EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology
eetimes.eu
eetimes.eu
ASML is the world's largest photolithography systems manufacturer and the only one producing extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These EUV scanners are expensive as hell. Last years model costs $120 million per piece and you need 10-15 of them for TSMC gigafactory.
TWINSCAN NXE:3400C (7 and 5 nm nodes, >170 wafers per hour) is probably the most expensive machine in the world.
The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money.
And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.
They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor.
Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.
You might have the best car design in world, but if all could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might work better.
Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.
Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.
Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”.
As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.
I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.
[1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...
Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.
The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.
It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or not, the future of the economy is with the politically preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans. Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation, insurance and so on is for the peasants.
As a mediocre analogy, you don't expect to be able to write good novels because you got your hands on a printer.
I think much of the relevant general-purpose chip design knowledge we had (ARM) left the EU this morning. I don't yet see any other chip company (eg NXP etc) suddenly be the next Intel or AMD yet (let alone the next Apple).
The larger ARM Cortex cores are still designed to a large degree in Southern France.
How does this matter? Do you think ARM won't license their IP to European chip makers?
It's the inability for SMIC to obtain EUV lithography equipment for their sub-7nm process technologies from ASML that prevents China from getting into high-end semiconductors, not the domestic microarchitecture know-how.
As long as the US has the world’s only reserve currency and as long as the EU economy - especially the productive bit in the North - is built on exporting to the all-powerful US consumer, the EU has very little leverage in its affairs with the US.
The final word has not been spoken. Construction of Nord Stream 2 has recently been restarted despite the US threatening with sanctions.
Only a fool would tie themselves to China as things stand right now.
Here is an interesting question: how long will it take China to catch up? I predict 10 years! The Chinese government sees a leading position in semi manufacture as being of extreme strategic importance. There are several reasons why I think China will succeed other than government strategy: the size of the Chinese market (already the biggest processor market in the world), the ease with which Taiwanese semi expertise can be brought to China (legally, salaries are just higher in Shanghai than in Taipei).
Does that even marginally matter?
Even after Brexit, both EU, and UK will remain open economies, unless you believe a conspiracy theory that Boris is a closet communist.
Also, the European Union is heavily betting on the RISC-V for its future hyperscale HPC systems[2][3][4].
I would believe that next-gen European CPU budget declaration is part of this dynamic. And I really hope it will work out.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-semiconductors-...
[2] https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/project/epi/
[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2297-8747/25/3/46/pdf (PDF)
[4] https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/10/europes-homegrown-hp...
Changing where the foundation is incorporated doesn’t change where this R&D happens.
Also Switzerland isn’t in the EU.
Regarding the EU heavily betting on RISC-V, what gives you confidence that this will work? The history of EU funded projects to catch up with the US in AI, in cloud computing (like GAIA-X), in quantum computing, in the space race? HPC is not a mass-market, how should this niche be economically viable to amortise the huge cost of processor development? HPC in the US (and other countries) is often connected to military spending (although this is not always openly expressed). Processor development is extremely expensive, to the extent that Intel is now struggling to finance catching up with TSMC's fab process. Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity? ARM is about to be swallowed by Nvidia, and a lot of Arm's micro-architecture development is done in the US already. Now compare the micro-architecture design capacity with that in China (the world's biggest processor market).
I really hope it will work out.
Given 40 years of failure to catch up with the US, and now China, I am sceptical! I expect this to end up like previous EU attempts at catching up: the monies available will be much smaller than originally announced (by at least an order of magnitude), spent over much longer a time-frame, but more importantly, mostly flow to existing EU-based companies that are good ad lobbying, e.g. Siemens, and French conglomerates.
Another prediction: China will soon dominate RISC-V, since they are now forced, by US sanctions, to move away from Arm. I cannot see big Chinese processor companies moving to local ISAs such as Loongson. Alibaba announced a RISC-V processor at ICSA this year [2]. The big US players (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) have much less of a need to move to RISC-V.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
[2] https://conferences.computer.org/isca/pdfs/ISCA2020-4QlDegUf...
Of course. It also removes unnecessary anxiety for the EU that the next ruling power in the US (or elsewhere) may eventually attempt to impose sanctions on the export of the IP. Switzerland, as part of Schengen and Union's single market, fits nearly perfectly into the narrative of European consolidation.
> what gives you confidence that this will work? [...] Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity?
I can't see the future, hence I have no confidence. But I express cautious optimism for the following reason: the issue of EU's dependence on some crucial technologies from the third parties is obvious, but there's no direct and quick solution to solve it. The EU can't just turn into venture capital Mecca overnight, the same holds for becoming a low tax heaven. However, the problems/challenges are there, and they must be addressed in the best way under the given circumstances.
The EU has a well-established practice of funding R&D in large areas with non-specific goals or metrics, however this approach is not unique to the EU, it's crucial to the bloc to nourish the interbloc integration and establish logistics between the disparate parts of the market and institutions. It doesn't always lead to unexpected discoveries or breakthrough ventures, but in general it manages the integration task quite well. Which, in turn, contributes to the development of a rich ecosystem. As a tech entrepreneur in the EU, I'm not exactly happy with current affairs, but satisfied with the recognition of my industry's difficulties and proposed attempts to solve them. A failed venture with some new sprouts at worst case, a tangible breakthrough at best.
So far, the EU holds leading position in the lithography systems (ASML). The EU is competitive in radio (Ericsson, Nokia) and embedded (NXP, Infineon, STM) semi manufacturing. There're many blank spaces on the European vertical technology stack, but it's far from a blank slate. This whole commitment is about EU pushing homegrown processor sovereignty across the entire stack. AFAIU, the project puts the focus on HPC as the only specific target platform that needs to be manufactured, but the developments around this project should lay the ecosystem for the boost of the industry as a whole.
Companies such as Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Amazon[3], Google[3], and especially fresh start-ups like Nuvia[4] and Ampere[5] — are working on new ARM-based CPU designs, while SiFive[6] and some others on RISC-V. Also, I'd speculate that AMD and Intel will have to consider switching from the X86 in the foreseeable future. Now is the best possible time for venture into the semiconductor industry in the past few decades. I don't underestimate the complexity of the task. But perhaps a fraction of €145bn would be enough to plant a seed of a viable EU-based CPU semi enterprise; or is it definitely a doomed undertaking, eh? Maybe that French SiPearl[7] or some other company will take chances, we shall see.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_Silico...
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/google-wants-to-dump...
[5] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n...
[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sifive-tech-idUSKCN2571UL
Worth noting the Sophia Antipolis arm design centre in France continues to exist. It works on some of the big A-class cores (The A75 for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A75).
Though whether arm would get involved in this endeavour is another question. They have a significant physical IP portfolio: https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-physical and associated skillsets (I think at least some of this is UK based, not entirely sure how much) so would be a good partner to have and I suspect arm would like to see arm cores coming out as test designs rather than RISC-V cores. Of course in the wake of brexit potentially not a partnership the EU wants politically! UK government would spin it as UK company plays key part in major EU initiative with significant funding awarded. EU would spin it as EU brings in major global semiconductor company to new semiconductor initiative.
[1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d....
ASML has plans to get into sub 1nm level. 2nm and 1.5 nm is already in the pipeline.
The technology high-NA EUV (high Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet) becomes just insane. Mirror manufacturing process requires atomic scale corrections and the whole metrology is moved into vacuum.
