Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed
wsj.com
wsj.com
yes, they have to repeat all that work, they have to solve all those solved problems again because companies that solved the problems won't share their solutions.
indeed, I wish I could answer this.
> Not to mention the national security arguments.
it is an inteserting excercise to consider this from the rival's point of view
...because those solutions are the company's competitive advantage that China has tried to steal for years on end now? Not to mention in many instances those 'solutions' are owned by or access controlled by the parent country of said company, many of which view China as at the least a bad faith actor, and at the worst an inevitable opponent?
Pretending China hasn't engaged in the world's largest industrial espionage campaign over the last two decades, and then victim blaming the companies involved for not "sharing their solutions" with China is a perverse form of logic.
I don't think the US border control system works like that. If you're a citizen, you never need an exit visa. IIRC, as long as you have a valid passport, you can exit and enter as you please, but if there's probable cause to suspect you of a crime they can arrest you.
China's system, on the other hand, does work like that. IIRC, anyone with any authority or access to secrets isn't allowed to have free control over their passport, and they have systems for denying people exit permission.
Even if somehow you got on the no-fly list, you can take a boat. Or drive/walk across one of the land borders. Perfectly legally.
Security clearances are a red herring. The folks working in Intel/TSMC/TI/etc fabs don't have or need security clearances. This is private technology.
Anyone who has been through civics 102 in the US knows that there's lots of ways to get your passport taken away, and without one you're not getting far. It looks like Canada's requiring either passports or fancy drivers licenses (only available from some states), and Mexico's at least as strict.
But that's irrelevant unless one of those ways is to "possess [ITAR-controlled and requires a security clearance] information," as one of the ancestor comments stated. If that's actually the case, someone should be able to cite law/regulation or provide examples of the practice, but no one has.
But they won’t be stopped at the border. They might be fired when they return though.
Maybe it's not that easy. I have no knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing (let alone advanced semiconductor manufacturing), but it strikes me as one of those areas that might have thousands of very specialized crazy hard problems that all need to be solved just right to get things working. If you hire away some guy from a leading company, at best he might have a thousandth of that company's solution (and maybe that thousandth of a solution is only valuable in a path-dependent context with all the other solutions that leading company followed).
> Are non-competes enforceable internationally?
Doubt it. Though I suppose in some cases disclosing trade secrets for advanced technology my violate other laws.
Yeah, that's a real obstacle, not much of a "maybe" about it.
I have a feeling that this, more than any other factor, is what is driving large-scale international tech IP theft. You have to grab stuff wholesale in hopes of either (a) teasing out isolated nuggets that happen to be applicable to your own efforts, or (b) recreating the surrounding path-dependent context (which doesn't have a well-defined boundary) in order to have a working solution.
How EUV works: https://youtu.be/5Ge2RcvDlgw
https://istanbultarihi.ist/578-the-nuri-demirag-aircraft-fac...
Regardless, it’s similar to software companies claiming to run agile, but always reverting to the “get it done, waterfall deadline” mode. It takes good effort and detailed knowledge of pitfalls to avoid to actually make a less intuitive, but more repeatable and productive process work. (Agile’s been around for over 10years and people still don’t do good versions well)
Agile software development has been around since the early 90’ies. Scrum is from something like 1995.
The reason people fail to implement it so often is that project management sort or doesn’t work in software development, and it doesn’t work because you can spend two hours looking for a spelling error or a missing semicolon, and you can create Godlike code in half an hour, and you never know which mode you’re going to be in when you get up in the morning.
Waterfall doesn’t work either, for the same reason, and for all the adaptive reasons that lead to agile.
The best way to deal with it is to take the methods that make sense for your current project and run with that. 99% or the time that’s a kanban board, and maybe some time registration software if you’re unfortunate enough to work in a place that bills by the hour.
The worst part about the project management methods in my personal opinion is that they all want to sell themselves as the universal solution, in a world where no two projects are alike but you also can’t be bothered to have 90 different project models in an organisation, because then what’s the point.
That's ADHD (maybe modulo some external factors like scattered meetings)
That doesn't seem like ADHD to me. Getting to a super-productive flow state is notoriously difficult to do reliably for everyone, and getting stuck on a stupid typo you can't find even though you know it is somewhere in the 50 lines of code you're looking at is likewise a fairly common experience.
Folks with ADHD may actually be better at achieving a hyperfocused state of flow, but the flip side of that isn't hunting for a typo, it is falling down a rabbit hole of yak-shaving, procrastination (productive or otherwise), and other distractions.
Somewhere in between is the experience of trying to hold more and more context in your head at once, resulting in a feeling like your brain has been pummeled and leaking out your ears, staring at some code that has become entirely illegible. This can be the result of ADHD-driven yak-shaving, but more commonly is the result of needing to comprehend huge chunks of a badly architected system before you can make a change with any confidence.
