EU countries team up for semiconductor push
reuters.com
reuters.com
If, at the time of the founding of TSMC, you had tried to get a consortium of companies, much less nations, to agree on the idea of a semiconductor foundry, you would not have been able to get agreement to do it. Consortiums can help to pool resources when everyone knows what needs doing, but even Intel has had a problem getting the latest generation of semi manufacturing going, and their problem sure wasn't a lack of resources. Sometimes the problem is the speed of innovation, and the more parties you have involved the harder it is to get agreement to try any given thing, especially if it is innovative (i.e. not certain to work).
I wish them good fortune, it would be good for the stability of the world economy not to have all the world's advanced semiconductors made in one region, but I am skeptical of whether or not this can make a big difference, no matter how much money is spent.
Europe is in this strange place where collectively account for enormous wealth and power but individually no country is a match to the big boys like USA/China when simultaneously are super unoptimised due to cultural/lingual differences.
The younger Europeans I met were all very eager to learn English, so who knows, maybe as the UK is out of the EU the English language can become the lingua franca with less resistance as it is no ones language(Well, there are the Irish but it's a small country).
At the end of the day, those large Eurpoean projects bring a lot of good. Be it political or simply keeping some talent in Europe. I am also hopeful for some competition from the UK :) Since the collapse of the USSR, finally there's a competition.
English IS the lingua franca in Europe, right now, at this moment, no question about it. Even the in remotest parts Generation Z and younger speak and understand a little bit, it is only the older folks who still remember the EU with borders are reluctant to speack anything else other than their own language.
And there are more and more people picking up a third language as they move around within the EU.
English is well suited for this lingua franca thing because at the beginner-to-mid level the syntax is simple, and you can get by with a few hundred words, much better than in other languages. Also there is a common pronounciation that is different for everyone (and reflects the mother tongue of the speaker heavily), but again, people speak slowly enough that it is possible to understand what they are trying to say.
Which cannot be said about the native speakers (coming from the UK, mostly), so the UK leaving us might actually improve the situation. No more awkward meetings where 20 people understand each other reasonably well, but not the single UK representative... (true story)
Unfortunately the majority of native English speakers (not just from the UK) fail to realise that there is an 'international' business English which has significant differences from how they would speak 'back home'.
From the faux pas I've seen in international teams, my shortlist for the English native speakers:
1. Try to speak slowly and with diction
2. Avoid idiomatic expressions
3. Avoid phrasal verbs
4. Avoid Sarcasm (!)
Do that and 90% of miscommunication in an international setting is gone.
I'm confused by this. Are you saying that the native English speaker in the room was the one having difficulty understanding what the other non-native speakers were saying?
Malta also has English as an official language, though again, it's an even smaller country. On the other hand, in neither Ireland or Malta is English the "first" official language.
https://www.politico.eu/article/english-will-not-be-an-offic...
IMEC's research mainly benefits companies like Intel, Samsung, TSMC. The only relatively local link is ASML.
I have not looked at it this way, but maybe you are right and this is the big chance for the EU. It would make the EU so much more efficient.
I mean, this is never going to happen. Name one country in history that completely switched language without external pressure (invasion or colonisation).
So instead of dealing 24 languages, EU can make English the default for everything international. Local stuff will continue with the local language but all the international dealings can be conducted in English.
That's pretty much the standart on the internet and the younger generations are already used to it. If a website, an app or a game doesn't support your language you simply use English and it's all good. From the admin side it'a also good, many people who are not native English speakers who want to build projects for the global audience would simply start with English as a base language and localise from there.
It works fine for the most international thing we have: The Internet. Should work fine for the EU too.
IIRC Geneva switched from being bilingual French German to French completely dominating public life in the space of a generation because of the influx of French Protestants because of Calvin.
Next, China is sponsoring actively similar agreement for African countries. Africa is a potentially huge market and has a lot of natural resources. It seems that Europe totally drop the ball here, the only thing they have done was to destabilize some of the African countries in the name of supporting democracy - this failed miserably everywhere, new rulers were equally undemocratic and often even more hostile towards Europe.
The same with US, they totally gave up Africa, they could not to come up with something else than mumbling about democracy and trying to impose some post-colonial trade deals. China is playing this game much, much better and, whatever I think of them, they have actually something substantial (investments other than digging diamonds and cobalt) to offer.
Europe will loose Asian and African market, India is building up its economy fast as well, so soon Europe will not have anything to sell over there too. Europe lags behind US for a long time in all aspects (education, innovation). This only means marginalization and the role of destination for cheap crap that cannot be sold on other markets.
It seems that UK politicians sort of noticed that, that's why they decided to cut ties with EU without much fear (brexit without any agreement) as they count on their influence and position in Commonwealth countries, what will give them backdoor access to developing markets and be part of the global economy.
Europe leaders really need to wake up. Stop concentrating on immaterial issues, push for more competitive economy, lower taxes, less regulations, development of innovative companies in a natural way, not buy being financed from some EU founds - this just does not work, as this creates companies that are good in acquiring those funds, not creating market value.