The limit for mass production is measuring and calibration. The measurement accuracy is comparable or exeeding Large Hadron Collideror gravitational-wave astronomy. The speed (wafers per hour) must eventually slow down, requiring more machines and making the process more expensive. Then Moore's law finally dies due to the cost.
A nitpick: You are greatly underestimating the precision in gravitational-wave astronomy.
ASML's atomic scale corrections are approximately one billion times larger than the fraction-of-a-proton's width displacements measured by LIGO.
From https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts:
> At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBdMRUG69uc
So many disciplines of engineering going into this machine!
And not a small part to gigantic speculative expectations around tech sector in general, which seem to have crossed the Atlantic this year.
So much speculative interest has never been a good thing as we know.
Unfortunately no. A number of pieces of military hardware produced in bigger numbers will leave even that pricetag in the dust.
The USS Ford is said to cost around 13 billions. I wouldn't call that "reasonable" :)
https://usadefensenews.com/2020/11/13/meet-the-us-navys-13-b...
The declaration essentially said "one oil platform, unpackaged".
There was a suitable tariff code for it, but the value of it was so great the electronic customs declaration system couldn't handle all the digits.
Instead they had to write the value as a free-text comment.
I have to say though, from Wikipedia, sounds like there are only a few of them? Sort of one-offs, each of them (so to speak). I kind of think that might disqualify them.
Like calling the ISS the most expensive machine?
(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
The advantage that the EU has is in fact ASML. No company can make the 5nm litho systems today, and catching up with the decades of R&D they've invested is not feasible. They are the greatest achievement of science and technology on the planet. [0]
The strategy that can work is for the EU to partner with TSMC to build a foundry in the EU that produces at the node they want to intercept (2 nm?). Then, make a business arrangement that puts European scientists and engineers into high-value roles. That would enable the EU to develop the technical skills and keep China from locking it up.
The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.
Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)
When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.
This was quite a classic move during the "privatisation" in '89-90.
The true reason for those who wonder was the fact that ALFA was making electronics for MiG, Su, Tu and for missiles. I had family and friends working there btw.
One country took the radical/liberalist path, another chose the one that doesn’t tarnish the economy.
As much as I hate libertarians today, in 1990s they did an awesome job.
Don't forget that prior the collapse of the USSR, ukraine was not an independant country from russia, while poland has always been "independant" during socialist times.
I mean, sure, many factories were not competitive since they were highly subsidized and faced no competition on internal market. But USSR had an immense R&D potential and engineering education was top-notch.
I know this first-hand because it has happened to my country each and every time an US backed president was elect. It's happening right now, they're attempting to sell our only semiconductor company.
The Soviet Union was destroyed from within much the same way the 2010s arab springs/ukraine and more recently also tried with HK.
The Soviet Union collapsed because of massively broken economy. That's just basic science. They exported oil and imported grain. Russia imported GRAIN for gods sake. Then oil prices collapsed. Next? They did nothing and just ate through the resources until they were no more.
And then 'evil liberals/evil west destroying the great country' happened, when finally USSR had no money to pay for the social obligations and for massive military.
This are the undisputed facts, supported by a vast trove of internal documents from the late USSR and first years of the Russian Federations.
A monograph by Egor Gaidar [1] is an excellent source referencing tons of the original documents.
Sorry for Russian, not sure this is available in English anywhere.
I get that it's easier to think that source of our problems is some evil mastermind and conspiracy. But think of the Occam's razor — this is explained much easier by sheer incompetency and stupidity and no checks and balances to mitigate them.
1. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Гибель_империи_(монография)
Let's remind that full-on opening of the market was not what the west promised, but it's what they pushed for once the reforms passed a point of no return and they wouldn't take "no" for an answer. Propaganda is what won the cold war.
But let’s look at other ex-Soviet countries. Territorial quarrels and dumb nationalism were unthinkable back then. Look at Azerbaijani and Armenians, ethnic Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine, Georgia...
USSR could've easily continued its existence if it went full "North Korean." Union's army had no problem to force populace to eat grass in case of a complete economic collapse.
I attribute the single most important contribution to Union's collapse to US funding exchange visits for hundreds of USSR's senior officials, and completely nullifying their will to struggle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728237
The very same thing has happened to China, and Xi is trying hard to undo it.
His message of absolute committment to, and inreversability of "opening up" don't mean anything to 99% of ordinary citizens.
Whom he addresses these messages to are not ordinary Chines, but elites whom he tries to convince to the best of his abilities to not to drop the ball on him, and the system.
Those resources they ate through -- when were they accumulated? I find it hard to believe that they became a superpower by just coasting on the wealth that existed in 1917.
in 1940 they went toe to toe with the worlds greatest industrial super power (or second greatest - depending how you count) in war and won.
The economic development achieved by the Soviet Union in the first half of its reign was incredible.
They made the best rockets, fighter planes, super computers.... But they never made a TV with a remote control.
That's a regurgitation of a great lie. Krusev indicated in his memoire that economic data of Stalin's years was defying kindergarden level arithmetics, was utter garbage, and he gave few convincing examples of that, and here, I would believe him.
Union's economy saw few ups, and downs during its existence, and those under Stalin, and Breznev were not ups by any extend of imagination.
Do not rely on state propaganda, look at the results
The "massive industrial advantage" was nothing not to be expected from the most resource rich country on the planet.
Yet, the country was, by all accounts, from both most staunch communist party sources, and contemporary anticommunists, completely incapable of running during the crisis, and "all in" strategy of manufacturing one gun, one tank, one shell, one plane in massive amounts was a result of desperation, not industrial might.
How is making more tanks, guns, and aeroplanes done on desperation and not industrial might?
I think ideology has gotten in the way of reason!
Some facts from Wikipedia: At the opening of operation Barbarosa the Red Army had four to one advantage over the Nazis in tank numbers.
By 1941 lend lease tanks were 6.5% of Soviet tanks, about a quarter of medium and heavy tanks.
Where do you get "up to 40%" from?
Even if true my point still stands.
According t Alex Nove in 1900 there was not a metal lathe in all of Russia. They could de clinker locomotives, but not make a gear box. By 1941 they were out stripping the Germans.
That is the greatest economic achievement of the twentieth century.
(IMO the Bolsheviks were sadistic psychopaths, but credit where credit is due)
Again, you are regurgitating a myth.
I would not doubt the 4 to 1 outgunning of USSR vs. Germany. Indeed Union's army was incomparably materially superior due to decades long total dedication to military buildup, but that does not preclude the fact the industry was still barely going, and that this material advantage melted like butter within first months of war.
"probably" does not cut it.
The lie is the Soviets were bad economic managers. They pulled off the most incredible feat in industrialising their economy in less than fifty years, more liek twenty five useful years.
The millions of starved peasants, slaughtered "class enemies", exiled dissidents.... They were there too. Not pretty, not moral, not desirable, but incredible achievement nonetheless.
I am not sure, how in the context of such a system "efficiency" can be measured. But in raw capacity there has never been anything like it until the Chinese in the nineties and naughties with their own millions of starved peasants, slaughtered "class enemies", exiled dissidents....
Yes, by throwing ten million of their own citizens at the problem.
They won because Hitler ran out of bullets before Stalin ran out of targets.
It. was. not at all.
But never could make consumer goods. When the economy had to pivot to a consumer lead one, they found that all the economists with different ideas had been shot....
Which was a direct consequence of surreal levels of corruption, incompetence, and double digit percentages of country's GDP coming, and going out of existence annually as a result.
If anybody are to call names, those would've been the most hardcore brezhneviks themselves.