That probably overstates the case a little bit since capacity is distributed around the world, but in some sense yes.
It's not particularly hypothetical. If China (PRC) was to invade Taiwan, that would potentially knock out a frightening proportion of the world's leading-edge capacity.
> Developing jet engine is not an easy game unlike rocket engines as it's comparatively very compact in size & it requires advance engineering to develop it's crystal blades technology & maintain it's thrust to weight ratio & that's what make jet engine technology one of the most complicated technology.
From https://defenceview.in/how-difficult-is-it-to-build-an-jet-e...
> Developing jet engine is not an easy game unlike rocket engines as it's comparatively very compact in size & it requires advance engineering to develop it's crystal blades technology & maintain it's thrust to weight ratio & that's what make jet engine technology one of the most complicated technology.
That's a terribly worded and nonsensical claim (and almost reads like it was written by a ten year old). How could someone claim that rocket engines are "not very compact in size"? The RD-180 turbopump for example generates 170 MW of mechanical power, much more than any jet engine in operation, and in a smaller package to boot. Likewise, the HPFTP on the RS-25 generates around 50 MW of mechanical power, and does so in a package sized 0.55m by 1.1m or something like that.
My favorite story about this is a paint manufacturer building a brand new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to increase their capacity. Everything was controlled, monitored, etc. to the nth degree.
Only one problem--paint from the new line no longer stuck to anything.
Cue a crash debugging with all hands on deck. The problem? The new line was too clean.
Paint relies on the correct ends attaching to the wall and then the other ends forming a kind of network to protect those. But there is a tradeoff--the outer paint surface (exposed to elements) vs the inner paint surface (attaches to the wall) have different needs. If you make the inner paint surface too dense (molecules all vertical) the paints sticks great, but then doesn't protect against the elements. If you make the outer paint surface dense (molecules all horizontal) then the paint protects well, but then won't stick to the wall.
The solution: add some "dirt". Adding some very fine, very small inert particles can change the angle that the paint molecules connect and fix the adhesion issues.
The lesson: nobody knows all the things necessary to run a manufacturing line. Ever.
They could just hire the experts from the incumbents
HSMC attracted a former top TSMC executive as chief executive. QXIC recruited dozens of experienced engineers from Taiwan, including from TSMC, with relatively big pay packages, according to former employees.
Then again, there may be no "secret sauce" in the way we usually think about it. You might have to hire hundreds of people from an incumbent to pull in enough institutional knowledge to get things going. And even then it's not going to happen overnight.
I feel like the right people to hire, at any rate, aren't the executives. You need the right engineers, scientists, and researchers.
My family gets contacted now and then by researchers trying to figure out how to do it.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Bernauer
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
Two pictures I have of him, one with a telescope the other with a microscope. Both sides of my family were nerds :-)
He also led a team to Iceland in the 1930s to set some surveying markers to determine if Iceland was expanding, which would prove the continental drift theory. After the war, other researchers went back and confirmed it. I'm kinda sad he died before completing this, and so others got the credit for continental drift.
However, their style of process/chip design is very hierarchical with HUGE teams to get the implementation out in the 3-4year cycles (there are multiple overlapping teams). This was driven over the successes of decades of scaling. Then it failed. Now they are behind. If they had been able to pivot early they might be parallel with rather than behind TSMC, but they couldn't admit it wasn't working. The large group structure got in the way.
We'll see if they can fix it.
especially in case of jet turbines, due to their much larger size than chips?
Even once you have the blade to copy, you don't know why the features are the way they are. What bits are important? Which areas must have high tolerance? After that, there is the question of how to make it. You probably cannot just mass spectrometer it, put those ingredients in a vat, heat it up, and pour it into a mold. Is the order of ingredients important? The exact ratios? How quickly do you cool it? At what temperature? And how do you get those holes in it? How do you do it economically? You can't just 3D print these, and even if you did, it'd be way too slow.
Also, (I didn't read the original article), but there's been some suggestion that some of these companies, like HSMC, were really just investor scams. They raised a whole bunch of money, promised a lot, but didn't actually know how to do what they said they did. Kinda like a Chinese Silicon version of Theranos. I think HSMC even had an ASML EUV machine, but never got to use it.
Any one organisation can only be efficient if the whole organisation can fit in one persons head. It must be possible to reason about changes in one area affecting another. This anecdotally applies to every software system i have worked on - once you don't understand how another part works decisions you make become divorced from reality
As such organisations must either simplify, so they are reason-able or they must split into markets (which seem to be very good at getting efficiency out of complexity) - or hire people with bigger heads ! (this does not mean a niche for AI - at least not yet)
I think what I am trying to get at is that someone at Intel must understand how it all fits together - and someone at Boeing etc
But the US banned ASML from selling to China so you need to catch up with ASML and Intel/TSMC at the same time. Now, I don't know when ASML started researching EUV but they were certainly working on it in 1998 -- which doesn't mean it'll take twenty years to replicate it because surely some of it is public but still, it's a big, big project. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA56970339&sid=googleSc...
do you know what the cost breakdown is when building fabs?