Common market should be available for all EU countries, not only (still) the richest ones - "innovations" like 2014/67/UE directive are not helping - this one hit less developed EU countries - it forces companies to pay local wages for workers who are delegated to work in other country. As a result the truck driver from Poland has to earn the same money as the driver in France, Holland, Germany, depending where the truck is in the given moment of time. This makes new EU countries companies less competitive. And nobody cared that it violates EU treaties and the rules of "free movement of goods and services".
Stop internal fighting with anyone who dares to have different views or elect government that EU bureaucracy does not like (Italy a few years ago, today Poland and Hungary).
There are very noble ideas like reduction of CO2, this is important, but maybe Europe just can't afford being the leader in that effort if the rest of the World just does not really care? Europe need sources of clean and cheap energy. What the biggest EU economy does? Nord Stream 2, to buy gas from Russia. Is it helping? Not really. Why can't Europe start spending funds on innovations in nuclear and fusion energy reactors?
I don't see any leaders that Europe used to have who could push Europe in the right direction, unfortunately.
I am waiting for someone who would just say: hey, maybe moving whole "The European Parliament" every month from Brussels to Strasbourg and back does not make any sense and it costs a lot of money that can be spent better.
I agree with you, that it has to focus more on innovation. Regarding quality of life for the average person I would take the stability of a Northern European country over the US or China at any time.
Examples for things Europe is also missing: Opressive governments, gang shootings, school shootings, people without healthcare, social scoring systems, polluted rivers, forced labour camps, denying of facts like evolution or climate change.
I agree that our dear leaders have to wake up - but that is not the direction they should go at all. Our taxes are already so low that many countries have problems financing taking care of basic needs like healthcare. Less regulation? This will directly, and negatively, impact the people of Europe because corporations always exploit every legal (and illegal) avenue to cut corners at the expense of the people.
How about fund university research in related technology, reduce regulation that inhibits free enterprise, open financial markets to support capital formation, lower taxes on capital gains, enforce anti-trust regulation, and cross your fingers and hope some comes from it in 20 years.
You could also spend trillions of dollars on a high tech military industrial complex. That helps also.
This is not going to do it.
How does that help semiconductor development?
1. competitive capitalism: see US
2. competitive state-orchestrated capitalism: see China, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore
Although the Chinese model doesn't seem to be too successful with regards to chip fabbing, their efforts are behind schedule.
I hope I die before that ever happens.
If we have to go back to mentioning Airbus (1970) and CERN (1954) to find successful European projects, I think this show how big of a serious problem there is in Europe no!?
P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
> P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
What factors make you want to get out? As an American who's spent a lot of time in both the US and Continental Europe (and elsewhere) I don't see any terrific suck.
EU has tons of projects with smaller or even larger scale, usually in areas that are not supposed to yield profit but has large impact to trade and life quality of the citizens, preserve peace and food security. Mostly boring stuff, EU is not a for profit company that will design the next iPhone, it's this organisation that does the stiff that individual countries or companies are not willing to do or simply cannot do but it needs to be done.
According to you, who wants to leave and why?
P.S. Raising your kids in a British college? As in a school in Britain?
And anyway, if your kid goes to college, he or she is very likely to be of legal age and have, like, opinions of their own. Yet you make it sound like you're raising cattle for yourself or something.
This is absolutely not true. English is tought in most schools simply because it's used worldwide. Also, most of the people I know are very happy to live here, and most who may have wanted to emmigrate to the US lost any desire to do so after the four years of Trump.
(a.1) it bootstraps / gets venture capital
(a.2) Leaves after 2 years for the US / gets acquired and the fiscal headquarter moves to Delaware (Stripe)
(b) Gets absorbed by an old blue chip, like Siemens, Telefonica, and dies a slow death.
(c) Becomes highly stymied by bureaucracy, and the initial momentum wanes without winning much market share (Zalando, Deliveroo, Idealista).
It's called the market of lemons problem. Only the least productive projects want to have their hands tied and financed by the government.
Not in the EU I was born and raised.
TSMC or its ecosystem is already like a consortium.
this semiwiki article point that out.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/29364...
"TSMC, for example, has a massive ecosystem of partners and customers who together spend trillions of dollars on research and development for the greater good of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. There is also an inner circle of partners and customers that TSMC intimately collaborates with on new process development and deployment. This includes Apple of course, AMD, Arm, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, and Synopsys just to name a few."
TSMC hand out their kit to their partners on their node process.
bottom line: fabless no longer just simply toss design over to the foundry.
Not saying they should move completely, but to strategize to limit their operational risks. I am sure they'd receive some nice grants from EU.
It may be that nothing much will come out of this initiative, but what choice does Europe have? Europe simply has to have control over its computing/communications infrastructure, if it wants to be truly independent.