This is published in English as [1] Yegor Gaidar, "Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia".
TLDR is maybe this [2] write-up of a talk, 8 pages, very interesting.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Empire-Lessons-Modern-Russia...
[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20070419_Gaid...
This can't happen in EU today.
aerospace, energy, semiconductors,
telecom, drugs/biotech
There are a variety of ways to cultivate a domestic industry, govt committees directly investing doesn’t seem like the leading candidate can. Trade barriers and state sponsored industrial partnerships.
Generalising from 40 years of EU history, I have little confidence. The top US and East Asian processor and semiconductor companies all are extremely successful in the marketplace, in addition to consuming government subsidies. Fostering a competitive market has not been the EU's forte. Indeed the EU narrates this funding as a need to address a "market failure" [1]. I feel that this is one-dimensional, bur entirely predictable from the structure of EU decision making.
Just today, at midnight, the EU lost ARM and DeepMind as domestic industries.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52...
It raises to prominence after becoming a Google wholly owned subdiary. I have repeated multiple times in other comments that DeepMind's success is at least built on top of Google's tech and capital.
Interesringly, Google's tech infrastructure were blueprinted by a lot of pioneers and two of the most well known are Urs Hozle and Luiz André Barroso both are of Eu descentdent.
There is no evidence that whatever DeepMind did can be done with another EU partner. Or even anyone who is not Google, largely thanks to Larry and Sergey's personal tastes and experience. I doubt Msft or Amazon have the right culture for DeepMind.
The whole alphabet thing was engineered to allow independency. So that, among other things, a more pure research org can work without the ever encroaching of the profit driven hands inside Google. Mind you, DeepMind absolutely put itself above Google, or at least firmly distance itself from Google, GCP once proposed to use DeepMind brand in marketing materials, and was sharply rejected citing "conflicting brand images".
I have no idea whether any of the relevant antitrust official could still stop it.
It lacks motivation, there is no SV in Europe because one cannot pay competitively with SV for top talent when you tax to death. It is a lot easier to become a billionaire from real stuff (not manipulating stock markets or other financial trickeries) in US than in EU, so the smart and motivated in EU move to US; what is left is ... what is left: either less motivated or less smart or less both.
Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.
> energy
CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy.
> telecom
Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.
> drugs / biotech
BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.
The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.
Anchored, yeah sure. So you're listing something that isn't in the EU, which is revealing. ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much. The biggest breakthroughs in fusion will derive from smaller projects, not giant slow-moving projects like ITER. The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that). Fusion will make zero contribution in that time.
> BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.
Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech, you're more than reaching. Russia and China also have apparently successful vaccines being deployed.
> The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.
That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.
It is surrounded by EU countries, in a country that is a pseudo-EU member. You're reaching.
> ITER is entirely irrelevant. It's a pork project that won't result in much.
Unless you have a seer's eye, these kinds of claims are baseless.
> The next 20-30 years of energy generation is wind, natural gas, oil, solar, some hydrogen and nuclear (and primarily only China is brave enough to build that)
Agreed and a sad state of affairs
> Moderna was just as well positioned as BioNtech
Which makes Moderna a leader too? It doesn't diminish BioNtech's work.
> That's true in the sense that the EU never had leadership in most fields to begin with.
You literally had to ignore multiple points in my parent comment to even be able to make this claim. Revealing..
Edit: not to mention we are commenting under an article that partly concerns ASML..
That's entirely political and nothing to do with the tech. Huawei's tech is arguably better, cheaper (and available now).
If you knew that important people would use your phones you could as well give them for free - easier to spy on them.
Such a hyperbole statement.
Airbus has the edge in the narrowbody aircraft market, especially A321, while Boeing is plagued by 737 MAX problem.
OTOH Airbus is well behind Boeing in the widebody segment. Boeing had 1,464 787 orders as of Aug 2019, 882 of those had been delivered. Airbus had only sold 913 A350. A380 has been discontinued while Boeing can still count on B748 freighter.
Of course 2020 threw a wrench to the airline industry and it remains to be seen how well it will recover post pandemic. Both Airbus and Boeing are affected deeply.
You are right that for now, Boeing is better in widebodies. But let's see Boeing new aircraft program, because currently Airbus is better prepared for the future.
Well, SpaceX caught with the pants down to everyone. Before the revolution of the reusable Falcon 9, the Ariane 5 was a fine reliable rocket.
Sadly, the Ariane 6 design predates the reusable revolution of SpaceX, how ever they are working on reusable Arianes that are similar to the Falcon 9 and Spaceship (https://www.techforspace.com/european-space-sector/european-...).
Those are some huge claims, which could have previously been said for many currently outdated technologies.
Just as an example, the dimension of the features their tool prints are smaller than the wavelength of light that is actually doing the printing.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100162/randd-costs-of-a...
that's hardly in Taiwan's geopolitical interest. perhaps if the EU made some serious political concessions to Taiwan.
From my experience with gov trying to do tech investment it’s going to go into the pockets of late career overpaid ‘executives’ with ‘industry experience’ and tons of (also overpaid and underqualified) contractors doing the same thing. Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.
I mean I hope it goes to the engineers and smart dudes (who doesn’t want another successful semi competitor and 2nm?) and not the ones who know how to play the political game the best but I’m highly highly skeptical.
We’ll see in a few years I guess.
And I say that fully understanding ASML and the value they currently provide. But let’s hope who ever doles this out understands it as well as (maybe) half the people in this thread.
But even ignoring that giant elephant in the room, it adds the critical question why should ASML care to give special treatment to this one project? They are already killing it globally. Just because they operate in EU and this offers shit loads of money to potentially fleece?
I completely agree that consortium-based organizations are less able to respond and react to changes or issues. That's why it needs to be treated as a strategic (defense) matter rather than a government/industry partnership, a-la Sematech in the US.
What often ends up happening is that because it's so "strategically important" and so much money has been directed towards it, you are obligated to have expensive ("experienced") people hired based on past reputation -- which may not be applicable to new technology, roadmaps get laid out which everyone has to say they're meeting successfully, and then at the end you find out somehow that it didn't produce what you wanted.
Versus, a more bottoms-up approach where you hopefully create the conditions that incentivize or make possible some technologies and technologists to succeed -- without knowing fully who exactly or what exactly.
I'm sure that both have some inefficiencies, but the 1st method is sure to pay the people who have already been successful. But then again, maybe for a relatively incremental advance in some technology, there are fewer unknowns and method #1 works ok.
In practical terms, over 50% of that large (many thousands) organization should not exist. Another 50% of what is left is only needed because EU bureaucracy requires them to cover work that can be avoided. That qualifies for "too much bureaucracy".
Andy Grove, High Output Management, about Intel (at the time when they were successful)
I think there are many, many (not directly) productive functions that successful business needs to have and engineers often underestimate those (I certainly know I often do).
In other words, very different model from what the EU is currently trying.
In the context of the EU developing the ability to fabricate state-of-the-art chips, ASML would sell them the TwinScan tools they needed, which are just one species of about 40 that are used for chip fabrication.
Lithography machines are a functioning market that is interfered with for geo-strategic reasons.
All of the world's most profitable companies depend dearly on chips. If they are literally the only company that can provide this critical part of the chip production, why aren't they taking a larger portion of the profit?
I'm sure there is a lot of stuff where 7nm is necessary to get certain outcomes, but it is a small market compared to what could be reasonably done with older process technologies.
