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US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment

US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

knightfall21 2y ago
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- rowanG077 2y ago
  I'll gladly take another Elon for siliconX. Hell I'd take 10. The good Elon has done in terms of his companies vastly outweigh the few bad tweets he slings into the world once in a while.
  - vessenes 2y ago
    Plus if there were ten more Elons they would all probably just argue on Twitter and sort of cancel each-other out. Win-win-win.
  - psunavy03 2y ago
    I don't get how some people struggle with the idea that he may simultaneously be a gifted businessman (in certain sectors, obviously Twitter was a disaster) and also simultaneously be a raging asshole. Bill Gates was a raging asshole. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. Larry Ellison was a raging asshole. It's not ideal, but it also doesn't preclude success.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      I think that it's actually helpful to a degree to be an asshole to be disruptive in a field. I expect you need a certain resolve of going against the flow. Something which is easier if you are an asshole.
    - rapsey 2y ago
      The Musk derangement syndrome sufferers do not have the intelligence to see people as multifaceted creatures.
    - ripjaygn 2y ago
      It's about propaganda, if they keep saying Musk didn't found SpaceX(real comments on Reddit) and keep upvoting those comments, and downvoting anyone saying he did with sources, then eventually new folks will believe that he didn't found SpaceX. On Reddit, mods of large subreddits like /r/news are permabanning people that just post an official SpaceX response and are censoring the comments. It's wild out there.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      It isn't required for success, either. If Elon Musk was never born, it is likely we'd still have SpaceX and Tesla equivalents, but with a better human being at the helm. A parallel universe also exists where Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle were not founded by raging assholes. The fact that these companies are all run by jerks is a terrible coincidence, but it does not necessarily need to be so.
      - reducesuffering 2y ago
        > If Elon Musk was never born, it is likely we'd still have SpaceX and Tesla equivalents I'm perturbed by Elon's politics and hypocrisy, but this is absolutely not true in anywhere near the same timeframe.
        ryandrake 2y ago
        So, out of the seven billion people on the planet, only Elon Musk could have made these companies what they are? No other person on Earth (given access to equivalent capital) could do it?
        rowanG077 2y ago
        That's not remotely saying the same thing. Just because someone could do it doesn't mean it will happen. These things require MUCH more then just the possibility of it happening. For example I could go out right now and murder someone. Doesn't mean I will do it. I'm certainly capable of it. In fact most people are in this exact situation yet there are only a tiny amount of murders happening each day compared to the people capable of it. So the real question is. Is there someone else with a similar or better drive then Musk, that is as smart as Musk, that has as much discipline, has the right personality and at the right time. The answer is much more likely to be no then yes in my opinion. Because if the answer is yes we would have another Musk or close to it.
        ryandrake 2y ago
        I don't know. I happen to believe that many, many people are capable of running and growing a successful business, and that the limiting factor (and the reason they haven't already) is access to capital, not some special personality trait or pedigree or family background or really any particular expertise. Definitely millions, probably tens of millions, and maybe even hundreds of millions of people are capable of starting the next SpaceX-like enterprise, and the lack of access to $100M is the only thing stopping them. We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies. (I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      > I don't get how some people struggle with the idea that he may simultaneously be a gifted businessman For me it's the Cybertruck. If find it hard to reconcile that a person with his track record could come up with that absurd abomination (makes me think that there is small small chance that all his other achievements were just extreme luck and random chance. Well in reality it's probably it due to lack of pressure/constraints that forced him to focus on making rational cars previously).
- alexashka 2y ago
  Don't confuse demonic overlords' wishes with the wishes of the many. Remember that Elon was the overlords' darling up until he decided to spit in their face and buy their favorite mind programming toy from under them.
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    His pseudo-fascist political views, love of eugenics and other fringe stuff might have played a part. Also you can't really expect a person narcissistic/unhinged enough to name his child "X AE A-XII" to be even remotely likeable (considering he also did it as a joke and possibly forgot about it doesn't make it much better).
