5 ms·

One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it

by shubb 3y ago

One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. So, if there is a bubble in the chip supply pipeline, auto manufacture doesn't happen. If there is undersupply of precursor chemicals it takes a while to make vaccines at scale... What you are talking about makes me think of the very long lead product that is skilled people. A significant proportion of fab employees are genuinely highly skilled workers who need a specialised physics degree and then additional training in order to optimize yields and things like that. I think they can build the buildings and buy the machines but unless a lot of Taiwanese are willing to get on a plane and move to the US, it is going to take a long time to be able to replace their labour at the required scale.

vel0city 3y ago
Good thing there's a university only a couple of miles away from the Richardson fab that specializes in training semiconductor and nano-fabrication which has quite a large international reach which has been massively expanding every year for the last few decades.
petsfed 3y ago
This is explicitly why Boise State University, an otherwise middle-to-low-tier research university boasts such a high-quality materials engineering department. BSU actually hold some of their intro-to-materials-science courses at the Boise Micron fab so Micron employees can work towards said degrees without missing as much work to commute between the two locations. Edit to add: I've met a few people who are aware of US military supply chain rules, and assume it means "oh, chinese $doodad must be crap, that's why we don't give them to our troops", when the reality is just as you said. Supply chain bubbles can be massively disruptive, so its a real strategic blunder to outsource critical components to the country we have designated as our number one rival. I'm not saying we're set up for a trade war, but we are well past due to calculate the cost of increasing short-term profits. Is a quarterly decrease in operating costs from consolidating fabs worth risking a massive disruption when that single fab is knocked out? Given the volumes that even small fabs do, I argue that quarterly increase is not at all worth it.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Current analysis projects US semi to face shortage of ~80k talent in next few years, ~300k+ in by decades end. This is reality pretty much in every semi producer countries, SKR and TW both have 50k-100k+ shortage with pretty developed talent pipeline. From everything I've read, current US+co short/medium term talent production won't be enough fill all the new fabs being proposed. Unviable due to operating costs which can always be subsidized, unviable due to lack of talent is much harder to address. Apart from training more, only way to plug gap is to poach talent from CHIP4 partners, which US has the money for. But I surmise it will get geopolitically ugly. For reference PRC after elevating semi to first-level dicipline in 2018 is pumping out about 30k IC graduates per year. They're still about 200k short, ~520k/720k out of what IC talent 2018 white paper estimated PRC needed for complete semi industry. This is PRC that graduates ~5M STEM with huge population to draw from that bias towards S&T in tertiary. Which leads to the other uncomfortable point that a complete semi industry is more than just fabs, there's a lot of critical semi supply chain stuck in TW / East Asia (SKR/JP) that's going to get disrupted anyway in event of conflict. I don't see any indication US is resolving to reshore the entire semi chain.
  - nickpsecurity 3y ago
    This could be an opportunity for low-cost, educational groups to scale or partner up. Is there a list of degree or course requirements fabs are looking for? What programs would be necessary to meet that demand?
  - bsder 3y ago
    > Unviable due to operating costs which can always be subsidized, unviable due to lack of talent is much harder to address. Or, gee, let's throw this out there: perhaps if the pay wasn't shit, people would go into the field. You know, just like computer science over the past couple of decades.
- wyldberry 3y ago
  There's not much prestige as a BSU alumni (and someone doing a masters part-time there), but I do distinctly remember chatting with materials graduate students and them mentioning that they chose BSU because of the ease of availability for equipment required for research and having Micron right there. There's a few good things that the university offers which is surprisingly strong. When i went back to prepare for a CS masters (military, self-taught) I was surprised at the quality of the undergraduate degree in preparing students for industry, and how quickly the security program was invested in (INL does a lot of investment here). All that to say: it's a pretty good school, especially for it's price. I only ever had one bad professor, and it was in the supply chain management department. And it was (is still?) the only raptor biology masters in the country.
colechristensen 3y ago
>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. I would say exactly the opposite, the vaccines were made quite quickly and there weren't major supply issues. The Defense Production Act (er... central planning as you put it) was used to say what was going to happen when with money to back it up and... things happened quickly. DPA wasn't invoked to build you new cars or supply you toilet paper so... those things had their supply issues. The US actually can do logistics very well, especially when there's somebody willing to foot the bill for big asks. The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us). We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  This would have been categorically true circa-1970s. Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries. The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems. If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result. > We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment. "We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment. 20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1] And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare. At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputations-reveals-the-human-cost-of-russias-war-d0bca320 https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputatio... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputees-images-world-needs-see/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputee...
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. The dominant ideology in the US, at least until recently, is that there should be no central planning. The invisible hand of the market was all-knowing and would allocate resources far more efficiently than any human planner. I wouldn't blame central planning, I'd blame the lack of it.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  That was just a lot of talk. The federal government has been shaping the US economy and its industries since the start. Things like agriculture and energy has always been subsidized. E.g. the offshoring of manufacturing and the newer cultivation of green energy tech are entirely the result of tax and subsidy policies designed to result in these things.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  The problem with laissez faire economic allocation has been timescales. It's an extremely efficient allocator... on a certain timescale, itself determined by the market. It's an incompetent allocation on different timescales, typically when you get into the 5+ year range. The ideal blend is when capability is centrally planned, but implementation and tactical scale is market-demanded.