In 1985 Morris Chang was recruited by
the Taiwanese government to help develop
the emerging semiconductor industry. In
1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non
profit research institute ITRI as Chairman
and President and launched what would be
TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer
fabrication plant on the ITRI campus.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Ltd. was officially formed in 1987 as a
joint venture between the Taiwan government
(21%), Dutch multinational electronics
giant Philips (28%), and other private investors.
I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America!
What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
Exactly. The salaries in EU are pitiful.
Well, probably the same is true for the "pitiful" salaries in the EU. Just to a lesser degree.
I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.
Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away.
Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1].
Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer.
Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3].
[0] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
[1] - https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...
[2] - https://www.welcomebc.ca/Immigrate-to-B-C/B-C-Provincial-Nom...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking
The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.
At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.
You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.
Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.
Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.
This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...
So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.
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Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).
It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).
EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...
I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.
Now let me give you actual statistics.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.
By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.
Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...
This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm...
I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.
But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).
You know not all IT people are senior engineers nor they share vision of the world exported by the Hollywood
There's a catch, though: You have to live in the borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary increase, imo.
1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".
2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.
3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.
This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).
It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion. A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.
I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application.
I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too.
This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.
I can understand your concerns. But if you look at mid-range airplanes the European monster Airbus did respectably catch up with incumbent Boeing.
In with the Jumbos they clearly surpassed it engineering-wise but failed in their commercial predictions that such planes would be needed.
So EU is neither a guarantee for failure nor for success.
I do wonder how many people will be involved; it could be like ITER where everyone builds one fab that's truly the best in the world. Or it could be that they want to spread it out amongst the existing incumbents they can find who I am sure will do nothing with it.
Concentrate the funding and I imagine it could do pretty well. Distribute to (more than one) commercial entity (preferably zero to retain public access) and I doubt it will go anywhere.
Boeing should have a clear advantage because they have no such political interference. But it doesn't seem to have prevented Airbus from being a serious competitor. Whether the political interference is older than the EU or from the EU of today should not make a significant difference here.
I'm still so fascinated by our minds' ability to interpolate and extrapolate to the platonic ideal of any ungrounded and unconstrained idea so readily. Yes big bureaucratic mass of brain trust experts going at it nonstop, how can you not yield great returns? I'm starting to awaken more and more to how messy and data dependent this world is. Ideals and declaration and promises just don't go far enough. But it's all so complicated and situational to figure out in advance why they don't go as far as we'd expect.
Are we talking about VC and large corporate investment or government investment here.
Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.
Given the size of this commitment it seems clear that there is a lot more to 5nm than the lithography machine.
I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU.
They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out.
If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.
But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.
Yes there is whole part of equation that has nothing to do with ASML. But the point, to over simplify things a lot was that without ASML there are currently zero chance you could get leading edge node working. But even with it you have barely started.
Look at Intel, Samsung and Global Foundry.
I thought 'gigafactory' was coined by Tesla/Elon?
It was named as such because of the scale and capacity of those Fab as compared to other pure play competitor. It was also one reason how TSMC manage to win by Economy of Scale.
Second, this is not new money, this is part of recovery funds already allocated in July 2020 for combating the economic recession created by the Coronavirus [1]. These funds were already earmarked for environmental and digital initiatives. This declaration is probably a clarification of how much is given specifically to the digital initiatives.
This looks quite smart to me. In the US neither the original CARES act ($1.4 TN) passed in March, nor the new stimulus bill ($0.9 TN) has any funds dedicated to cutting edge industries. There were instead funds for airline companies and cruise lines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_EU#Recovery_fu...
That's because the US largely doesn't have to do that. The reason the US has a couple hundred major technology companies and Europe doesn't is due to its far superior venture capital market, which Europe almost entirely lacks by relative scale and so it has to try to make up for it with government money (which has been a repeated approach in Europe going back decades now, it hasn't worked well).
Our smartest people keep leaving to the US and taking US venture capital. Or selling to US companies. All for very good reasons. It’s where the rest of the smart people are. I’m convinced that’s what matters most, the people, not just billions of dollars won’t replace that.
If anything it’s quite obvious the US gov should be investing in infrastructure (transit, urban development, etc) like a good gov instead of venturing into even more territories pretending they can compete with highly advanced industries (be that finance or tech).
These governments, not just US, have enough things they are already struggling to deliver on. I really wouldn’t recommend they also pretend they are venture capitalists or worse starting the organization themselves.
Even old school NASA success was a lucky collection of semi-nationalizing a bunch of already successful private industry, academia, and a hardcore Cold War patriotic mission. And I should note one of the most famous people who helped get the US to the moon was Canadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chamberlin
One could argue NASA slowly lost that powerhouse ability as it became just another hundred billion dollar gov project. They still do great things but nowhere near the scale or speed as the past.
I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unrealistic.
EDIT The 2-3 years is when the funds are allocated. Not when the results are expected.
If you try to compete with them for EU grants, you are going to get an investigation into your business for misspending EU funds. Because they know the right people.
Doing nothing and just giving up doesn't make corruption go away.
Don't get me wrong, it was all developed with good intentions, but those have been known to pave the road to hell. From a personal point of view, I learnt a lot from the experience. But there are probably more efficient ways for software engineers to learn than by doing FP7 projects.
I was just a cog in the machine, perhaps someone further down the pipe got some benefit out of what we were doing. But given how the projects were managed, I doubt it.
But I also see lots of small 'mindshare' changes thanks to those 'it can be done' projects. The important steps seem to be to first unlock the first TRLs, then find PoCs on real products to inspire (and increase TRLs) tech directors and product managers that they need to invest the next millions into an big and still uncertain shift, and to underinvest in other important parts of their products. In the case of tech push you often end up with a new shiny tech that can't be used right away. So, mostly, it's about climbing the maturity ladder, and be ready for the very small openings in the product development cycle to shoe your new tech in.
In the case of customer pull or market pull, the lead time of such projects makes it too late to ask for external help, and no research grant wants to participate in 'product development' (not their job). So the tech is usually badly implemented and leaves a sour taste.
What I see as positive: if you have a great tech idea and available resources, and great academic/labs contacts, you can get the money, with little resistance (but yes, lots of admin work) with either European or national/regional grants.
IIRC the 2014 version of SPARK was designed and developed through a French civilian R&D funding project : http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/ The project was clearly a success there (although I don't know about ROI or profitability for AdaCore on this tech). Working with innovative SMBs is a great way to get funding in France and most of the projects that I've seen tend to conclude in new products... for the SMB. But the scale is low there (<4MEUR), so it also helps to accept failure ('only' 4m 'wasted'...).
Funny thing, the wiki page explicitly cites horizon2020 (which one of the GPs criticized): "The European Commission advised EU-funded research and innovation projects to adopt the scale in 2010.[1] TRLs were consequently used in 2014 in the EU Horizon 2020 program. In 2013, the TRL scale was further canonized by the ISO 16290:2013 standard.[1] A comprehensive approach and discussion of TRLs has been published by the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO).[3] Extensive criticism of the adoption of TRL scale by the European Union was published in The Innovation Journal, stating that the "concreteness and sophistication of the TRL scale gradually diminished as its usage spread outside its original context (space programs)"."
The OP forgot to mention that one of the goals in the Horizon2020 projects is to provide incentives to create pan-european collaborations involving industrial, academic, and institutional organizations.
In short, they are aimed to bridge the gap between academia and industry, and also create synergies between multiple organizations across Europe.
