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Not only cheaper, but local. Many chips were still made in Japan or US, depending on where you needed them. To be fair, making modern chips is a lot more challe

Not only cheaper, but local. Many chips were still made in Japan or US, depending on where you needed them. To be fair, making modern chips is a lot more challenging, so it makes sense that it has become consolidated somewhat.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Modern chips sure, but what about chips from a few generations ago? Do the factories they made 20 years ago for what was then cutting-edge tech still exist and produce things using that era of chip making tech, or have they been modernized?
- rwmj 3y ago
  Very much so. For example the UK's only FAB in Newport was formerly used to make Inmos Transputers. It can currently do 180nm chips which is late 90s technology. There are very many in Japan if you look at Wikipedia's list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
  - rwmj 3y ago
    Don't know why I wrote "FAB" there. Maybe channelling Thunderbirds ...
- pjc50 3y ago
  > Do the factories they made 20 years ago for what was then cutting-edge tech still exist They're phasing out gradually. I work for an IC company and we're retooling some mostly-analogue parts from 10+ years ago onto modern processes because the right sort of fab is increasingly hard to find. I suspect that even if you dig an old GDSII file out from the nineties for one of those chips it may be hard to find somewhere to make it without requiring tweaks.