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I would love to see a clear roadmap from the EU (not been successful searching) My take on this is 1. this is less about competitiveness at the cutting edge a

I would love to see a clear roadmap from the EU (not been successful searching) My take on this is 1. this is less about competitiveness at the cutting edge and more about security and economic on-shoring 2. building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm level massively reduces risk, increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs 3. chips we need are rarely the cutting edge AI stuff. The vast volume of chios will go in as controllers on screens, USB connectors and so on. Building plug and play alternatives will give local manufacturers choices, and incentives will help. 4. the big win is security. Does the CEO of sensitive company, the head of security services and the general in charge of procurement use keyboards, cpus motherboards and monitors made from open source chips manufactured in a trusted nation? What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom and ... the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge. But we make tanks from steel other materials made in "favoured nations" - surely the same applies to silicon?

Gravityloss 3y ago
There are projects like Helios: Highly Efficient and Lightweight Input/output Open Silicon https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 But AFAIK this is just a small part of large amount of multiple projects.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  A lot of EU semi research goes on at IMEC in Belgium, but EU still lacks the actual means of put any of it into production on their own soil. EU fabs have given up going beyond 12nm as it was deemed too capital intensive.
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    Thanks! I was somewhat expecting someone to actually drop into this thread to put links to many 100 million level programs... :)
ksec 3y ago
>building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm >the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge. Plenty of 28nm+ chips Fabs are inside EU. And more are coming online. This isn't a long or arduous process. Edit: Should have been Plenty of 28nm and above. As the original quote state.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Plenty of sub 28nm chips Fabs are inside EU. Which are those "plenty" sub-28nm fabs exactly? AFAIK only Global Foundries Dresden goes down to 22nm and 12nm, and I think that's by far the most cutting edge fab currently in EU, making the Ryzen IO dies and other such things. But even TSMC's future Dresden fab starting construction next year(hopefully) will start making mostly automotive chips for NXP, Bosch and Infineon chips at 28nm and 22nm all the way in 2027(!), with plans to go to 16nm and 12nm in the further future. Your view on EU cutting edge semi fabrication seems very optimistic.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    and TSMC is not exactly a european company...
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Of course they weren't gonna export their crown jewels outside of Taiwan, the same way how the west didn't export their crown jewels to Asia when they did the technology transfers for semiconductor manufacturing in the '70s, making sure to keep their Asian partners at least a node behind. Well well, how the turn-tables.
      - toyg 3y ago
        Everything gets out in the end. My Italian hometown had a "golden age" of silk manufacturing for a while, thanks to bugs smuggled out of China. It lasted for a couple of decades and then they were again smuggled out to other Italian towns. And then of course you have the nuclear shenanigans. If European countries wanted the tech bad enough, they would find ways to get it. The problem is not the know-how but the massive investments needed to productize it.
cduzz 3y ago
My understanding is that a 40nm fab is only economically viable if it's spent the first several years of its life producing high margin chips. In other words; the life cycle of a 40nm fab is: 1997: start building fab 2000: fab goes online and starts producing CPUs 2006: fab upgraded 2012: fab switches from CPUs to video and memory controller chip sets 2018: fab switches to USB controllers and embedded chips 2019: fab offline for 2 months because an antiquated but critical part is broken and is only brought back online because another similarly old fab went offline and sold off their parts 2020: fab shut off because of covid 2021: fab found to be a write-off because too many things broke while fab was offline. So if you skip straight past the profitable phase, you end up spending billions of dollars to make a fab that makes $0.30 parts, and it'll never be profitable unless those parts are $10 each, which in turn makes the product they're in unprofitable.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You are correct. Building fabs today only for fabbing much older nodes will not be profitable. You have to target 22nm and below otherwise you can't afford to jump in the semi fab ring.
  - hajile 3y ago
    TSMC is building a lot of new 28nm production with plans to shut down all their older nodes and move everyone over in the next few years. GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD fabs) created a brand-new 22nm planar process specifically for older chips as an upgrade to other company's 28nm processes. Profits seem possible if you approach it the right way.
    - throwup238 3y ago
      The math works out a lot better when you’re upgrading pre-EUV fabs or expanding an existing facility. A lot of the gear and setup is mostly the same such as wafer cleaning, HVAC and isolation, etc and the local challenges to setup and labor have been figured out.
londons_explore 3y ago
> What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom In today's world, it would seem more sensible to just stockpile enough of all the components for 5-7 years of tank production, knowing that if your enemy tries any evil tricks then you have half a decade to figure out how to redesign or make the components yourself. Keep a close eye on anything that looks like an antenna and it isn't so bad having the enemy backdooring your chips either.
- jes 3y ago
  This has been my take as well. There is a lot of disruption in a company when a key part, like the FPGA that serves as a communications nexus in the product goes EOL and everyone scrambles for a year trying to engineer in a replacement. Buy enough parts for expected product life, make good use of the time you didn't waste on scrambling, and when your product is EOL sell any left-over parts on the secondhand markets.
mastax 3y ago
I agree that often the less cutting edge chips are important but doesn’t the EU already have that handled with ST Microelectronics, NXP, Infineon? What’s lacking is very high end CPU, GPU, high end memory, high end FPGA.
qwytw 3y ago
> about security and economic on-shoring > increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs I'm not sure what does that mean? What specific chip needs that would that solve and what benefits would this provide? If those chips are not competitive nobody would buy them? So what would governments do with them? Stockpile them for the future just 'in case'? The problem is that unlike grain or oil chips are not exactly fungible if your military production or other vital industries lose access to their current suppliers they wouldn't be able to use your slow, outdated and overpriced chips anyway (and forcing them to do that under normal circumstances would make your products less competitive). > BOM for the challenger tank How many other components does the Challenger tank contain (IIRC it's not really produced anymore anyway) which are not manufactured in the UK? In any case stockpiling necessary chips etc. just in case the UK won't able be able to acquire anything from the US/Germany/etc. seems like a practical approach than trying to develop everything inside the country.
anonymou2 3y ago
security, yep! they will run Microsoft Windows, Google proprietary javascript, and Whatsapp for "secure" communication on these chips!!
- incompatible 3y ago
  Is there some reason why you wouldn't be able to run a purely open source software stack on it, if you wanted? Does Microsoft Windows even run on RISC-V?