The channel's older videos have a lot lot of information about fab economics, though I dunno if there's one that has a general cost breakdown.
So I think the cost is largely that every part must be engineered to perfection.
e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
Source: my company is one of those not allowed to sell this type of software to China
Although we could mention the B-29 which actually cost 50% more than the entire Manhattan Project -- or, to be closer to present day, the F-35.
From Ivan on the forum "We expected to go out for a funding round (and convert from bootstrap to salary-paying) last spring but, well, 2020.
Right now we’re trying to decide when to make a second try at it. The financial market for the likes of us isn’t back yet, and the virus rates are turning up again, which argues for waiting. But the economy and the future market is real iffy, which argues for doing it now. "
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-unicorns-... this suggests there has been a dramatic increase in VC money to be acquired by the right startups.
If I were the mill team, I would get their patents nailed down (which I think they have mostly done), then get some token open source projects out there to show what they actually have in their trousers. Then start giving some talks, public presence, things like that. Show what their toolchain and simulator can actually do.
Typically they all say "We are using this other nanometer size, and so thats not where the backlog is"
is there any truth to that statement?
The "size" you are talking about is the "process node". It's basically a shorthand for how large the transistors are. These nodes are not fungible, once a chip is designed and a mask set is taped out it must be fabricated on that specific process node. Even if you have a chip designed on an older/larger node, it cannot be fabricated on a newer/smaller node without significant expense and delay.
Older nodes are generally in lower demand, although strictly speaking they are a tighter supply bottleneck, since nobody is incentivized to build fabs at older process nodes.
But the picture is even more complicated than this. Virtually all semiconductor fabs specialize in certain kinds of chips. Even at roughly the same process node, a DRAM fab cannot easily retool to make NAND, a NAND fab cannot easily retool to make logic (CPU, GPU, FPGA...), a logic fab cannot easily retool to make MEMS or image sensors, and so on.
In fact, not only are individual fabs tooled to make particular kinds of chips, but individual fab operators will generally have their own "design rules" at a certain node. So suppose that you have an ASIC you've been making at TSMC 22nm; just because GlobalFoundries has capacity at 22nm doesn't necessarily mean you can just have them start making your chips.
I have met so many people that think their semiconductor manufacturing needs are exempt from the supply chain issue or backlog. [because they are not on a leading node]
Their semiconductor manufacturing needs are not exempt from the supply chain issue or backlog. [for the reasons you explained]
The landscape can be surprising at a glance because there's no obvious rhyme or reason to who and what is capacity impacted. Before fabs get greenlit for construction, the beancounters do demand forecasts many years out into the future (getting the first chips out of a fab is a labor of many years). If those forecasts were high, there is overcapacity and prices will settle relatively low for that node. If they were low, then there will be capacity issues.
Over time, trailing nodes will get "arbitraged" because chip designers for new devices that are cost-sensitive or not performance-critical will preferentially select cheaper nodes, but acute changes in demand like we've seen from COVID can still cause problems.
I'm a bit surprised they didn't shoot a bit lower and just try to replicate ASML's machines. Those are one of the unobtainium pieces that cost so much in a new fab.
In my experience the only way to compete with a long established player is to learn the business from the ground up and expect a loooong learning curve. What that might look like with semiconductors is building an ingot plant that can sell ingots that the established player can use. Then start slicing them and selling passivated ingots for a bit more margin, then use "marginal" ingots to make large node (like 140nm or 90nm) chips in the good areas to develop training around the workflow. Ideally those chips have some nominal market value and sales can act as a 'discount' on your investment (say it costs you $1B to make the chips and you sell them for $500M, you've basically invested $500M in learning the work flow instead of a full $1B).
Expect this to take 10 - 15 years minimum, 25 years more typically. Invest in university programs to train process engineers, physicists, and circuit designers. "Seed" several universities with small 300mm fabs to give students real experience rather than just "book learning." Aggressively weed out people who cheat to get through school.
Its a really really huge deal to take on this task. It was insanely complicated in the 90's and now it is even more so. The only thing China has going for it is that it doesn't need to repeat the mistakes made in the last 30 years that other semiconductor companies made and so their path is a bit more "straight line." But if experience is any guide, there is no shortcut to doing the work, no matter how much money you spend.
This requires a deep cultural change. Because of high pressure cramming exams that favors rote, Chinese students are incentivized to just cheat from a very young age.
Also, keep in mind that no matter how much you invest, studying at an American university opens the door to working in America and getting a western passport, something more and more Chinese are desperately trying to do.
I'd heard the opposite; that in recent years fewer Chinese studying in the US are staying, and that more who had stayed were returning to China, because of greater opportunities.
https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reve.... (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)