For example, some programs require applicants to partner with research institutions and industrial companies of significant and arbitrary size to be able to even submit a proposal.
Thus, it's disingenuous to evaluate the success of these programs in terms of commercial products being developed out of these programs. The political goals of developing collaborations between member-states is far more important than delivering a gadget or a trinket.
Similarly, we have the Erasmus program that enable higher-education students to spend a year in a school from a member state somewhere in Europe. It's disingenuous to assume the goal of the Erasmus program is solely academic.
I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. And where you taxes really go.
Yes, Europeans complain about bureaucracy from the EU and here about the ERC, but the moment someone comes with more 'pragmatic' processes, either you see some 10+MEUR-level abuse quite quickly, or you get some blast about bad management of the tax payers money, and calls for more oversight.
I don't have a solution, and without a united EU military/defense budget I don't see anything DARPA-like emerging. And it seems only European military budgets (still sovereign) and regional budgets (regionalism being, to me, the biggest flaw in the modern EU vision) seem spent on 'low admin we trust you let's try this just convince this panel of scientists and admins' funding. While I think it's great for labs/research funding, for product derisking and creating competitive edges for the local industry, and for SMEs and overall high tech employment, you're not going to create a semiconductor industry like this.
I've seen the results of several ERC consortia projects and am sometimes impressed with what EU-based research (academics+smb+large groups) can do with so little money (on each subject) and, yes, so much admin overhead.
I appreciate your arrogance, but as you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage. Thus your complete lack of arguments, which you tried to hide with snide remarks and an unimpressive attempt to appeal to authority, were dully noted.
I noticed nothing of the sort. No need to lash out – you probably meant to describe your experience but then forgot. I'd be curious to hear. I'm not psychic, and your account is anonymous.
OK, so you've had good experience with the EU bureaucracy and its "innovation funding" schemes. What was you role in them?
I guess your mileage does indeed vary. I contributed to a subproject of a major FP7 research program, which counted with the collaboration of a major industrial manufacturing company, a state research institute, and a couple of university research groups. In the end, besides a hand full of research papers, the industrial company developed a commercial product which is being rolled out as we speak. The state research institute didn't gained much out of the deal but we did developed institutional relationships that have been fruitful since then.
What you take from a research program is proportional to the legwork you put in. I'm sure some projects aren't immediately fruitful but it's short-sighted to claim that the money is wasted, specially if you take into account that this expenditure is what makes this sort of industrial effort possible.
It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that had to hand out work to all the funding countries.
I am curious what investments have worked out for the EU, but if the LHC is the pinnacle, it doesn't inspire much hope.
And Einstein's patent office was cheaper.
But the bigger problem with arguing for projects like the LHC or the moon landing based on the side benefits of what was invented there is that there isn't really a demonstrable causal link and it provides no real support for any of the actual projects being undertaken, just to the idea of employing smart people in an environment with free time.
The other factor is that they come in waves: there could be many grants for your startup for a few years, then government focus shifts and they dry up, then 5 years later they might come again
Aquiring the grants and completing the required paperwork feels a lot like doing schoolwork - it's tedious, but certainly doable, I have won 2 grants a few years back for my startup, its not like you have to be a big corp to stand a chance.
But it might be because it's Germany, you have to use your regional bank for the process and ours was horrible.
Disclaimer: I used to work at a company that was particularly good in draining these kind of funds without delivering useful outputs.
How can we avoid spending money on lobbyists? Maybe the structure should be more VC-like?
Still, an argument for state subsidies, despite some inevitable degree of inefficiency, can be made.
I also don't think it's been conclusively shown that there have been "repeated successes with this style of investment". Demonstrating that would require knowing what the opportunity cost of the spending for these projects was, which is impossible. Claiming it's an open-and-shut case that these kinds of investments will yield positive results is just as ideological as you accuse dissenters of being.
Neither point has been supported in this discussion with anything beyond rhetoric.
Not for the purpose of creating long time state owned companies, but for cashing out when/if the investment is successful, just like VC's. This would both provide the state with money, removing the need to raise that same money via taxes, and hopefully also better align the incentives of the funding organisation by providing measurable goals.
In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total disaster for promoting innovation.
I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20 years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards. But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle, it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).
It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream.
So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.
I'm really curious what specifically you mean by this. I see similar issues on the software side (my degree is in CS). Software is incredibly bloated and horrible at interoperability. Unix had pipes back in the early 70s, and somehow with GUIs and then mobile "apps," we've regressed. Identity-based security has failed time and again. And only rarely has software design progressed meaningfully beyond structured programming from the late 70s (not to mention the languages). Moore's law has given software developers around over 100M x improvement over the past 40 years, yet ordinary people would scarcely notice.
TL;DR: I see a lot of the same flaws in software, dominated by fads and popularity only of what is mainstream.
I'd really like to hear a dissident point of view from the hardware side.
Now we have event-based apps but we're also stuck in the purgatory of async hell. Hundreds of classes got replaced with hundreds of factories and having to endlessly learn DSLs. Compilers mutated into handwritten unit tests. I feel a heaviness in my chest just writing this, because one thought leads to another and it's hard to articulate the root of the discontent. I still believe that the web way is better than bare metal, but I'm saddened to see it reinventing the bad habits that we abandoned 25 years ago.
For me, what's really going on is that computers have not gotten appreciably faster since about the time that PowerPC iMacs were running OS X, roughly the year 2000. Before that, computers were getting 100 times faster every decade, and then it just kinda.. stopped. Only video games kept going, the only tradeoff being that we have to use someone else's 3D library rather than just writing ray tracers in a few pages of code (if only we had general-purpose multicore chips).
And that made programmers desperate, because they were still focusing on performance instead of stepping back and seeing the high-level abstractions that were largely understood by the 1980s. Everyone is so used to being compute-bound that we can't even think about solutions outside of that reality.
My "idea" to fix all this, bluntly, is to forget about improving single-threaded performance and start giving people the raw computing power they need to get back to work again. To keep up with Moore's Law, that's a computer with 10,000 parallel threads running at least 1 GHz, for $1000. Or 100 times the cores every decade. My initial mention of 1000 cores was perhaps conservative.
Pretty much all of the problems we deal with today are embarrassingly parallel. A synchronous blocking PHP page is, when served to thousands of users. DSP is. Neural nets, genetic algorithms, stocks, Bitcoin..
So our desktop machines should really be thousands of Docker containers with a total capacity of like 1000000%. No program would ever block another program, or get out of its sandbox. Programs would sometimes run across the internet. I picture it kind of like this big Minecraft Disneyland where you're in VR but processing stuff in the background and forgetting it's there. Maybe you'd devote 50% to an AI agent like J.A.R.V.I.S. that sits around all day backing up its best self and evolving its subprocesses to be even better. Not being compute-bound is like being able to throw processing power at problems declaratively and never having to solve anything menial again. I've been daydreaming about all this since like 1999 hahaha.