Gravityloss 3y ago

There are projects like Helios: Highly Efficient and Lightweight Input/output Open Silicon https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/190183836 But AFAIK this is just a small part of large amount of multiple projects.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
A lot of EU semi research goes on at IMEC in Belgium, but EU still lacks the actual means of put any of it into production on their own soil. EU fabs have given up going beyond 12nm as it was deemed too capital intensive.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  Thanks! I was somewhat expecting someone to actually drop into this thread to put links to many 100 million level programs... :)

ksec 3y ago

>building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm >the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge. Plenty of 28nm+ chips Fabs are inside EU. And more are coming online. This isn't a long or arduous process. Edit: Should have been Plenty of 28nm and above. As the original quote state.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Plenty of sub 28nm chips Fabs are inside EU. Which are those "plenty" sub-28nm fabs exactly? AFAIK only Global Foundries Dresden goes down to 22nm and 12nm, and I think that's by far the most cutting edge fab currently in EU, making the Ryzen IO dies and other such things. But even TSMC's future Dresden fab starting construction next year(hopefully) will start making mostly automotive chips for NXP, Bosch and Infineon chips at 28nm and 22nm all the way in 2027(!), with plans to go to 16nm and 12nm in the further future. Your view on EU cutting edge semi fabrication seems very optimistic.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  and TSMC is not exactly a european company...
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Of course they weren't gonna export their crown jewels outside of Taiwan, the same way how the west didn't export their crown jewels to Asia when they did the technology transfers for semiconductor manufacturing in the '70s, making sure to keep their Asian partners at least a node behind. Well well, how the turn-tables.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Everything gets out in the end. My Italian hometown had a "golden age" of silk manufacturing for a while, thanks to bugs smuggled out of China. It lasted for a couple of decades and then they were again smuggled out to other Italian towns. And then of course you have the nuclear shenanigans. If European countries wanted the tech bad enough, they would find ways to get it. The problem is not the know-how but the massive investments needed to productize it.