by shubb 3y ago

vel0city 3y ago

Good thing there's a university only a couple of miles away from the Richardson fab that specializes in training semiconductor and nano-fabrication which has quite a large international reach which has been massively expanding every year for the last few decades.

petsfed 3y ago

This is explicitly why Boise State University, an otherwise middle-to-low-tier research university boasts such a high-quality materials engineering department. BSU actually hold some of their intro-to-materials-science courses at the Boise Micron fab so Micron employees can work towards said degrees without missing as much work to commute between the two locations. Edit to add: I've met a few people who are aware of US military supply chain rules, and assume it means "oh, chinese $doodad must be crap, that's why we don't give them to our troops", when the reality is just as you said. Supply chain bubbles can be massively disruptive, so its a real strategic blunder to outsource critical components to the country we have designated as our number one rival. I'm not saying we're set up for a trade war, but we are well past due to calculate the cost of increasing short-term profits. Is a quarterly decrease in operating costs from consolidating fabs worth risking a massive disruption when that single fab is knocked out? Given the volumes that even small fabs do, I argue that quarterly increase is not at all worth it.

dirtyid 3y ago
Current analysis projects US semi to face shortage of ~80k talent in next few years, ~300k+ in by decades end. This is reality pretty much in every semi producer countries, SKR and TW both have 50k-100k+ shortage with pretty developed talent pipeline. From everything I've read, current US+co short/medium term talent production won't be enough fill all the new fabs being proposed. Unviable due to operating costs which can always be subsidized, unviable due to lack of talent is much harder to address. Apart from training more, only way to plug gap is to poach talent from CHIP4 partners, which US has the money for. But I surmise it will get geopolitically ugly. For reference PRC after elevating semi to first-level dicipline in 2018 is pumping out about 30k IC graduates per year. They're still about 200k short, ~520k/720k out of what IC talent 2018 white paper estimated PRC needed for complete semi industry. This is PRC that graduates ~5M STEM with huge population to draw from that bias towards S&T in tertiary. Which leads to the other uncomfortable point that a complete semi industry is more than just fabs, there's a lot of critical semi supply chain stuck in TW / East Asia (SKR/JP) that's going to get disrupted anyway in event of conflict. I don't see any indication US is resolving to reshore the entire semi chain.
- nickpsecurity 3y ago
  This could be an opportunity for low-cost, educational groups to scale or partner up. Is there a list of degree or course requirements fabs are looking for? What programs would be necessary to meet that demand?
- bsder 3y ago
  > Unviable due to operating costs which can always be subsidized, unviable due to lack of talent is much harder to address. Or, gee, let's throw this out there: perhaps if the pay wasn't shit, people would go into the field. You know, just like computer science over the past couple of decades.
wyldberry 3y ago
There's not much prestige as a BSU alumni (and someone doing a masters part-time there), but I do distinctly remember chatting with materials graduate students and them mentioning that they chose BSU because of the ease of availability for equipment required for research and having Micron right there. There's a few good things that the university offers which is surprisingly strong. When i went back to prepare for a CS masters (military, self-taught) I was surprised at the quality of the undergraduate degree in preparing students for industry, and how quickly the security program was invested in (INL does a lot of investment here). All that to say: it's a pretty good school, especially for it's price. I only ever had one bad professor, and it was in the supply chain management department. And it was (is still?) the only raptor biology masters in the country.