As Macron recently said ( https://geopolitique.eu/en/macron-grand-continent/ ):
> In concrete terms, this means that when it comes to technology, Europe needs to build its own solutions in order not to depend on American or Chinese technologies. If we are dependent on them, for example in telecommunications, we cannot guarantee European citizens the secrecy of information and the security of their private data, because we do not have this technology. [...]
> The same goes for the extraterritoriality of the dollar, which is a fact and not a new one. Less than ten years ago, several French companies were penalised to the tune of billions of euros because they had operated in countries that were banned under American law. In concrete terms, this means that our companies can be condemned by foreign powers when they operate in a third country : that is a deprivation of sovereignty, of the possibility of deciding for ourselves, it weakens our position immensely.
> Unfortunately, we grasped the full implications of this when it came to the discussion on Iran. We Europeans wanted to remain within the framework of what we call the JCPOA. With America’s withdrawal, no European company was able to continue doing business with Iran for fear of sanctions from the United States. Hence, when I talk about sovereignty or strategic autonomy, I am bringing together all these issues, which at first glance seem very different.
It's not like they are cooperative like US automakers, and they have done China's will.
1) The commoditization of foundry technology. 2) The hardware equivalent of the reproducible build.
The first is necessary for nation-states to feel comfortable building and maintaining national-security infrastructure.
The second is necessary for the rest of us. If we are able to purchase an open-hardware CPU and verify its integrity through hardware/metrology checksums in addition to a software checksum, society will have made a step forward. The hardware checksums might be expressed through moire-patterning visible in x-rays, for example. The CPUs on which such technology might be developed need not be fancy - if a proof-of-concept works on cheap chips, the extension to the high end is apt to be feasible.
Aside: how did the Netherlands become such a semiconductor powerhouse?
However, the prior initiative was VHSIC and that basically produced the modern semiconductor industry (including the software tools!) in the US.
I was always under the impression that the difference between VHSIC and Sematech was simply that VHSIC threw around a LOT more money.
Micron has one in Italy that is basically shut down. I was once told that to avoid payouts, required by Italian Law, for letting employees go the factory had been put on a sort of "pause" everyone sent home but not let go. If things like this still go on I see no hope for a European electronics/Semi manufacturing industry to ever take hold.
The EU doesn't have a unified military in the same way as the states.
Intel is dying a slow death, ARM is leaving UK's control, and TSMC is slowly taken over by China. The tables are turning.
The US companies do what they do best: innovate business models and find ways to vendor lock in and own the market.
But who's been doing all the research keeping moore's law alive? Lithography?
For a country as small as the Netherlands, you can wonder if we could afford from a geopolitical point of view to be producing all the world's chips (answer: no, it would force other place to invest highly in competition out of strategic interest).
Hence the strategy of being long term profitable and to just sell the machines to everyone at the same price.
It does make it baffling why Intel is unable to produce 5nn chips with the same ASML machines TSC is using. It must be management failing Boeing style.
As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
It will end up in the pockets of friends and families of politicians that will be in "the management".
So don't expect anything from this. The future most sold chip will still be Apple Silicon or Samsung Exynos in TSC's foundry or Samsung foundry on a machine by ASML using IP from ARM and NVidia
ASML machines do not produce chips, they're just ones doing the etching. There is a ton around what you do with it, and how all the rest of the chip is produced.
They don't come with pre-programmed transistor gate templates. Each fab company has its own libraries of extremely specialized designs, doing different optimizations and tradeoffs. As mentioned plenty of times before, the consensus seems to be that Intel tried to pile up too many new improvements, which backfired. TSMC took a more incremental and safe approach. You have to appreciate that a defect that impacts high-volume yield today could have its roots in a design that was put on the roadmap years before.
> As for the rest of Europe. Im sure they can politically do this. But where will the money end up?
If H2020 is anything to go by, the majority of that money will be salaries of people working on big research projects. At worst the project outcome is useless. I don't see how any of the way these projects are structured benefit the pocket lining of managers.
At the same time you can trust that TSMC secrets are no longer secret[2]. A lot of the Taiwanese companies are actually quite bad at security despite Taiwan have some top notch security engineers. I guess it's just old industries general problems.
[1]: https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/asml-is-too-convenient-a-targe...
[2]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313599-chinese-hackers...
Can you point to some industry literature that explains this?
If this is true, it is a lot more surprising that Intel is talking about going fabless. You build a lot of expertise by rolling the dice on new techniques that don't pan out on the first iteration. People wouldn't be so pessimistic about Boeing if they had just been overly aggressive in a new airframe design, rather than failing to safely mount new engines on an old design.
I used to work for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer a long while back so am familiar with that industry. ASML works on just lithography but there are dozens of other processes needed to manufacture semiconductors. The biggest of those in market share are the US companies Applied Materials and Lam Research. They make a quite a few of those machines. So ASML is an important part but not the only part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_equipment_sales_...
FYI, a LOT of the critical components in ASML come from the US. There's no one country that can make the latest tech end-to-end relying on it's self. China seems to be trying, but it'll be inefficient.