The math is all there, I've written about it at length in previous comments. You basically take an old processor like MIPS that was about as optimized for single-threaded performance as one can get, without getting mired in the evolutionary dead end of long pipelines and huge caches. That or the PowerPC 601 or DEC Alpha had on the order of 1-3 million transistors. Looks like the Apple M1 has 16 billion. So the raw numbers do suggest 10,000 of last-century's best cores. Then spend another 10 billion transistors for about 1-10 GB of RAM, or 1 MB of ram in-core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
Yes, memory routing is a pain, but you just use content-addressable memory and treat the interconnect just like any other network on the internet. The cores use caching, compression and copy-on-write to combine the best aspects of Erlang, Lisp, and Clojure. We'd write code in a Javascript-like language that's identical to the ideas from Immer and Immutable.js, but natively. Since everything is read-only, it statically compiles ahead to the best of its ability, running through a monad only when processing mutable state, and then going back to static. When you're not compute-bound, the static stuff processes instantly. It basically inverts the logic, so the only slow part of your code is the IO. My terminology isn't exact here, but it would basically transpile a subset of Javascript to Lisp and then run the embarrassingly parallel stuff 10,000 times faster than we're used to, rivaling the speed of video cards.
To do this as a hobby project, it might be fun to see how many early ARM cores and small RAMs could fit on a chip with a billion transistors. Then see how hard it is to add the content-addressable networking to the OS. Then finally get 1000 Docker containers running with, say, Debian. I used to daydream about doing it on an FPGA, but haven't kept up as closely as I'd like. Also I feel like there is industry pressure to keep FPGAs down, because they haven't kept up with Moore's law either, and never went fully open source like they should have.
I feel kind of weary about all this because I've been thinking about it for so long, and have a lot of regrets about not using my degree more. I'm still just writing CRUD apps like everyone else. It's so tedious, and takes so much code to do so little visible work, that I've lost seasons.
The salary for the verification engineers would already probably exceed low millions of dollars after 3 years. Not to mention licensing cost for EDA tools you need to tame billions of transistors.
I will give you low millions of dollars if you have a viable path to orders of magnitude better performance general purpose processors.
Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firms. The front cover this particular week was one such article and I had found it kind of funny, so I was showing it to my friend and we were discussing it.
Next to us in the restaurant was another table with an elderly gentlemen dining alone. Suddenly he leaned over and joined our conversation. It turned out he was some sort of economics academic and one of his 'research interests' was this question of why the EU doesn't generate tech firms. He had a lot of insight and I've never forgotten that discussion: it has influenced my thoughts about how to set up my own software firm.
One of the points he made is that outside the USA there's no real culture of granting early employees equity, whereas in the US tech industry that's standard. ARM is apparently one of the few exceptions, in which the co-founders did in fact hand out equity early on. The incentivising effect this produces is profound. I've felt it myself - when I joined a startup, having an ownership stake as well as a salary made the difference between doing the work, and genuinely caring about the company, being willing to get into arguments and fight for what was important, etc. So a culture gap with respect to ownership is perhaps one reason.
The man made other points that were more commonly observed, like the different approaches to regulation. A few days ago people were surprised to discover that the UK/EU Brexit treaty mandates SHA-1 for some obscure data interchange format. This is typical for the EU. In the US people at least pretend to care about the innovation-harming impact of regulation, even on the left. There's zero culture of that in the EU. The EU views more regulation as inherently good, and anything that isn't caked in hundreds of pages of regulations as being merely on the TODO list. It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law actually says. This creates a one-way ratchet of ever more convoluted and obsolete rules, which in turn imposes a thicket of complexity costs on companies that have other things to focus on. Many of these rules are justified on the grounds of making trade easier but often have the opposite effect.
Finally there are the very real cultural aspects. The US/Valley culture practically celebrates failure. This isn't necessarily good - failure is still failure, but family and friends at least seem to be pretty supportive of entrepreneurs in general and "failure" is very flexibly defined. For instance creating a company that never makes money isn't a problem in the US thanks to a mix of this culture and bottomless VC money. Whereas that would be perceived as failure by family and friends in Europe.
I guess that's related to the US dept culture too. Not having money but borrowing it for all kinds of things and with that stacking dept upon dept is quite normal in the US while over here at the continent you usually want to pay it back asap.
So not having money or working for a company which doesn't generate any must feel much better in the US.
I would be terrified. I also wouldn't work for some startup which won't pay be but instead preach something about family values for example. Earning money and owning stuff that I buy feels great. Wouldn't want to miss it.
Having lived in Germany for 7+ years, I noticed there’s a strong sentiment against owing money in general. Odd, considering the crazy high real-state prices these days.
People also seem to save a lot, and consume much less than in other western nations I’ve lived at, or visited.
This may be causing broad economic issues as the money is there, it’s just not moving around as much [1].
Owing someone you know money is probably the worst. You want to get rid of that "Schuld" asap. Even if it's an Euro you borrowed for an Einkaufswagen.
Than there is the "credit" for things you should actually pay from money you have or otherwise not buy at all. Like a fridge or a TV or something like that. You usually don't go around and tell other people that you did that. You pretend that you actually paid for it and that it's yours. This is also where US debt-culture comes into Europe though. You can see for years now that shops encourage going into debt for those kind of products. They try to normalize it because it's easy to hide and pretend.
Third are really big investments like a house or a business. Taking a credit there and discussing those with your friends and relatives is nothing that is frowned upon. Nobody expects you to have that kind of money (and if you had, you'd probably not admit to it).
That's why consensus building and failure avoidance are common in Europe. People want good enough without moonshots.
Giving employees equity in the Netherlands is nearly impossible without getting taxed to death. The position of the tax authority is that the sole reason you get equity, is because of your relationship as employee, and therefore the "gift of equity" is actually a form of salary, and therefore salary tax must be paid based on the value of the equity. In the Netherlands, this tax is around 50%.
Worse: depending on the exact legal implementation of the equity, you may end up having to pay the tax, based on its value on paper, before actually selling the equity, whose actual market price may be far lower. One could end up losing money just by having equity.
In the Netherlands, having a bankruptcy on your name makes you an ecomonic pariah. The process of going through a bankruptcy is not pleasant and comes with many responsibilities. Starting another company will be difficult. You will not be able to get a loan anymore. Oh, and your phone bill counts as a loan.
There is also a very weak culture of venture capital investment. There are very few such investors, and where they exist, the amounts they offer is tiny (like 10x lower) compared to US VCs, even though they ask the same amount of equity.
I am also not very impressed with the amount of advice/expertise VCs can offer over here.
The Dutch government likes to talk about how much they stimulate the tech and startup scenes. But when capital is concerned, their default answer is that you're supposed to get a loan. Lenders, unlike venture capitalists, are risk-averse (which they have to by law), meaning that they MUST get their loan paid back no matter what, which means that your business plan MUST be profitable, guaranteed, and that you must provide some sort of personal collateral, such as your savings or your house.
The sort of companies the government is thinking of, is for example a factory, where you need capital up front in order to buy machinery. The demand is known, so you know what profit you will roughly make. But this sort of thinking doesn't work for areas with high risk or a high degree of unknown.
For example let's say that you want to make a Twitter. You need money to pay for developers' salaries. But what will your profit be in year 3? It could be 1 million, or 0 (because nobody wants it). When banks hear this, they want a collateral equal to the loan amount. Why would I even get a loan then?
The best thing I can say about the Netherlands is the WBSO subsidy. When you do tech research and development on an area with risk (where risk is defined as being risky to you, e.g. because you have no experience with a particular topic or technology), then the government provides a subsidy for the amount of man-hours spent on this R&D. R&D includes software development too. This subsidy is implemented as a salary tax break.
Plus, when it turns out that your WBSO-subsidized product actually generates profit, then you get a corporate income tax break on the profits generated by that product. This is called the Innovatiebox.
WBSO and Innovatiebox are really nice once you have initial capital and have taken off. They won't help you when you start with near €0.
