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There are basically only 3 close-to-cutting edge foundries left - Intel (American), Samsung (South Korean) and TSMC (Taiwanese), and TSMC is in the lead by quit

There are basically only 3 close-to-cutting edge foundries left - Intel (American), Samsung (South Korean) and TSMC (Taiwanese), and TSMC is in the lead by quite a bit. We're getting extremely close to the end-game of moore's law, so the lifetime of a <7nm fab is likely to be long, and there are likely to only ever be a handful built because they are absurdly expensive (20+ Billion dollars), particularly if you can't keep them fully utilized. There are no 'smaller companies' with cutting edge fabs, and these aren't really American companies who outsourced and are no bringing them back - Intel has always had a large manufacturing presence in the US, and a large part of this is trying to get foreign companies to 'offshore' fabs to the US rather than continuing to concentrate in south korea / taiwan.

mhneu 4y ago
This is true for large digital integrated circuits. There's also analog fabs, MEMS fabs, LED/photo/laser fabs. Places like Analog still have smaller fabs like that. Those fabs also seem likely to create technological progress into the future, and so the US should be funding those too.
bejelentkezni 4y ago
Unless I'm mistaken, Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well.
- verall 4y ago
  They do but they have explicitly given up the game of competing to be the first to the next fastest smallest digital logic (i.e. cutting edge nodes). Micron is still pushing DRAM and NAND tech but it's more for cost cutting since they are strictly commodities. The work it takes to be a pure-play fab like TSMC is pretty different - lots of working with fabless vendors to bring up their chips. Even Intel isn't any good at this (yet). It's a collaborative process.
- chmod775 4y ago
  > Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well. At their tech level there's probably hundreds of companies with fabs[1]. GP was explicitly talking about cutting edge fabs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

mhneu 4y ago

This is true for large digital integrated circuits. There's also analog fabs, MEMS fabs, LED/photo/laser fabs. Places like Analog still have smaller fabs like that. Those fabs also seem likely to create technological progress into the future, and so the US should be funding those too.

bejelentkezni 4y ago

Unless I'm mistaken, Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well.

verall 4y ago
They do but they have explicitly given up the game of competing to be the first to the next fastest smallest digital logic (i.e. cutting edge nodes). Micron is still pushing DRAM and NAND tech but it's more for cost cutting since they are strictly commodities. The work it takes to be a pure-play fab like TSMC is pretty different - lots of working with fabless vendors to bring up their chips. Even Intel isn't any good at this (yet). It's a collaborative process.
chmod775 4y ago
> Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well. At their tech level there's probably hundreds of companies with fabs[1]. GP was explicitly talking about cutting edge fabs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...