colechristensen 3y ago

>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. I would say exactly the opposite, the vaccines were made quite quickly and there weren't major supply issues. The Defense Production Act (er... central planning as you put it) was used to say what was going to happen when with money to back it up and... things happened quickly. DPA wasn't invoked to build you new cars or supply you toilet paper so... those things had their supply issues. The US actually can do logistics very well, especially when there's somebody willing to foot the bill for big asks. The lack of corruption and general merit-based placement here compared to so many other places combined with a large degree of vertical integration means that we can accomplish quite a lot and is one of the underappreciated cornerstones of our ability to make war (and why nobody wants to fight us). We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment.

ethbr0 3y ago
This would have been categorically true circa-1970s. Unfortunately, US industrial vertical integration now includes foundations placed in global low-labor-cost countries. The crash vaccine manufacturing scaling program was possible because we were rich enough to throw mountains of money (of which we have the most) at any international supply problems. If the Atlantic or Pacific had been hostile to commercial shipping, or countries hadn't cooperated, it would have had a very different result. > We are decimating (and then some) Russia's military by giving away second tier equipment to Ukraine, and the amount we're giving away is basically an afterthought. A one-time superpower is scraping the bottom of the barrel for equipment fighting against largely NATO supplied spare equipment. "We" are not. Ukrainians are dying and holding their own against a much larger country, with the help of NATO surplus equipment. 20,000-50,000 Ukrainians now have at least one limb amputated as a result of the war. [0] [1] And Russia's military is not being decimated. It's holding its own with an elastic defense, that's making progress difficult and costly for a Ukrainian army that's trained halfway between Soviet mass doctrine and Western maneuver warfare. At some point the Ukrainians will hopefully manage to exhaust Russia's logistics sufficient to break through their defense, but that's in no way a sure thing. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputations-reveals-the-human-cost-of-russias-war-d0bca320 https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ukraine-a-surge-in-amputatio... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputees-images-world-needs-see/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/ukraines-amputee...

ProjectArcturis 3y ago

>One of the interesting lessons of the past few years is that supply chain lead times are a thing and policy doesn't just happen because central planning says it should. The dominant ideology in the US, at least until recently, is that there should be no central planning. The invisible hand of the market was all-knowing and would allocate resources far more efficiently than any human planner. I wouldn't blame central planning, I'd blame the lack of it.

edgyquant 3y ago
That was just a lot of talk. The federal government has been shaping the US economy and its industries since the start. Things like agriculture and energy has always been subsidized. E.g. the offshoring of manufacturing and the newer cultivation of green energy tech are entirely the result of tax and subsidy policies designed to result in these things.
ethbr0 3y ago
The problem with laissez faire economic allocation has been timescales. It's an extremely efficient allocator... on a certain timescale, itself determined by the market. It's an incompetent allocation on different timescales, typically when you get into the 5+ year range. The ideal blend is when capability is centrally planned, but implementation and tactical scale is market-demanded.