AFAIK, ASMLs fancy EUV tech comes from a Bay Area company they acquired a while ago and not from the Netherlands.
I see reference for a company bought by ASML in California, HMI. They were bought in 2016 but the development of EUV technology predates it by many years so I find it unlikely that it had an important role in it.
Semiconductor manufacturing is really a global effort -- most device makers have fabs full of equipment mostly from US, European and Japanese suppliers. Korean equipment suppliers are also becoming more prevalent. Chinese suppliers are starting to try to gain some market share as well.
100% agree. Considering the incredible education system and engineers we have, the 2 only things restraining Europe from reaching Silicon Valley level are corrupt politicians and risk-adverse VCs.
I find it telling that it's mostly europeans who make these types of comments. The EU has tremendous barriers to labour mobility that most europeans don't even realise - differing bureaucracy and language being two of the most significant. And i cannot emphasise the bureaucratic hurdles enough when moving countries. Despite the EU crying itself hoarse about labour mobility, only around 5% of EU citizens relocate between EU countries. The majority of that 5% is people moving from poor to richer countries. The comparable number in the US is 20%.
Most rational people realise that despite all its flaws, some of the most key factors in US tech dominance are the existence of a large talent pool, all of whom speak the same language, the existence of a large market all of which operates in the same language and finally VCs willing to take on risk.
Corrupt politicians are not hobbling European tech success any more than corrupt US politicians are hobbling its success. The EU will not reach Silicon Valley's levels of success, at least not in my lifetime.
>and risk-adverse VCs.
I don't know exactly how realistic this is. But from this side of the pond [Europe], it seems like, in the US there are VCs willing to throw millions [billions sometimes] at companies which are little more than a couple of guys with a silly idea, which would get you laughed out of your bank manager's office over here, if you went in asking to borrow a few hundred euros/pounds.
- labor laws (very hard to fire people in many European countries)
- lots of disjointed small-to-medium markets (with different laws and languages) make expansion on continental scale much harder than in the US
My understanding is that Intel believed EUV would be very late. As such, it committed to Intel 10nm (TSMC 7nm) without EUV, which turned out to be too complex. At the same time, TSMC banked on EUV early. This gave them a headstart over Intel once Intel started down the EUV path.
The tables could have been reversed. EUV could have been very late, and 10nm non-EUV might have worked better. Hard to know these things when you are making plans 3-5 years ahead.
If they can execute, which I very much doubt, given the history of similar EU initiatives. The only example I can think of is Airbus. Those funds are usually funneled toward bullshit vendors that are specialised in milking such EU programs, with nothing to show for it afterwards.
I’ve met a CEO of one such company. A filthy rich scumbag that has half the government in his pocket. Ensuring that he gets the big government contracts and muscles out other companies for EU funds.
It was fortunate for Europe that the consortium had a longer-term objective as opposed to other pan-European aircraft projects like Panavia and SEPECAT.
I do agree that every continent should have a modern fab along with the supply chain to feed and repair it.
And ST Micro chips are heavenly used in IOT. Maybe it's more than the semiconductor sector and includes telecommunications, networks equipment, phone/pc CPUs.
The thing is, micro-controllers do not need advanced nodes. They don't have a lot of logic (it's all relative, but compared to a PC CPU or smartphone SoC), so would be "pad limited" on advanced nodes: the area of a chip depends on the logic (and memory), but also on the I/O pins or pads, which take area. So if you used a too advanced node for a chip with (relatively) little logic and still enough I/O pads, some die area would be wasted as the minimum area would come from the pads. It's a situation you want to avoid, as there's no point paying for a more costly finer nodes (with more leakage) to waste it by not using the silicon area.
Another factor is that micro-controllers also embed Flash on their die, to have a very integrated solution with logic, RAM and Flash storage on a single die. This puts a limit on the node density. Flash is OK down to 40nm. Then from then one must move to more advanced, and still young and costly, alternatives (MRAM).
So if your business is driven by micro-controllers, there's no real point in pushing toward node density ("low" nodes). ST does process optimization as everyone, but at "medium" nodes best suited for µC. There's no business drive for them to chase TSMC.
It's similar for other Eurpeans silicon makers: they tend to be on specific segments where going for "low" nodes like 5nm simply doesn't make sense. The relatively advanced fabs in Europe are from Intel and Global Foundries (both US). And GloFo stopped the race to advanced node at 14nm, as it was too expensive.
Makes you see ST in a new light.
Lots of better stuff in the US, until recently when the stagnation in the US made it more feasible (and politics made things scarier).
It ain't much, but it's honest work.
far from it
GER and FR are just bigger names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
However, for these other countries, they have concerns that are not strictly economic, but also related to national security and economic flexibility.
I don't know their plans, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pragmatic solution wouldn't be to co-invest in domestic fab facilities with existing incumbents who agree to comply with domestic interests as relates to sourcing, labor practices, IP sharing, local hiring, training, and environment controls.