cherryteastain 2y ago
The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was founded
- hangonhn 2y ago
  That's such a good insight. It really was the SpaceX moment or maybe we can say SpaceX was the TSMC moment of space since TSMC came first.
- ac29 2y ago
  1987? As near as I can tell there was nothing particularly remarkable about TSMC in the 1980s or 1990s.
  - kanwisher 2y ago
    It was one of the first foundries that focused on external ip and not producing its own chips
  - newsclues 2y ago
    Tesla and SpaceX both took time before they started generating positive cashflow.
  - ska 2y ago
    20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.
    - starspangled 2y ago
      They weren't a startup for 20 years, they were a huge company with billion dollar fabs, thousands of workers, and they were exchanging technology lead with other silicon manufacturing companies many times (back before 2020s, mid/late 2010s, TSMC was not undisputed leader). UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.
milesskorpen 2y ago
I think the issue is that TSMC exists, which takes up a lot of oxygen and opportunity. Whereas in space, there wasn't a high quality opportunity, so SpaceX had a lower hurdle to being the best (even though that still wasn't easy!).
- doron 2y ago
  Indeed, but downplaying the strategic threat to Taiwan as a "short-term" potential impact is not a credible position in the long term. It is prudent, possibly even critical, to have foundries on US shores, and the US will have to pay for it.
cdchn 2y ago
Chip production seems another order of magnitude more expensive than space travel, when you look at tens of billions for a fab, but also several orders of magnitude more productive.
nemothekid 2y ago
>By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, I think semiconductors is a difficult space for a SpaceX. SpaceX was relatively cheap - the company itself only raised 2 billion dollars, and according to Musk, the cost to develop Falcoln Heavy was "only" $500M. I think the "thesis" behind SpaceX is moreso that the technology to develop rockets had come down massively, but the market had gotten fat and lazy on government contracts. The market only seemed impossible because everyone just assumed so. On the other hand ASML's EUV machine costs $300M and that's only a small part of what you need build your own Fab and barring some massive research breakthrough that isn't coming down any time soon.
reaperman 2y ago
> a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s The thing is, the SpaceX moment occurred because of a rare opportunity where the industry incumbents were insulated from any competition or need for innovation for ~30 years. Some domestic industries still operate in an environment somewhat like this (e.g. the steel industry), but still face modernized global competition (albeit whose effects are kept at bay via import tariffs reaching as high as 266%). The semiconductor industry... while there are magnificent barriers to entry and not "enough" competition, they have absolutely not been wholly insulated from innovation or competition. And innovation in fabrication is driven at a very rapid pace! So there aren't huge outsized profits to be found like there was for SpaceX. And even SpaceX needed to invent what was almost an entirely new industry (Starlink) to become truly profitable. And even trying to pull a "SpaceX" on domestic steel manufacturing would fall flat because you wouldn't capture the global market, and would still be dependent on some (potentially much lower) tariffs to compete against the very modernized factories in China, which are innovative/competitive/efficient, unlike our domestic industry. SpaceX took advantage of a very rare situation where there truly was no competition or innovation anywhere on the planet for a very long period. I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!
- packetlost 2y ago
  US Telecom is not as far behind, but it's pretty far behind. Unfortunately, I think it largely competes with cellular networks and Starlink these day.
- highfrequency 2y ago
  Nice analysis on competitive dynamics of semiconductor industry vs. space industry in the 2000s. > I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here! Digital payments may be in a similar situation. Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they are making 80% gross margins on $30b of revenue to do what boils down to a few API calls and some fraud repayment. I doubt that they need to do much innovation to keep that moat either (in contrast to say Apple and their 30% cut of App Store revenues - they need to constantly stay ahead of Android and Windows). Curious to hear your take on what other industries at least come close to the space dynamics in 2010.
nick238 2y ago