But they are correct in saying this. You wouldn't give equity to random people would you? And is it not worth money? You might not agree with the tax rate but the two reasons you mentioned are irrefutably true.
This is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.
It’s the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against each other. They don’t want the subsidies or differences in standards to allow one to undercut the other.
The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its just that historically the US has sought to export its copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it’s why weed is still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It’s also how the US gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.
Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settl...
well, if you completely ignore that the EU pushed diesel over petrol, to protect its domestic industries
exactly the same as the chicken thing
neither are to protect your health, that's just a secondary effect that the EU uses for PR
diesel particulate emissions as a direct result of the EU legislation protecting EU industry cause about tens of thousands of deaths a year, mostly in Europe
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/15/diesel-e...
meanwhile chlorinated chicken has killed no-one
As for chlorinated chicken, the EU likes to come up with bogus safety issues to protect French farmers, this is no news. It also has banned GM food, although the health problems Americans have aren't related to chlorinated chicken nor GM foods. The air one has been tackled by others already.
One of the best examples of this are the digital tachograph design documents, which are hundreds of pages of legal gibberish mixed with a convoluted tech spec. 100% design by comitee. No wonder the top digital tachograph supplier is VDO and one if the lesser players, Stoneridge, has a much better designed and executed product.
In contrast with this, the US ELD is an 125 page document standardising functionality and the data output of the device.
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social-provisions/...
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/hours-service/elds/electronic-logg...
If anything Europe has larger economies of scale. EU population alone is 446 million and that's not including countries that chose not to be part of it.
And from the standpoint of e-commerce, shipping charges across Europe are expensive compared to the US. We do not have any common, reasonably priced service similar to US Post. Sending a package to Spain will cost me more than twice as much than sending it within borders of my own country, and the delivery will take several days.
> Americans are much more culturally alike to one another than they are willing to admit
I'd argue that French are about as different from Germans as Alabama is from New York.
I sell on eBay and Amazon. We Americans have no idea how good we have it in terms of shipping options.
I can ship via USPS a videogame that is, including the padded envelope, 4 oz or less in weight for ~$3 to anywhere in the US (even AK, HI, and PR and other territories).
I can ship as much as fits into a USPS-provided free padded Priority Mail envelope for $7.75, and reasonably expect that it will arrive anywhere in the US in two to three days.
After FedEx ended its relationship with Amazon, it gave eBay Amazon's previous steep discount. In many cases, FedEx 2Day through eBay is by far the cheapest way to get a package from one US coast to the other, even cheaper than USPS Priority Mail and Priority Mail Cubic. This is guaranteed two days or less, as opposed to Priority Mail; think SLA versus lack of same.
Such a discount is available to others, of course. I've written before about how I a month ago made $1700 in profit in three days by dropshipping a popular video game-related accessory from its manufacturer to dozens of customers around the country. I leveraged the manufacturer offering free FedEx shipping to fulfill my orders.
Shipping from Germany is extremely cheap - even internationally (even cheaper than the rates you mentioned). But shipping the same thing the opposite direction can easily cost many multiples more.
I was able to buy from German Amazon with a shipping charge around 4 Eur to Czechia. But a package from Czechia to Hamburg cost me 12 Eur.
How Europe lost its tech companies (2017)
Government has no appetite for creative destruction and pushes policy favoring large incumbents over upstarts. Investors have no appetite for risk and only seek conservative investments. The best minds (that don't leave the EU) would rather work for large companies, schools, government, etc. than at smaller, riskier organizations that may not be around in a few years.
My family in Europe thought I was a loser and/or crazy for leaving a job as an adjunct professor to work at a 100-person startup. It makes no sense to us but it's understandable to someone who views landing a lifetime cushy bureaucratic job as the gold standard.
Then there’s mega projects like LHC and ITER (international projects, but it’s not pure chance that they’re located in Europe) and Wendelstein 7-X.
My pet example is Nordic Semiconductor, which has an insanely good position in the Bluetooth LE device market. What’s also interesting is that two of the major competitors also design their chips in Norway. Although those companies do illustrate one problem in Norway (and perhaps Europe in general): the lack of capital at certain stages. In the IC businesses it seems most companies are acquired by US companies eventually.
Let’s look at EVs. Europe doesn’t have Tesla. But seems like most European car makers are doing OK with EVs. Arguably better than US incumbent car makers. VWs new platform is one of the most promising right now, although this project has shown that VW has a problem with software engineering. But so does most other older car companies in the world. There are also some interesting start ups that’s more focused on designing/supplying components, such as Rimac and Kreisel. Rimac seems to go toe-to-toe with Tesla on extreme performance.
I believe a lot of robots used in advanced manufacturing is German as well?
In general I have the impression that Europe is very strong in designing/making components and manufacturing machines and such. Things that the end consumer never hears about. Very few have heard about ASML, but everyone has heard about Intel. So maybe that contributes to the impression that EU is behind on tech.
Europe has also been ahead of the US in adopting tech on the consumer side in several areas. The US was in the stone age for a long time when it came to banking and payment for instance.
How do you measure being behind/ahead in tech?
The US has both the major desktop/laptop CPU designers, as well as both desktop/laptop GPU designers. Of the three major desktop/laptop OSes, two are American, and the last doesn't belong to any particular country, but the primary creator moved from Europe to the US permanently.
The two major smartphone OSes are made by American companies. Two biggest browsers, again, Americans. Maybe three, if you count Mozilla (though Samsung is probably around there as well).
Huge internet/software tech companies that consumers interact with? Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple are all American. Europe has no equivalent to these, all they can boast is a few smaller ones like Spotify, or business facing giants like SAP (equivalent to that in the US would probably be like Oracle or IBM).
While obviously Europe doesn't have a complete dearth of local software, in terms of major consumer hits, especially the kind that get play outside of the region they originated in -- not much of that going on.
Also, I work at Google Munich, and it's pretty telling how rare it is for people here to get 'poached' by other local tech companies. It happened to a few people I knew...to go to Lyft's Munich office. Other than that, I can't think of any. When it comes to enticing engineers, there just aren't any German tech companies that play in the same league as Google.
All the anecdotal evidence you provide is nice, but is not represented in the market.
An example you give, Nordic Semiconductor, has a market cap of $3B.
Here's a good list of the worlds largest tech companies. The first European entry is #14, ASML:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
The last time the relative size of US tech giants to EU companies was brought up here, a commentator replied that EU law is designed to prevent companies growing to this kind of outlandish size. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if so, it seems like a prudent approach even if we miss out on brownie points of getting to claim "ours is biggest". As others have pointed out here, the EU is not behind technologically. All we're behind on is company size, and I'm ok with that.
However, not in the EU. The EU has been engaging in massive subsidisation for decades and has little to show for it. In some places it seems to have led to a hollowed out society in which companies that are supposedly startups spend all their time chasing grant money instead of building real products.
VC investment is hard work. The EU isn't a well run VC firm even though it deploys more capital than such firms do, and it shows: they don't really care what the money gets spent on as long as there's a paper trail they can use to do ass-covering if it turns out the money was lost to fraud. So it creates this USSR-like culture of zombie firms that can't really survive independent of state funding.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
The exact same thing the OP accuses government grants of perpetuating.
Your post is a perfect example that with startups that's just accepted and glossed over.
And it is the investors problem when a startup fails, and they are aware of it. But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
Are they really? What are the failure rates for both?
> But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
https://qz.com/1719019/wework-and-ubers-losses-may-be-subsid...
https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-investors-include-pe...