It doesn't necessarily mean "spend money to beat TSMC at the tip of the spear". I mean, at least, I hope it wouldn't. Not at first.
If market cap was relevant you'd be, in a parallel conversation, be able to say:
> Why isn't Telsa mentioned btw ? What cars have Ford, Toyota and Mercedes built so far ?
Don't know about the others.
German companies like Zeiss build parts for e.g. ASML.
Granted, it's a smaller business than semi, but it suggests to me that a national program to strengthen an industry isn't guaranteed to be a failure.
"Isn't guaranteed to be a failure".
Sorry, I struggle to interpret sentences like this. English isn't my first language.
Please clarify?
Are you saying that "it is not definitely a failure"?
I can't figure out if it's the above, or if it is this:
"won't necessary fail"
More specifically, I'm not sure if the implication is optimistic or pessimistic.
I hope that makes sense - the nuances of English are a delightful journey of exceptions; something my programming brain struggles with at times.
An equivalent might be "has some chance of success" but that misses the sense that the presumption is failure. More verbosely, the phrase might be: "One might presume that a national program to strengthen an industry would be a guaranteed failure, but this suggests to me that it might have some chance."
The implied notion is that the governments and their agencies are usually too incompetent and anything but innovative, so programs like this are oftentimes just a way to extort the money for some and a chance to pose in front of the cameras for the politicians.
And I apologize for using unclear language. I should be thinking about a wider audience when writing in an international forum. Thanks for pointing it out!
The fact that you took the time to clarify my confusion is the ideal consequence I'd say.
To me, they can be optimistic or pessimistic based on what the baseline is. I read the GP’s post as optimistic, as they come from a perspective of these kinds of government programs always failing. However, from a baseline of these kinds of government programs often succeeding, any of the three versions would be pessimistic.
European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments.
I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and also private wealth to accumulate and grow easier than European counterparts. The American government simply allows its business and private individuals to accumulate money via off shore companies in the Caribbean. The US deliberately allows this.
Disagree. Research has consistently shown that American multinationals consistently apply better corporate management practices than their European counterparts.[1] This is especially true in IT-intensive industries.[2] This is true even when comparing American multinationals operating in Europe.
Any sufficiently large company in a globally integrated, competitive industry, is going to reap potentially large efficiency gains by replacing European management with American management.
[1]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/... [2]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...
Also, it's not like in economics/business science there's a European vs American distinction in publications. The European Economics Association is quite small and most European departments hire out of the American association's market, for instance
Their biggest tech companies are Spotify and Skype. That's pretty underwhelming given that Spotify's biggest innovations are in product development and Skype became a subsidiary of an American company within 2 years of its existence.
Additionally, the 2 companies that seem to have industry tech talent: UK and Sweden, are not part of this deal.
The tech scene in mainland Europe operates completely differently from what you might be used to from Silicon Valley, but there is lots of stuff going on. If you only look at the European car manufactures and the endless amount of small-to-medium sized businesses involved in the supply chain. Lots of stuff going on.
If the criteria of tech innovation is a cloud-based xAAS then the list will be unfortunately short.
The semiconductor push was really expected for a longer time already and is (I think) obviously part of the aspirations in the strategic autonomy continuum. If the roles were reversed, that is, EU with some Asian countries owned and controlled the majority of all chip fabrication, it would make perfect sense for USA to start chip production of its own on its own soil.
25% of the worlds research is done in the EU and a lot of that leads to something. Sounds to me like you look for software for the average Windows user only. ESA and CERN alone leads to huge innovations.
It was the first practical videocall software and pioniered the niche. It did more to improve my life than all social networks combined. I backed it with hard cash, paying for Skype premium or whatever it was called.
Then in 2011 MS bought it, and best as I can tell, has delivered no real improvement for the consumer.
The client was rewritten twice, now it's in JS, glitchy, slower and serves adds.
I think the world would have been better off with independant Skype, Zoom should have never become a thing.
Source: All other industries in Europe.
Giants in Europe, there are a lot more
Only Americans think the opposite, i wonder why..
And speaking of market, Europe is a big player, https://www.vgchartz.com/ console sales speak for itself
Stop being brainwashed
ARM is in the UK and not the EU. It's owned by a Japanese company and soon an American one.
Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications. [1] Some European countries are ahead when measured per capita, but only some and that's not an important figure here.
The rest I'm unsure about, but I would like to note that as a market China would easily dwarf Europe. As China becomes richer Europe will become less important in comparison.
[0] Page 10 at https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:f7982217-cfde-4fdc-8ba... (PDF)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4566288/#!po=13...
Steel isn't a relevant metric these days. Almost all developed countries can make as much as they need. China needs and produces more because they have to catch up.
> Does Europe do that well in pharmaceuticals? It looks to me like the US is leading in biomedical research publications.
