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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

22- and 28-nm production technology isn't going to lessen fears about being dependent on Taiwan. Nice for a lot of chips needed though.

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The vast majority of the chips we use are perfectly fine on 22 and 28 nm nodes. Not all applications require the high densities a phone or laptop CPU does.

I agree, that's why I added the last sentence. On the other hand, I do not expect this announcement to belay any of the fears over dependence on Taiwan by politicians since this fab is not on the cutting edge.

But can your initial proposition also be true (or is it strongly true in any useful sense) in the face of the second statement?

This should still be able to cover a lot of the shortages we see in manufacturing. I suppose a lot of the concerns motivating this are in that space more than ensuring a continuous supply of bleeding edge silicon.

Yes. The politicians constantly talk about the advanced process and Apple. They talk about cutting edge and not the logistical chain. The fear is denial of the advanced process fab.

For context, Ivy Bridge is 22nm and iPhone 5s is 28nm.

And all those automotive grade semiconductor chips that car companies are desperate for are in the order of 60nm.

For most of their stuff 60nm provides enough computing power and as for actual electricity usage, that's obviously dwarfed by the "move 2 tons of steel at 150kmph" part :-D

There’s plenty of Malaysian fabs to handle those node sizes and products, no need to site them in Japan. Unless we collectively think that c-19 is going to be a problem in SEA for several more years.

Build time for fabs is quite long, and build time for a mature semiconductor industry (in India, for example) will be longer.

That said: I have stopped trying to think any COVID timeline is too long. Shit's wack. Shit will continue to stay wack for a while. Maybe a very long while.

Exactly. MOST companies are priced out of deep nanometer nodes these days. So they go for these nodes instead because many are still selling 50-100 nm products so there's cheaper room to improve merely to 22-28 nm.

Those nodes are perfect for industries where maturity matters more, like automotive, medical, industrial, etc.

Yes and for a good many years in the future. It is a very good, practical thing. I doubt it will decrease any political concerns.

Is automotive 20~ish nm chip now?

That's incredible. Judging by my primitive 2013 truck, the onboard computer is probably >100nm.

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