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Comment by connicpu | Hacker News Reader

Tariffs on products we don't have immediate domestic manufacturing capacity for will hurt the economy in the short term, which is not a great move during a period of rising inflation. It's a tough decision though, because it does feel like the better move for the long term.

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> Tariffs on products we don't have immediate domestic manufacturing capacity for will hurt the economy in the short term

I suppose you could announce tariffs which will take place 5 years down the line? And ramp it up over time?

Congress offloads imposing tariffs to the executive branch, so they'd need to take it back to do that. Otherwise, it's just a countdown for the industry to donate enough to the opposing political party's PACs to get them in office and repeal the looming tariffs.

ie. the current bill only passed because both political parties are fine with giving companies government money.

The US still produces a lot of computer chips…

Intel is still a very large player in chips and dominate in some areas. Even TI which has tons of fabs (not highest end) as well. I don’t really understand this.

Relatively few consumer electronics use Intel chips. Even in the devices that do use Intel chips, it's one Intel CPU versus dozens of others.

TI's fabs are mainly focused on analog, so the requirements are a bit different. IIRC we have 3 130-65nm layers for digital in our mixed signal designs which is roughly on par with a the process technology Intel used in 2005.

The majority ICs used for products and such do not need bleeding edge node sizes.

True. That is part of the reason why only 3 of maybe 30-60 layers are that small.

Analog gets some signal integrity benefits from larger transistors, and often we have fairly large fets for low rdson and high voltage tolerance.

I agree tariffs are the right long-term move. I think they just have to be implemented gradually. Just increase it by 4% per year for the next 10 years.

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