I would hope that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann-La_Roche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstraZeneca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanofi
etc. aren't just twiddling their thumbs :-)
Except that ARM has many offices outside the UK developing important IP. Their Mali Bifrost and Valhall GPU architectures are mainly developed in Scandinavia by former Falanx Microsystems of Norway, aquired by ARM in 2006, hence the norse naming.
People often throw around numbers like this without any context. In the other thread people were trying to judge economics of electric powerplants by total weight.
Why is this a relevant metric? Why would you not expect China, which is 2x the population and is building infrastructure to refine more steel? Like they also produce more food and plastic, so what?
It also is hardly correlated with wealth, wages or GDP. There has been a glut of steel on world markets for the past few years.
Are the kinds of steel produced even comparable, i.e. only recently China could produce ballpoint pens
www.bbc.com/news/amp/business-38566114
(Airbus has pretty heavy government involved, to be fair.)
Even if it is a standalone company, it'll be vying for that dank european subsidy.
“ Press release7 December 2020
Member States join forces for a European initiative on processors and semiconductor technologies ”
Appreciate your cynicism but maybe Brexit along with competition from China, the Far East and the United States will focus European minds. Let's not forget the many EU-wide research and development initiatives that are successful. I can provide a list if you so wish.
See: Acquisition of Alstom by GE in France.
Did they pivot to other industries in Finland? If so, which industries? Were they valued as much in the other industries or did they take significant pay cuts? Or did they have to pack up and move elsewhere where they would be valued? If so, where?
I'm asking since I met a few ex-Nokia people looking for work in Switzerland/Germany/Austria years ago.
If anyone knows more I'd like to find out please.
Basically they went to work to other companies and spun up lot of new ones.
There are lots of small and medium sized companies in Finland that are operating in technology and hardware.
I presume a majority of them had similar salaries as earlier. Engineers have never been well payed in Finland and Nokia knew the market rate very well. It rewarded few individuals very well, but the general salary range was probably nothing special.
Finland has lots of engineering activity - always has had. The problem has been marketing this knowhow to external markets.
Explosion of Nokia was a blessing for Finland. It was too large for a country this small, and it started domineering investments in all levels of economy.
From geek consumer point of view it is a shame their engineering was run down by poor management.
But the company was fixed on this course from it's early years. It basically trusted on two things - that radiotechnology would be it's secret sauce for all eternity, and the main point of competition would be it's logistics network.
When the radiotechnology used in handsets became commoditized, China basically levelled the playing field regarding logistics and outsourcing, and the software development inside the company remained a second tier effort, it could have not ended any other way (in retrospect).
https://venturebeat.com/2019/05/10/surviving-nokia-how-oulu-...
https://www.eetimes.com/life-after-nokia-how-finlands-radio-...
I'm not sure we'll see a similar size global consumer hardware company from Europe anytime soon.
I would love to hear the most innovative, relevant mid-size/large class leading hardware companies HN readers can name in Europe.
imec, ASML, Graphcore, ST, Infineon, NXP, ARM (for now) - what else?
Isn't HMD R&D like "across the street" from the old Nokia building?
Also, the telecom equipment side of Nokia still exists as it was, only the phone division went into the whole Microsoft clusterfuck.
Edit: clarification.
In information technology, ARM is ostensibly British but key parts of their portfolio were Euro collabs that became acquisitions or whatever (Keil, Adelante, EuroMIPS etc.)
In space technology there's a fairly strong Euro theme. E.g. i live near Glasgow, Scotland. There's a few really cool Space firms here but the larger ones appear to have strong collaborative elements with other firms in Europe (and in some cases, ownership models now that span Europe).
In farming and food supply there's a lot of large impactful collaboration across Europe.
Transport and logistics is another one where specialist firms, a lot of them Dutch for some reason, have all sorts of unexpected collaborations.
In Scotland we have a few small parts of Europe's wind turbine manufacturing industry but that's grown thanks to some euro collaborations.
There's quite a lot if you scratch the surface.
Which is still European, sure there is Brexit on the horizon, but even then it would still be European just not European Union.
ESA is a thing. ITER is a thing. But mainly all those small international projects that simply would be too niche or small for a single country or market. Im talking about stuff like wave power startup, on land fishfarms, salvage operations in the baltic, cofinancing of highways (or powerlines so that green energy may find its way across the union), et cetera..
Counterpoint: processors have gotten so good at extracting ILP from a sequential ISA that I wonder how much benefit you would gain from a dataflow ISA. The downside is that it would require to completely rethink and redo the software stack. (efficient par to seq is just as hard as efficient seq to par)
We already have x86-64 (guarded licenses), ARM (less guarded but still uncertain) and SPARC, Power, RISC-V (open source).
Should a new ISA be the focus of major economic plans? Maybe if one of the objectives is protectionist ISA licensing, but that seems like an insular mistake.
An ISA ecosystem is a lingua-franca, so choosing a well established one is the most sensible basis for growing different semi/IT industry flows around.
