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The US needs to do whatever it takes to get TSMC to build not only top-tier fabs but centers of excellence here. As it stands TSMC on Taiwan, which is threatened by China, has damn near a monopoly on competitive fabrication. A single hit on Taiwan could terminally stall the entire global supply chain for top-tier chips.

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Why would Taiwan let TSMC move its operations away and thus weaken Taiwans U.S. Defense Guarantees?

Who would've thought that high-end chip manufacturing could be a (n enormous) bargaining chip.

Someone who can think long term I guess

The same people behind the Intel ME, AMD PSP, etc, etc.

Silicon backdoors are the new nukes.

It can be a mutually beneficial arrangement, perhaps letting TSMC US produce some defence-relevant silicon and providing a safe haven and nest-egg for Taiwans elites in case of invasion/unification.

That is not a beneficial arrangement for the Taiwanese population, compared to "if Taiwan fall this capability is lost, defending the island is absolutely necessary".

Taiwans international relations are pretty delicate. I’m not sure if there is a lot that they want to change right now. Controlling the manufacturing of top end microchips is exactly the kind of card a small “neutral” country with a scary neighbor wants up their sleeve. Sure you could have a US embassy and recognize their sovereignty and put a military base and park some destroyers there but that would be a serious escalation with China.

Think on decades time scale, electron based turing machines are asymptoting in design, there isn’t much space for someone to be ahead until we start making optical computers.

Apple has a huge war chest. Let's hope they use it to advance the state of the art.

Keep dreaming. Electrons interact with each other, photons don't.

Not directly, but you can do really clever things with nonlinearity, look at this recent development:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/ou-1ei110320...

Essentially, if you trap a few photons in little resonator cavities that rely on mostly all of the electrons making up the cavity, the next set of photons can pass through the cavity without interaction.

This means the light interacts with engineered electrons in a specific way to create an optical switch. This is a critical component of photonics on a chip, and was just demonstrated with Si (which is a requirement for something in the mid term).

People have been doing "neat hacks" with nonlinear optics for a long time. None of it is remotely close to being usable as a photon-controlled photon gate.

All-optical switching (i.e. photonic computing) is like fusion power generation. It's been "right around the corner" for 20 years, yet we never seem to round the bend.

It is, however, great for physicists writing grant applications.

> look at this recent development: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/ou-1ei110320...

This was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24997573

My response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012670

Summary: this is converting information from the photonic domain to the thermal domain. Heat diffuses very slowly; you won't be able to put a lot of these devices near each other and run them at usable speeds without them causing each other thermal interference.

My green laser pointer would like to have a word with you.

If I were made of photons it wouldn't be able to!

Of course it would: It's coherent light!

[But seriously, the green light of a standard green laser pointer is generated from the non-linear interaction of pairs of 1064nm photons.]

> the green light of a standard green laser pointer is generated from the non-linear interaction of pairs of 1064nm photons.

Um, no. It is caused by stimulated emission in the lasing medium, when electrons drop from a higher to lower energy level. Pairs of photons do not interact with each other.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pumping

In rare situations you might have an ion or an entire atom changing energy levels. But never just a photon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulated_emission

If you don't believe that photons are bosons I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this discussion...

> It is caused by stimulated emission in the lasing medium, when electrons drop from a higher to lower energy level.

In a typical green laser pointer a 1064nm light is produced via ordinary laser mechanisms, then 1064nm light is upconverted in a non-linear medium to 523nm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-harmonic_generation

Yes, in a medium. You also don't see a lot of conventional computers constructed without semiconductors. :)

That is impossible. TSMC will never build that fab.

TSMC is now the only reason Taiwan can count on the US coming to its defense when China invades. You can't put a price tag on that.

Well Samsung has quite a bit of top-notch fabrication, in South Korea and elsewhere. Not that what you're suggesting wouldn't still be a good idea.

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