How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
Bare minimum estimates, working backwards:
- $? for marketing and distribution, physical inventory costs
- $100k/y for one field engineer (FAE)
- $250k for first successful manufacturing run
- $250k for first full mask run with bugs
- $100k bringup boards, test equipment, engineering time fixing it
- $25k shuttle run for initial testing. This will find at least one bug.
- $100-200k outsourced layout: this is boring, specialised, and low value-add, so get someone else to do it
- $500k/y misc software and testing staff or consultants
- $100-500k/y each: 3-5 senior design engineers. For best results, these are people you already know and are spinning out of their job at Big Boring Semi Co
- optional $100k really big FPGA + software + custom boards
- $250k/y software licenses from Cadence or Synopsys, unless you're very brave and want to try the open source flow
- IP licenses. Not just obvious things like ARM cores, but analogue or semi-analogue IP like high-speed transcievers.
People are always shocked when I tell how tiny is the semi industry, but it really is.
Besides the super-concentration of semi manufacturing which starts to get more coverage, designs needs some exposure too.
When Apple bought PA Semi, it went rather unnoticed, but people didn't know that the amount of logic designers of a such calibre who can design cores like ZEN, or Firestorm is probably less than 100 in the whole of North America.
Sounds very dramatic, but America is less than 100 senior logic designers away from getting out of design business too.
I'm still in university and I've always liked hardware and low level related stuff but I've heard bad things about software in hardware companies like Qualcomm.
Almost every part of semi industry is very bad on effort to salary ratio, and players like Intel, or Qualcomm are far from the worst, they actually do very well on salary front, and attracting talent. It's Asian companies who score the worst on that.
TSMC process development job is 100:1 lottery win + 20 years of your life for $50k a year salary. Know people with first hand experience of that.
In many other places software is an afterthought to the hardware, and it shows.
On the design and verification side the story is slightly better, verilator (https://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator) for instance is an excellent tool that lets you simulate system-verilog code with high performance. It has seen wide industry adoption in the last years and now a couple of companies like Google, SiFive, etc. are investing in open source tooling for hardware. You can go a long way to building your design without having to pay for expensive licenses. The downside is that most of the interface type components (PCI-Express, DDR4, etc.) are prohibitively complicated to build yourself, so you will need to rely on external IP at some point.
Unless you talk about countries where people simply don't pay for software no matter what.
Some companies are just fine with 10 years old pirated Virtuosos in places like China.
It was a big surprise to me that even software which probably has less than 100 licensees globally is still getting warezed.
Is there an impediment I'm not aware of? Or maybe it's not as good of a deal as I think?
Samsung and TSMC are home-grown in their respective countries and Intel still makes chips. Together, they make the majority of the world's chips.
There definitely is but it will come at the cost of share buy backs and keeping share price up which affects compensation of management. Failure to keep the share price up by investing in manufacturing in US will also invite predatory share holders to topple the management. The cult of "free" markets driving wealth growth at the top of the society seems to have trumped strategic common sense.
Because America fell asleep at the wheel while Taiwan did not. TSMC and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers benefited from a government that saw the need to be a part of high value manufacturing. Meanwhile America of the 90s and 2000s assumed that it would be the most powerful country in perpetuity and so it wouldn't matter where something was being produced as long as they could pay for it.
The events of the 2010s has shown the flaws of this thinking. It is now possible for American firms to be cut off completely from semiconductor manufacturing, similar to how Huawei was cut off. There is now support from the American government to restore semiconductor manufacturing. They are footing a part of the bill for TSMC's new plant. I'm sure Intel's lobbyists are skilled enough to get part of their new plants paid for as well. China is doing the same - the state has deployed all it's resources behind SMIC to ensure that what happened to Huawei never happens again.
It's more complicated than this though. You don't just need semiconductor fabs, you also need rare earth metals, almost all of which is mined and refined in China. America is attempting to reshore this too (https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/31/g...)
This is usually presented as an ace up the sleeve that China has secured through shrewd strategic thinking. In reality, rare earth metals are neither particularly rare, nor are they expensive, nor are they in high demand.
Rare earth metals are more common than silver or mercury, somewhat rarer than cobalt. The ones with excellent magnetic quantities go for ~$50 per kilo (allegedly only 200g is required per electric car), the ones used for catalysts and alloy making go for as low as $2 per kilo, cheaper than copper.
They're not nearly as much of a constraint as claimed.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...
The 70s started the trend of financializing (is that the word?) everything, that meant that at every step of every productive process someone packaged it into a tradable "paper", which got packaged with other paper from other productive processes and then re-sold and repackaged again and again to the market as proxies of the value from those productive processes.