I think rockets are insanely simple compared to silicon. The amount of research and development it takes to build a light source (hot tin plasma[1]) is extraordinary, and fabs are also probably the most complicated manufacturing facilities in the world. Tesla struggled mightily with integrating disparate auto parts manufacturers some years ago. SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person (in their nascent stages), who pushed to break norms in the conventional thinking, either "rockets can't be reused/we must spend $10B on a test campaign[2] before any part leaves the ground" and "EVs aren't cool". I don't think if Musk could design a rocket engine from scratch is relevant, but the strategic design patterns of 1) reduce requirements, 2) remove unused things, 3) simplify/optimize, 4) accelerate cycle times, 5) automate. Those points aren't revolutionary, just a more expanded "go fast and break things." The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-SpaceX thinking. [1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-plasma.html https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-plasma... [2]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion
- kazen44 2y ago
  > The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-SpaceX thinking. another good example of this is how VLSI in particular disrupted the mini-computer/mainframe market and made CPU's cheap enough to put them into smaller and far cheaper machines. This really shook up the old guys who where used to being total system vendors. (IBM, DEC etc). Suddenly, you could get a computer for much cheaper compared to the decade prior, and by the early to mid nineties you had guys like sun eating their lunch completely. IBM pivoted to being a services company and DEC just imploded.
  - nunez 2y ago
    AFAIK IBM still completely dominates mainframe, so they're not entirely out of the systems space.
- 2y ago
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
TSMC has been spending $15 - $50 billion per year for years to stay on top. Estimates are it would take $200 - $300 billion just to catch up with them and little to no profitability for a decade while burning $10s of billions every year. I think the federal govt is the only entity that has that kind of money.
amluto 2y ago
Maybe one of the e-beam startups can pull it off. Aside from scaling issues, direct electron beam lithography ought to outperform optical lithography by many metrics, not to mention that there would never be costs associated with mask revisions. Here’s one of them: https://multibeamcorp.com/ https://multibeamcorp.com/ I remember touring a little research fab, maybe around 2000, that could achieve feature sizes comparable to what TSMC can do today. But they were very, very, very slow. (Fast-moving electrons are easy to make, easy to aim, and have teeny tiny wavelengths that entirely sidestep most the issues that people have with photons having obnoxiously large wavelengths. But electrons have all manner of downsides that explain why fabs spend many billions of dollars on optical lithography, one of which is that they repel each other, which makes shining a lot of them at a wafer at once quite problematic.)
numpad0 2y ago
I think lack of focus on US domestic chip capability is semi-intentional and is an eventuality. Semiconductor industry, and many other manufacturing industries too, seem to flourish at very outer edges of the free world. It could be simple as the free world not wanting manufacturing capability at home. It could be wanting only grain farms and money printers.
- kazen44 2y ago
  Manufacturing in the west is expensive compared to cheaper developing countries. Also, manufacturing has a massive impact on the environment, this includes semiconductor manufacturing. It has politically been impopular for a while now.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Because of the resource curse - everything that isn't the best cost/benefit ratio to a country tends to become unworkably expensive. The USA's cursed resource is money - literally - it prints the world reserve currency.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow. This already happened and the startup was TSMC. Unfortunately for the U.S., it's in Taiwan.
keepamovin 2y ago
TSMC would likely never let itself be bought by a Western company. It's too vital to Taiwan's (and China's interest). The best that can be hoped is its ethical engagement with US chip players in decline. But surely it wouldn't be impossible, with enough capital and initiative, to start a US-side TSMC clone on US soil? Just like the Valley successes of the 70s and 80s prompted savvy Taiwanese investors to found TSMC. We might need to start copying back some of their playbook to chart our own course to success, as they did with ours, then exceeded it with their out strategy and ingenuity, currently.
- anitil 2y ago
  I don't know geopolitics well enough to know the answer to this. Is losing TSMC an existential risk to Taiwan?
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Existential depends on perspective, but TSMC is a strategic asset. Any loss of it would lead to TW losing significant leverage and being more vulnerable to external pressures.
Wytwwww 2y ago
> By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market SpaceX entered a market with hardly any competition (due to little demand) and is/was extremely reliant on government funding anyway. Semiconductors are highly competitive and you can't rely on government agencies buying most of what you manufacture. I'd argue Tesla might be much more closer to "startup entering an (somewhat)impossible market" considering how entrenched non Chinese car makers it was and how hard it was to survive in and especially start from scratch as a small company.

