Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

Ideally, the EU would be trying to build its own semiconductor industry. I don't see that kind of foresight in any of our political leaders, much less mine in Germany. So the next best thing is to ensure that the current company we're reliant on builds local production.

View on HN

Note that the act of giving subsidies to foreign companies automatically kills any case for investing in a truly local chip company, because you can't easily compete against that.

Competing with Intel is out of the question for any local chip company.

But semiconductors is much much much more than high end CPUs. There’s totally a huge opportunity for local chip companies to grow. And having company like Intel may help, as people who work there will get a lot of know how that they can take to smaller local companies to help them grow.

> Competing with Intel is out of the question for any local chip company.

Why? Intell lost the mobile, and is currently losing desktop/server. RISC-V is more promising each passing day. If India can do this, why can't Europe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243674

> If India can do this Can do what exactly? AFAIK they haven't actually built anything yet. It's going to be years until they have anything competitive with current gen CPUs. And even if they build something useful there is no guarantee it won't end up like Russian Elbrus (way to expensive and 10 years behind Intel/ARM).

Intel never really had the mobile market and was seemingly never particularly interested in it. They are currently heavily pressured by AMD and ARM based cpus both in the consumer and server markets.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/india_it_would_be_fab...

India is hoping it can convince Intel and TSMC to set up fabs in the country as part of their multibillion-dollar manufacturing expansion blueprint.

Bloomberg reported Tuesday that India's government is making pitches to both companies, backed with a $10 billion subsidy plan that can be used to cover up to half of the cost of a new chipmaking plant. The plan also covers new plants for display manufacturers.

It took Apple, one of the most powerful company in history, about decade and half, multiple acquisitions and many billions of dollars to be able to compete with Intel.

By the time any incumbent in Germany would be ready, even assuming they start right now, that fab will be heavily outdated.

But there’s literally bazillion other semiconductors (and they are the main reason for the shortage, not high end CPUs) that you can competitively manufacture and increase supply chain locality for critical components.

Germany used to have a semiconductor industry like Intermetall (acquired by micronas acquired by TDK). The problem is that IMHO German automotive industry is not willing to pay a cent more than necessary.

They do only care about short term profit. They triggered the chip crisis in Germany by stopping there orders and then restocking. I am not sure if any government can fix this.

Infineon doesn't count?

And there's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Fab

"The X-FAB Silicon Foundries is a German group of semiconductor foundries, with headquarters in Erfurt (X-FAB Semiconductor Foundries AG is located in the south east industrial area between Melchendorf and Windischholzhausen). The group specializes in the fabrication of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for fabless semiconductor companies, as well as MEMS and solutions for high voltage applications."

And:

https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/03/apple-to-invest-ov...

"Apple will invest over 1 billion euros in Germany and plans European Silicon Design Center in Munich"

>Germany used to have a semiconductor industry like Intermetall (acquired by micronas acquired by TDK). The problem is that IMHO German automotive industry is not willing to pay a cent more than necessary.

How about the three fabs that Bosch has in Germany? Or Infineon, X-Fab, Globalfoundries, TI, Prema, Elmos (now Siltech), Vishay, Nexperia?

Silicon on hacker news pretty much always means latest and smallest logic node, because most commenters aren’t aware of semiconductor applications beyond computer parts and assume everything is about 7 5 3 nm because that’s what gets in the news.

Sorry for being imprecise: I ment a much larger specialized semiconductor industry, that did not survive the market pressure. True that Bosch, Osram and Siemens (now Infineon) have survived. But I think things like RAM production moved out of Germany. Global foundries (formally th AMD fab) is an example of a non-European company, although certainly there fabs and are no clones of US fabs. However, afaik the industry used to be much more diversified and innovative at a time. Actually there is still some interesting exception in the list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...

Which of them can make a 2010-level ARM chip?

GF in FDX22, possibly also with eMRAM noadays. Surely not sure fathers 2010 cmos process...

They are on it [1], but it takes time.

[1] https://on5g.es/en/ec-sets-targets-for-european-digital-sove...

Some of the current German leaders (like Annalena Baerbock) are too subservient to American corporate interests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com