Holding paper assets turned out to be much more lucrative than the actual production for most companies, not to mention far far easier than competing in the market with products and innovation, so naturally it slowly began to chip away at the quality of the production in favor of holding paper that represented production. Outsourcing became possible and they noticed it didn't matter to the ones buying the paper assets who actually did the work, so it skyrocketed.
Financialization required an immeasurable amount of debt, they began extending credit to anyone so they could buy said paper, and then turned around and made the debt itself financial paper.
That got us the stock market booms of the 80s, the 90s, the dot com, the financial crisis, and of course their busts.
Now we are at the end, and the signal? companies are adding bitcoin to their balance sheets. The cycle of finacialization is complete, paper is no longer required and you don't even have to outsource your production, not that you have it anyways, as all you need to post profits and pretend you are a good CEO is buy crypto and hodl.
Production for a 'modern' business is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Governments can try to buy their way into any market but it is useless; most businesses have no real capacity to compete delivering cutting edge products with actual real "bare-metal" profitable businesses because they can only make profits "on paper".
(sorry if finacialization is not how it's written)
Top 10 companies
https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl...
Most of these are providing goods and services that 100s millions of people are getting value from, with the possible exception of Facebook :p
As an aside I must admit I had never heard of Delta Electronics before at all; nearly 50 years old and 5th most valuable company.
Out of the top 10 you do get some pure play financial companies like Berkshire, Morgan Chase, Visa (maybe).
Cutting edge semi conductor manufacture is arguably some of the most advanced technology and manufacturing we do at scale. It's just plain hard hard. The equipment, the expertise, the lead time to manufacture, it's all big scale problems.
Relatively speaking getting manufacturing of old node sizes would like not be remotely as hard, 32nm maybe even 16nm.
Apple became the biggest company in the world not only because they create products everyone wants, but equally because they are masters at managing money and debt. That is what gives them the edge in production as they barely produce anything. They are probably the best at managing financial assets by far.
And Tesla, well Tesla is very bad at building cars, they are bankrupt without paper profits. They shouldn’t be on that list.
Semiconductors is not harder than any other cutting edge industry that has come before. Taiwan is not special, they are 20 million people. A good chunk of them trained and educated in the US.
What, by not having any? The correct amount of cash for a company to have is $0 because it's not a productive asset, as you say, but Apple's strategy ended up with them having hundreds of billions of it overseas. That is literally the opposite of MBA philosophy, not an even better version of it.
(And they own a factory in Ireland.)
Who said anything about MBAs? The Apple way is clearly the better way to do it at the moment, and has been for the last decade. The MBAs at Intel are not even in the same league.
And Apple owns factories in the US too. They own them for other reasons, not because they "need" them to make products or are profitable on their own.
This literally isn't possible because of how GAAP accounting rules work for bitcoin. You can't count the value going up if you hold, but you have to mark it down if it goes down. It's only bad for you.
https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-tech-semiconductor-idUSKB...
So when you're talking a few hundred billion dollars for a US-first technological capability, the important question is who will get the money and how will they be held accountable for delivery? What, even, are they expected to deliver - no use if the plant is more expensive than TSMC so everyone chooses them anyway.
The history of these initiatives is not great: https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/foxconn-promised-130... (Republican)
https://fortune.com/2015/08/27/remember-solyndra-mistake/ (Democrat)
China big fund 2014 yield nothing. SMIC still have to poach TSMC engineers to get them to 14nm. we'll see how China big fund II going to do.
U.S. govrt is dumping money into semis by asking TSMC and Samsung to open fab in US and Intel is gunning for US govrt's money by going IDM 2.0.
The raspberry pi pico team also did a good podcast episode talking about this - I think it was a podcast called innovation coffee or something like that. Hosted by a guy from ARM Europe.
A decade ago, it would've taken you $1m in China for a 50/50 shot at it.
If your first tapeout works, you will make money, if not... you wasted $1m.
$1m looks like pocket change to most American tech people now, but the fabless trains has long since departed.
You will need a sum with few more zeroes, to get a jumpstart in the industry now.
There was 4-3 years long extreme consolidation push in the industry, with big swallowing dozens producers of commodity products. It is very reminiscent how the demise of American oil industry happened when the industry gone from thousands of oil producers, to less than 10 in one decade. Everybody bets now that there will be 10-15 or so mega-fabless running the industry in coming decade.
There are plenty of designs where just $10k will get you an ASIC built in some university... It won't be anything like leading edge silicon though, but for some products that's all you need.
With a few micron university process? Yes, can you commercialise it? No.
I believe 180nm has for long been the limit of how "commercially viable" is defined even for stuff like analogue, and discrete logic ICs.
A bunch of talented people with experience who can use the equipment productively = priceless. Probably can't be bought, otherwise some countries would already have done it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23755693
Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips (fossi-foundation.org)