knightfall21 2y ago

[flagged]

rowanG077 2y ago
I'll gladly take another Elon for siliconX. Hell I'd take 10. The good Elon has done in terms of his companies vastly outweigh the few bad tweets he slings into the world once in a while.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Plus if there were ten more Elons they would all probably just argue on Twitter and sort of cancel each-other out. Win-win-win.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  I don't get how some people struggle with the idea that he may simultaneously be a gifted businessman (in certain sectors, obviously Twitter was a disaster) and also simultaneously be a raging asshole. Bill Gates was a raging asshole. Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. Larry Ellison was a raging asshole. It's not ideal, but it also doesn't preclude success.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    I think that it's actually helpful to a degree to be an asshole to be disruptive in a field. I expect you need a certain resolve of going against the flow. Something which is easier if you are an asshole.
  - rapsey 2y ago
    The Musk derangement syndrome sufferers do not have the intelligence to see people as multifaceted creatures.
  - ripjaygn 2y ago
    It's about propaganda, if they keep saying Musk didn't found SpaceX(real comments on Reddit) and keep upvoting those comments, and downvoting anyone saying he did with sources, then eventually new folks will believe that he didn't found SpaceX. On Reddit, mods of large subreddits like /r/news are permabanning people that just post an official SpaceX response and are censoring the comments. It's wild out there.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It isn't required for success, either. If Elon Musk was never born, it is likely we'd still have SpaceX and Tesla equivalents, but with a better human being at the helm. A parallel universe also exists where Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle were not founded by raging assholes. The fact that these companies are all run by jerks is a terrible coincidence, but it does not necessarily need to be so.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      > If Elon Musk was never born, it is likely we'd still have SpaceX and Tesla equivalents I'm perturbed by Elon's politics and hypocrisy, but this is absolutely not true in anywhere near the same timeframe.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        So, out of the seven billion people on the planet, only Elon Musk could have made these companies what they are? No other person on Earth (given access to equivalent capital) could do it?
        rowanG077 2y ago
        That's not remotely saying the same thing. Just because someone could do it doesn't mean it will happen. These things require MUCH more then just the possibility of it happening. For example I could go out right now and murder someone. Doesn't mean I will do it. I'm certainly capable of it. In fact most people are in this exact situation yet there are only a tiny amount of murders happening each day compared to the people capable of it. So the real question is. Is there someone else with a similar or better drive then Musk, that is as smart as Musk, that has as much discipline, has the right personality and at the right time. The answer is much more likely to be no then yes in my opinion. Because if the answer is yes we would have another Musk or close to it.
        ryandrake 2y ago
        I don't know. I happen to believe that many, many people are capable of running and growing a successful business, and that the limiting factor (and the reason they haven't already) is access to capital, not some special personality trait or pedigree or family background or really any particular expertise. Definitely millions, probably tens of millions, and maybe even hundreds of millions of people are capable of starting the next SpaceX-like enterprise, and the lack of access to $100M is the only thing stopping them. We'll never know, though, because no bank or investor just hands out start-up capital to nobodies. (I also happen to believe, and HN is going to hate this, that the high percentage of businesses that fail is a testament to how thoroughly misallocated capital is. So much capital goes to people who end up demonstrating they are incapable of deploying it. The trick that hasn't been solved yet is consistently finding who those many capable people are beforehand.)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    > I don't get how some people struggle with the idea that he may simultaneously be a gifted businessman For me it's the Cybertruck. If find it hard to reconcile that a person with his track record could come up with that absurd abomination (makes me think that there is small small chance that all his other achievements were just extreme luck and random chance. Well in reality it's probably it due to lack of pressure/constraints that forced him to focus on making rational cars previously).
alexashka 2y ago
Don't confuse demonic overlords' wishes with the wishes of the many. Remember that Elon was the overlords' darling up until he decided to spit in their face and buy their favorite mind programming toy from under them.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  His pseudo-fascist political views, love of eugenics and other fringe stuff might have played a part. Also you can't really expect a person narcissistic/unhinged enough to name his child "X AE A-XII" to be even remotely likeable (considering he also did it as a joke and possibly forgot about it doesn't make it much better).