In terms of discovering new technical benefits, new ISA's should be explored in academic circles and startups where they won't waste everyones time and money on boondoggles.
This might apply less to microcontrollers.
edit: added link.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/14/arm-co-founder-starts-save...
We've all seen it and already know the end of the movie.
Good luck to them, but I wouldn't build any kind of business plan based on the predicted outcome.
As an European working in a sector very close to the semiconductor industry my main reason is that I don't want to live in the US/Canada.
I guess if someone can suffer the US' shitty conditions, I guess there's nothing stopping them from going there... except for the US's stringent immigration policies. Can't just hop over the pond to go work there, and I'm fairly sure it's easier for a US citizen to work here than the other way around.
Of course, that too is deincentivized thanks to US tax laws (still having to pay income taxes even though you don't live or work in the US).
Some people enjoy that of course. I do find the working environment better in the US, and I enjoy my work, but on most other parameters it’s inferior.
- US specifically starts to feel weird for non US citizens
- There are immigration laws
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
- http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/life-satisfaction/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
- https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
While none of these rankings are perfect they show clear trend that some of the European countries are doing better than US.
Also you should keep in mind that money is not everything. (Which is why we have the above stats anyway). People have friends and family and a way of life that they might not be willing to abandon. As other have mentioned before migration to US is non-trivial and requires quite and effort. In contrast to that you can move much easier within EU. Which is what is happening anyway - if you want high salary you go to Switzerland / London / Paris or any other high income area and you can do so without being treated as an immigrant.
Don't be so quick to assume that people want to move to and live in US/Canada.
Eg. in France if you make 60-80k and live anywhere other than Paris you're doing great.
For the top end of talent there's always freelancing, with a different, higher band of earning levels.
One guy I'm close with, and we've talked about our salaries.
I make 200k My friend in Europe makes 30k.
The difference is astounding.
For the US, the thing that stops them is the incredibly hard immigration process. The US is a very protectionist labour market. I've looked into it myself as a Greek, and it's very fucking hard.
you want researchers, and EU has ton of them ;)
It'll be a stepping stone toward getting a job at the big players.
At best, they'll keep the B players around because they won't pass the stricter bar for immigration.
What something like this needs is a leader driven by a huge personal product/technology belief and vision, backed up by personal technical capability, and his/her ass on the line. Versus what I could see is some generic credentialed CEO being put in to the top position to "manage", with little penalty for failure.
> It is a very crowded field and very difficult to catch up to current leaders.
With more than 50% market share it's the least crowded field there is, basically a monopoly formed by a very high barrier of entry, because not everyone has billions to risk on complex long term projects, private investors prefer shorter term returns. But it doesn't mean it's difficult to catch up or that the leader produces something good, on the contrary, monopoly means low quality, slow innovation, high price, easy to catch up by just throwing money at it, it just takes government involvement to do it.
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/joint-dec...
List of EU projects with associated legislations and projects: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/
Go Europe, we need an alternative to compete.
The right game is building end to end systems (ala what Apple does) where semiconductors are an important ingredient in that.
My .2$
One aspect that is less explored is the actual depth and breadth of the semiconductor supply chain. Moreover, that supply chain is bound with technical expertise at every level. You may have the fastest car at Le Mans, but you're not going to win without the best driver.
Chip design starts with design software. The most sophisticated software is made in the US. To use it, you need a variety of highly experienced designers of the right ilk (think neurosurgeon vs. cardiologist), supported by program management, organizational management, test and validation engineering and other disciplines. This synthesis of expertise and tools and equipment has to be at the highest level of capability all the way up and down the supply chain before you can get a 7nm chip to boot up.
Additionally, there are about 40 different types of process equipment used in chip fabrication. Every one of them requires dozens of product development engineers to design and build. Those teams rely on decades of both personal and organization experience to build on before they can produce tools that can, for example, apply a material like, say, tungsten, to a 12" slice of pure silicon in a layer that can be precisely measured in atoms, uniformly, across the 'wafer'.
Of all the 40 process tool types, the most complex work of science is the lithography tool made by ASML in the Netherlands. This thing produces the light needed to print the chip circuits at 7 nanometer geometries by emitting droplets of molten tin into a vacuum chamber and hitting the droplets with a 25,000 KW laser that vaporizes the tin and produces the light. It fires at 50KHz[0]. ASML has spent more than 20 years, employing 100s of engineers and scientists, in order to produce this wonder. There is no company (and certainly no government) on Earth that can catch up to ASML in any reasonable amount of time.
Next in the chip production chain is called 'Assembly' where the wafers are cut into individual chips and packaged into what you'd recognize. That node in the chain has it's own set of non-trivial equipment and expertise.
All of this is to say that there are vulnerabilities all up and down the supply chain, bouncing all over the planet. No one country has the technology to build state of the art chips from both the supply chain and expertise standpoints all within its own border. As soon as a nation has a deficit of one aspect of the overall technology required, that nation is no self sufficient.