Are you sure? This rather smacks of the "good old days" fallacy.
A recent example of 'basic' research coming to fruition in a practical fashion (eventually):
> "S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2
> The level of control and understanding we now have over our biology came from literally millions of person-years spent working on things that at the time were obscure and "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95% efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2
* https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934978
We have no way of knowing ahead of time what knowledge will be needed or "useful" in the future, so in some ways it is prudent to try to acquire as much knowledge of the natural world as possible and sort it out later.
Government funding is a good thing, but it’d be even better would be if we could harness the free market. One solution could be to equip research institutions with the means to capture value from IP that follows on from basic research.
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
If efficiency is your thing go into business. The smaller the better. But if you want to have a chance at literal moonshot stay in your job and swallow inefficiencies that come from size, ample capital, and no expectation of monetary profit.
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
All those taxes are collected from companies, look at the nice graph that proves it:
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-tax-ra...
I'm being ironic, the average corporate tax rate went from 40% in 1960 to 10% today.
AI? Basically all funded by the private sector and has been for a decade. Universities try to keep up but complain they can't.
Chip design? When was the last time academia contributed much to that? Probably RISC in the 80s? There have been tons of breakthroughs in basic research in silicon throughout my entire lifetime, all of them privately funded. For example look at the recent Optane DIMM tech (based on new chalcogenide chemistry).
Compilers? No, the most advanced compiler in the world is Graal, which is more or less funded by grants from Oracle. The second most is LLVM, which was originally written by Chris Lattner as his master's thesis i.e. he paid for it with his own student debt. Apple pretty quickly saw that it was good work and took over the funding of it.
PL design? Here, academia has indeed done a lot of basic research into various ML derived languages like Haskell. But this has largely been reviewed carefully and then ignored by the languages people actually use - it was basic research into ideas that didn't work well and not many people really care about. All new languages that have got popular for real-world usage in the past 10 years are imperative languages that trace their heritage all the way back to C i.e. Bell Labs (Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Go, etc).
The reality is, the computer industry demonstrates that you don't need government funding of basic research. Industries will certainly accept such research if it happens to be useful because they were taxed to pay for it regardless, but they don't need it.
We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise.
Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.
Yes, Space X is a private company but they wouldn’t exist without the innovations that came out of NASA, a publicly funded organization.
From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's initiative.
In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-how, credibility and potential contracts.
It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the lack of support from the American government, military and academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic research that provided more strategic benefits?)
[1] https://investinestonia.com/business-in-estonia/establishing...
Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
EU entrepreneur: I need to start a company that can access these juicy governmental funds. Let’s see, what exactly do these bureaucrats want? Hmm, sounds complicated, who do I know in the approval committee? I better start calling.
Incentives matter.
[1] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-semicondu...
Or will it more be like our Ariane missiles?
Also given the success rate of the related Vega rocket, it would not be a very dependable missile anyway.
This is not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because this is obviously applied rather than basic research.
Gov. intervention can work if done correctly.
I don't think they expect to build a 2nm fab by 2023.
I ask as I can't imagine the government doing this. So there must be some company behind this deal.
As someone working in HPC and EU projects related to this subject, I don't think they'll waste it. Current HPC and processor push is very real now.
One of the main ways that states fund technological advances is exactly by promising to buy the results. This was one of the most important things in early IT - the fact that the US army was buying it at all. If the companies in that space would have had to live by selling their tech on the free market, no one would have been crazy enough to invest in it.
Both Moderna and BioNTech were funded and working on the mRNA technology before governments came with large orders for the vaccines.
And yes, while BioNTech and Moderna had been investing in mRNA before this, governments had been investing in mRNA research for many years. BioNTech itself has received significant investments from the EU, at least since 2019.
Not to mention, there is no way to take this vaccine without specialized medical care, so even if people could buy it, they would still need medical care as well, which most people in most of the world get from the state anyway.
- obscure software and programming paradigms/libraries
- one-off's
- projects that create only reports, papers and recommendations
- endless recreations of the same software over the years and decades
- plain dumb projects
- attempts at recreating other people's software (e.g. U.S.)
There is also a large amount of overlap in work/content between projects, and lots of time is appropriated for unrelated work e.g. employees working on their PhDs.
On the other hand the industry takes a lot more money and plays similar games.
Project partners do not take the right path, because it's not conducive to fulfilling a grant, getting the next grant or increasing your citation count. The incentives are wrong.
I don't think they'll start a new ISA from scratch.
There are also some small companies focusing on photonics in NL, Smart Photonics is one of them for example.
And these three are only the largest pure-semiconductor companies. There are many dozens of smaller companies and quite some fabs. A lot of automotive electronics is done by European companies. Also, many international semiconductor companies have development sites in Europe.
Not sure you would include foreign companies with plants in the EU. Nexperia, TI, GloFo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
Aside from that I'd expected chip designers like ARM (+licensees), Bull Atos (would you call that an OEM?) and related software companies to take part in this.
The ASML litho machines are a single step in even just the wafer production process, there are several companies involved in making and processing masks, doing the etching, cleaning solutions, etc. As many industries, it's a highly globalized supply chain, with many companies distributed around the world specializing and leading different aspects. And yes, several of them are in the EU.
As to why the governments would do this, well it's geopolitics. The EU has some big players in the industry, but other parts of the supply chain are elsewhere. When all big geopolitical powers are interdependent, then no player will move to block another off at risk of hurting themselves. Now, both China and the US are shoveling billions into developing a higher independence (even before the trade war). Likely, the EU feels it is now forced to follow suit, or risk having e.g. the access to high-volume fabs to be a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/activist-hedge-fund-...
Japan, US, India and possibly some EU countries are partnering today to build an alternative to Huawei in 5G. This is coming 10 years late.
We might be repeating the same mistake but now in semiconductors.
As unsubstantiated news suggest, the most of American program will be spent on attracting few, amazingly expensive, one off projects.
that how eu is spending 145 billions while allocating 1bn to fighting covid?
Covid requres just one vaccine and a bit of time and disrupts mostly businesses that produce just human powered entertainment (and health services which is the worst thing about it).
While making the whole new generation of most important machines and landing beyond current cutting edge seem like both pricey and worthwhile endeavor.
Could you please share some examples? I'm genuinely curious.
https://wccftech.com/tsmc-2nm-research-taiwan/
https://wccftech.com/ssmc-mass-produce-2nm-2024/
now a consortium of runner ups not only hopes to catch up, but plans a parallel release of a new node size, while starting later, while starting with less know how.
https://semiengineering.com/euv-challenges-and-unknowns-at-3...
No sure what you mean here. Seems like the EU recovery package is €1,824B. Also, in Sept and Oct they allocated €87.9B in financial support.
I mean come on, the existing semiconductor industry in the EU has found it's niche. It's already well developed. If there really was a shortage of domestic semiconductor products then these companies would have been able to make a killing with their local fabs because corona related shipping restrictions resulted in a lack of supply from foreign nations. They wouldn't need the government stimulus and stand on their own.
It would make more sense to use this government stimulus on reducing CO2 emissions because most nations do not have economic incentives for reducing CO2 emissions. With our current economic models environmentalism amounts to charity and charity is one thing the government is very good at. The reason why I bring up CO2 reductions is because they are inherently domestic. You cannot put CO2 or electricity on a container ship and move the problem to a different country. A lot of the work also involves simple manual labor which helps with the underemployment problem for low skilled workers.
Is it? It seems to be headed for a TSMC monopoly as far as I can see.