cherryteastain 2y ago

The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was founded

hangonhn 2y ago
That's such a good insight. It really was the SpaceX moment or maybe we can say SpaceX was the TSMC moment of space since TSMC came first.
ac29 2y ago
1987? As near as I can tell there was nothing particularly remarkable about TSMC in the 1980s or 1990s.
- kanwisher 2y ago
  It was one of the first foundries that focused on external ip and not producing its own chips
- newsclues 2y ago
  Tesla and SpaceX both took time before they started generating positive cashflow.
- ska 2y ago
  20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.
  - starspangled 2y ago
    They weren't a startup for 20 years, they were a huge company with billion dollar fabs, thousands of workers, and they were exchanging technology lead with other silicon manufacturing companies many times (back before 2020s, mid/late 2010s, TSMC was not undisputed leader). UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.

milesskorpen 2y ago

I think the issue is that TSMC exists, which takes up a lot of oxygen and opportunity. Whereas in space, there wasn't a high quality opportunity, so SpaceX had a lower hurdle to being the best (even though that still wasn't easy!).

doron 2y ago
Indeed, but downplaying the strategic threat to Taiwan as a "short-term" potential impact is not a credible position in the long term. It is prudent, possibly even critical, to have foundries on US shores, and the US will have to pay for it.

cdchn 2y ago

Chip production seems another order of magnitude more expensive than space travel, when you look at tens of billions for a fab, but also several orders of magnitude more productive.

nemothekid 2y ago

>By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, I think semiconductors is a difficult space for a SpaceX. SpaceX was relatively cheap - the company itself only raised 2 billion dollars, and according to Musk, the cost to develop Falcoln Heavy was "only" $500M. I think the "thesis" behind SpaceX is moreso that the technology to develop rockets had come down massively, but the market had gotten fat and lazy on government contracts. The market only seemed impossible because everyone just assumed so. On the other hand ASML's EUV machine costs $300M and that's only a small part of what you need build your own Fab and barring some massive research breakthrough that isn't coming down any time soon.

reaperman 2y ago

> a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s The thing is, the SpaceX moment occurred because of a rare opportunity where the industry incumbents were insulated from any competition or need for innovation for ~30 years. Some domestic industries still operate in an environment somewhat like this (e.g. the steel industry), but still face modernized global competition (albeit whose effects are kept at bay via import tariffs reaching as high as 266%). The semiconductor industry... while there are magnificent barriers to entry and not "enough" competition, they have absolutely not been wholly insulated from innovation or competition. And innovation in fabrication is driven at a very rapid pace! So there aren't huge outsized profits to be found like there was for SpaceX. And even SpaceX needed to invent what was almost an entirely new industry (Starlink) to become truly profitable. And even trying to pull a "SpaceX" on domestic steel manufacturing would fall flat because you wouldn't capture the global market, and would still be dependent on some (potentially much lower) tariffs to compete against the very modernized factories in China, which are innovative/competitive/efficient, unlike our domestic industry. SpaceX took advantage of a very rare situation where there truly was no competition or innovation anywhere on the planet for a very long period. I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here!

packetlost 2y ago
US Telecom is not as far behind, but it's pretty far behind. Unfortunately, I think it largely competes with cellular networks and Starlink these day.
highfrequency 2y ago
Nice analysis on competitive dynamics of semiconductor industry vs. space industry in the 2000s. > I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here! Digital payments may be in a similar situation. Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they are making 80% gross margins on $30b of revenue to do what boils down to a few API calls and some fraud repayment. I doubt that they need to do much innovation to keep that moat either (in contrast to say Apple and their 30% cut of App Store revenues - they need to constantly stay ahead of Android and Windows). Curious to hear your take on what other industries at least come close to the space dynamics in 2010.