$533 billion for the entire semiconductor industry seems small.. That's like .25 Apples.
I like to think of it like this: if magically the whole semi-conductor industry vanished overnight the world would be much poorer. We would be in a crisis. If magically the whole of Apple vanished overnight, we'd still have smartphones and laptops and tablets and basically all the tech that Apple makes.
Just goes to show that what the market values and what is actually valuable in aggregate are not metrics that are in tune.
At the start of this century, some famous American investment bank (Citigroup ?) came up with a report that said that in the near future (today) stocks which are luxury items will grow much faster than stocks that are essentials. And that is exactly what seems to have happened. The report said this was due to increasing economic inequality. Basically the middle classes of the first world have money to spare so they buy Apple Iphones and Tesla cars. The poorer people have less money and none to spare.
Apple's recent annual revenue was ~275B.
So that would make proposed annual US federal funding in semiconductor R&D like .0016 Apples
You're right – when you put it like that it does appear very small.
† (Oct 15, 2020) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/semiconductor-indus...
The only well-known company that might have made semiconductors was ASEA, which might have made some thyristors before disappearing 33 years ago, after the fusion with Brown Boveri.
Now ABB has the headquarters in Switzerland. It has various sites in Sweden, but so have some US companies, without any of them being considered as Swedish.
Even the Eastern Block countries, during the Soviet hegemony, produced more diverse semiconductor devices than ever done in Sweden.
The most technically advanced countries in semiconductors in Europe, before the global fashion of mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs that obliterated most traditional semiconductor companies starting around 1999, were (in no particular order):
Netherlands (Philips) Germany (Siemens) France (Thomson CSF) Italy (SGS-ATES) UK (Plessey and a few others)
Relics of the former European semiconductor companies can be found now mostly in Infineon, NXP and ST, but all these present companies are the results of long chains of mergers and acquisitions of various companies spread all over the world, so it is difficult to define them as belonging to Europe, US or to any other specific country or group of countries.
Sweden is ahead in some things related to tech, particularly their own version of startups. Spotify remember, is related to the fact that Sweden is a pop-music powerhouse - there is definitely industry synergy there.
They are generally well organized for a small country, they make Jet Fighters (quite a feat) which is also related to the fact they are a few degrees more 'sovereign' in that they are not part of NATO and have historical antagonisms with a much bigger power, Russia. They had one of the world's largest air forces back when individual fighters were only the price of a few cars.
Those synergies resonate with one another but I don't think it's in silicon.
I feel like there is a need for a fundamental shift in mindset in Europe..
These kind of startup focused news sites are quite biased towards B2C/C2C software/*tech places, as most of their businesses need the public attention to succeed. Most B2B startups don't care much about outreach to these outlets, as most of their clients don't read it.
Only if you have a very narrow definition of tech. What about Infineon, ST, Siemens, Schneider, Dassault Systèmes, NXP, etc.
The startup scene is less vibrant: valuations are typically lower and funding is not as easy to get as it is in Silicon Valley, but you shouldn't discount established players that innovate and mature startups.
How about SAP, Capgemini, Atos, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Vodafone, ASML?
Not hip enough for you?
[Edit] I mean I don't know why I waste the time arguing with useless commies online.
They have a long history of failures and disappointments and still stick to this emotional garbage ideas, at this point it's not something I can fix since I am not a psychologist.
It's kind of amusing that HN has such slanted audience, given that startup funding is the biggest exponent of hypercapitalism.
Isn't that method exactly how the silicon valley, and with it companies like Intel, were created? By the US DoD directing money from the top?
They will probably have a similar realization about software in a decade or two.
Also in the whole article there is no mention of funding. It is probably a tech sharing and licensing agreement more than anything.
Consider that in the US, the decisions are also 'made from the Top' but often from large investment firms that decide where the money goes.
When an industry is small and new, it's more open.
But for commercial aircraft like for regular airlines, there is zero hope unless the government coordinates it. There's no 'hey, invest $20 Billion in my startup, maybe I will have customers some day'. No - you need a national strategy with the airlines buying in.
That said - concerns over central planning are real - not so much in impetus, but in execution.
If Europe could snap it's fingers and for $10 Billion just have competitors to Intel just magically appear - it would be a good investment. Very good.
But unlike roads, tunnels and bridges, you can't just buy innovation.
It's going to take the right leaders, the right investments, the right kinds of innovation.
Which is extremely hard.
I don't know the industry but it may may more sense to come at it from the periphery: possibly by creating design and fabs for more common chips.
Or maybe it makes sense to come at it from an academic/open angle, and get the top Universities to publish open source designs that if industry buyers want, they can get subsidies for fabs.
Finally ... the other parts of the ecosystem are not there as much: there is no more Nokia. There is nobody making computers. There is no 'OS' to guide deep integration.
I think it's reasonable to be wary of this kind of top down sentiment as it's risky and not preferable, and prone to fluffy words without action, at the same time, it's reasonable to address the issue.