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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

> Second, would have it been cheaper to manufacture somewhere more trustworthy (another country?) instead of spending all this time/money on your anti-hack systems?

I'd like to know this too. Has the West completely lost the ability to mass produce microchips at even a reasonable cost for financial applications?

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America has fabs, both old and leading edge, but ask industry giants like Gemalto to even bother to manufacture chips anywhere outside of Taiwan, assemble the final product outside of China.

They will never do that, because they look for the cheapest solution.

The bigger the company, the less it cares about things other than cost. This is why Mediatek and Broadcom can usurp the market of network SoCs, while making products with atrociously bad support. I personally dealt with both, and say that they wholely match their popular culture image.

I don't know how it is with USA, but for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres, for as long as they get them made inside the country.

Gemalto manufactures and assembles many, many products in Europe. The entire European security cluster won't use anything else. I know because I played a part in smart card development there. And all of that was from Europe. Wafers, chips, holograms, mag stripes...

What about Japan? I know they've lost most of their semiconductor business as well, but they still have some capacity no?

I’m under the impression that China does not make chips, but they do final assembly cheaper and faster than everyone else.

I don’t know if any companies do PCB manufacturing and assembly outside of China in large numbers.

Not exactly, PCB assembly is super cheap everywhere thanks to propagation of chipshooters, what makes the cost go up is logistics - what do you do after you populate the board for your part? Ship it across the world, or to another factory behind the corner?

That largely depends on the size of your board and the total number you want to ship. As soon as you reach full truck loads or full container loads that additional shipping cost is marginal on a board level.

But still, that complicates the whole operation immensely in comparison to "just go next city block"

You are right in a certain way. What increases with distance is lead time and as result inventory. Both of which are off set by volume. Cross-border adds customs issues. Complexity is not that much of a problem nowadays, maybe it never was. You are right that all of this oblyakes sense with large numbers, small scale production is better done locally as a rule of thumb.

Sony production lines assemble Raspberry PIs in the UK:

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3014651/sonys-penc...

That is true I think because of what happened to ZTE earlier this year.

I don't know that.

> for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres

Well, if your chips are bigger and slower, you will need more chips and mounts/packaging to place them. If you need more chips then the weight of missile/plane/tank will be increased and available space decreased.

So at the end, the 'uncaring' military will receive a weapon which is worse than competition.

All thanks to an outdated chip.

It's not the chips that are the problem. Most of Intel's fabs are in the US, and their assembly sites are in a number of countries.

I think people should know how stark the differences for assembly in the US are vs outside of it. Something that costs, at low prototype volumes mind you, $20 in China for a dozen boards or so, would run hundreds of dollars in the US and still take the same amount of time. As it scales up, the ratio might improve, but these aren't like 10%-20% differences.

This is not microchips, this is basic PCB assembly

But I'd guess momentum is hard to change.

Offshoring has its costs.

It's the unknown unknowns that get you.

> Has the West completely lost the ability ...

at first I had the same thought. but i have to question how securely the same manufacturing could be done in a US plant.

the US employee base has its fair share of desperate, ethically challenged individuals. and plenty of incentives to make a quick buck could be offered here too. idk.

The consequences if US citizens or residents get caught engaging in espionage for a foreign government are go-to-jail-for-years serious.

And it's not white collar resort prison ... no no no!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBzvMLW0ii4

ok. a fair point.

OTOH, given US law enforcement's low efficiency what are the chances of being caught? and what if it's merely corporate espionage?

finally, the US is an open society with strong personal freedom guarantees builtin. what if the perpetrator has ties to a foreign country and simply leaves the US after they've installed the vulnerabilities?

Death penalty.

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