nick238 2y ago

I think rockets are insanely simple compared to silicon. The amount of research and development it takes to build a light source (hot tin plasma[1]) is extraordinary, and fabs are also probably the most complicated manufacturing facilities in the world. Tesla struggled mightily with integrating disparate auto parts manufacturers some years ago. SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person (in their nascent stages), who pushed to break norms in the conventional thinking, either "rockets can't be reused/we must spend $10B on a test campaign[2] before any part leaves the ground" and "EVs aren't cool". I don't think if Musk could design a rocket engine from scratch is relevant, but the strategic design patterns of 1) reduce requirements, 2) remove unused things, 3) simplify/optimize, 4) accelerate cycle times, 5) automate. Those points aren't revolutionary, just a more expanded "go fast and break things." The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-SpaceX thinking. [1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-plasma.html https://phys.org/news/2020-05-exceptional-euv-hot-tin-plasma... [2]: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion

kazen44 2y ago
> The computers that came out of Silicon Valley in the late 70s-into the 80s were a disruption to the old stalwarts like IBM. Though for silicon maybe I'm just trapped in that pre-SpaceX thinking. another good example of this is how VLSI in particular disrupted the mini-computer/mainframe market and made CPU's cheap enough to put them into smaller and far cheaper machines. This really shook up the old guys who where used to being total system vendors. (IBM, DEC etc). Suddenly, you could get a computer for much cheaper compared to the decade prior, and by the early to mid nineties you had guys like sun eating their lunch completely. IBM pivoted to being a services company and DEC just imploded.
- nunez 2y ago
  AFAIK IBM still completely dominates mainframe, so they're not entirely out of the systems space.
2y ago

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

TSMC has been spending $15 - $50 billion per year for years to stay on top. Estimates are it would take $200 - $300 billion just to catch up with them and little to no profitability for a decade while burning $10s of billions every year. I think the federal govt is the only entity that has that kind of money.

amluto 2y ago

Maybe one of the e-beam startups can pull it off. Aside from scaling issues, direct electron beam lithography ought to outperform optical lithography by many metrics, not to mention that there would never be costs associated with mask revisions. Here’s one of them: https://multibeamcorp.com/ https://multibeamcorp.com/ I remember touring a little research fab, maybe around 2000, that could achieve feature sizes comparable to what TSMC can do today. But they were very, very, very slow. (Fast-moving electrons are easy to make, easy to aim, and have teeny tiny wavelengths that entirely sidestep most the issues that people have with photons having obnoxiously large wavelengths. But electrons have all manner of downsides that explain why fabs spend many billions of dollars on optical lithography, one of which is that they repel each other, which makes shining a lot of them at a wafer at once quite problematic.)

numpad0 2y ago

I think lack of focus on US domestic chip capability is semi-intentional and is an eventuality. Semiconductor industry, and many other manufacturing industries too, seem to flourish at very outer edges of the free world. It could be simple as the free world not wanting manufacturing capability at home. It could be wanting only grain farms and money printers.

kazen44 2y ago
Manufacturing in the west is expensive compared to cheaper developing countries. Also, manufacturing has a massive impact on the environment, this includes semiconductor manufacturing. It has politically been impopular for a while now.
- immibis 2y ago
  Because of the resource curse - everything that isn't the best cost/benefit ratio to a country tends to become unworkably expensive. The USA's cursed resource is money - literally - it prints the world reserve currency.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow. This already happened and the startup was TSMC. Unfortunately for the U.S., it's in Taiwan.

keepamovin 2y ago

TSMC would likely never let itself be bought by a Western company. It's too vital to Taiwan's (and China's interest). The best that can be hoped is its ethical engagement with US chip players in decline. But surely it wouldn't be impossible, with enough capital and initiative, to start a US-side TSMC clone on US soil? Just like the Valley successes of the 70s and 80s prompted savvy Taiwanese investors to found TSMC. We might need to start copying back some of their playbook to chart our own course to success, as they did with ours, then exceeded it with their out strategy and ingenuity, currently.

anitil 2y ago
I don't know geopolitics well enough to know the answer to this. Is losing TSMC an existential risk to Taiwan?
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Existential depends on perspective, but TSMC is a strategic asset. Any loss of it would lead to TW losing significant leverage and being more vulnerable to external pressures.

Wytwwww 2y ago

> By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market SpaceX entered a market with hardly any competition (due to little demand) and is/was extremely reliant on government funding anyway. Semiconductors are highly competitive and you can't rely on government agencies buying most of what you manufacture. I'd argue Tesla might be much more closer to "startup entering an (somewhat)impossible market" considering how entrenched non Chinese car makers it was and how hard it was to survive in and especially start from scratch as a small company.