs to give students real experience rather than just "book learning." Aggressively weed out people who cheat to get through school. Its a really really huge deal to take on this task. It was insanely complicated in the 90's and now it is even more so. The only thing China has going for it is that it doesn't need to repeat the mistakes made in the last 30 years that other semiconductor companies made and so their path is a bit more "straight line." But if experience is any guide, there is no shortcut to doing the work, no matter how much money you spend.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Invest in university programs to train process engineers, physicists, and circuit designers. "Seed" several universities with small 300mm fabs to give students real experience rather than just "book learning." Aggressively weed out people who cheat to get through school. This requires a deep cultural change. Because of high pressure cramming exams that favors rote, Chinese students are incentivized to just cheat from a very young age. Also, keep in mind that no matter how much you invest, studying at an American university opens the door to working in America and getting a western passport, something more and more Chinese are desperately trying to do.
- D-Coder 5y agoMaking EUV chips is hard: https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reverse-engineer https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reve.... (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)