cduzz 3y ago

My understanding is that a 40nm fab is only economically viable if it's spent the first several years of its life producing high margin chips. In other words; the life cycle of a 40nm fab is: 1997: start building fab 2000: fab goes online and starts producing CPUs 2006: fab upgraded 2012: fab switches from CPUs to video and memory controller chip sets 2018: fab switches to USB controllers and embedded chips 2019: fab offline for 2 months because an antiquated but critical part is broken and is only brought back online because another similarly old fab went offline and sold off their parts 2020: fab shut off because of covid 2021: fab found to be a write-off because too many things broke while fab was offline. So if you skip straight past the profitable phase, you end up spending billions of dollars to make a fab that makes $0.30 parts, and it'll never be profitable unless those parts are $10 each, which in turn makes the product they're in unprofitable.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
You are correct. Building fabs today only for fabbing much older nodes will not be profitable. You have to target 22nm and below otherwise you can't afford to jump in the semi fab ring.
- hajile 3y ago
  TSMC is building a lot of new 28nm production with plans to shut down all their older nodes and move everyone over in the next few years. GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD fabs) created a brand-new 22nm planar process specifically for older chips as an upgrade to other company's 28nm processes. Profits seem possible if you approach it the right way.
  - throwup238 3y ago
    The math works out a lot better when you’re upgrading pre-EUV fabs or expanding an existing facility. A lot of the gear and setup is mostly the same such as wafer cleaning, HVAC and isolation, etc and the local challenges to setup and labor have been figured out.

londons_explore 3y ago

> What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom In today's world, it would seem more sensible to just stockpile enough of all the components for 5-7 years of tank production, knowing that if your enemy tries any evil tricks then you have half a decade to figure out how to redesign or make the components yourself. Keep a close eye on anything that looks like an antenna and it isn't so bad having the enemy backdooring your chips either.

jes 3y ago
This has been my take as well. There is a lot of disruption in a company when a key part, like the FPGA that serves as a communications nexus in the product goes EOL and everyone scrambles for a year trying to engineer in a replacement. Buy enough parts for expected product life, make good use of the time you didn't waste on scrambling, and when your product is EOL sell any left-over parts on the secondhand markets.

mastax 3y ago

I agree that often the less cutting edge chips are important but doesn’t the EU already have that handled with ST Microelectronics, NXP, Infineon? What’s lacking is very high end CPU, GPU, high end memory, high end FPGA.

qwytw 3y ago

> about security and economic on-shoring > increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs I'm not sure what does that mean? What specific chip needs that would that solve and what benefits would this provide? If those chips are not competitive nobody would buy them? So what would governments do with them? Stockpile them for the future just 'in case'? The problem is that unlike grain or oil chips are not exactly fungible if your military production or other vital industries lose access to their current suppliers they wouldn't be able to use your slow, outdated and overpriced chips anyway (and forcing them to do that under normal circumstances would make your products less competitive). > BOM for the challenger tank How many other components does the Challenger tank contain (IIRC it's not really produced anymore anyway) which are not manufactured in the UK? In any case stockpiling necessary chips etc. just in case the UK won't able be able to acquire anything from the US/Germany/etc. seems like a practical approach than trying to develop everything inside the country.

anonymou2 3y ago

security, yep! they will run Microsoft Windows, Google proprietary javascript, and Whatsapp for "secure" communication on these chips!!

incompatible 3y ago
Is there some reason why you wouldn't be able to run a purely open source software stack on it, if you wanted? Does Microsoft Windows even run on RISC-V?