Hacker News Reader

Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

main problem is that we are rewarding companies for being disloyal and offshoring in the first place, now they win again with free money after raking in profits for decades. We should have some funding for smaller companies and R&D but also massive tariffs to force companies to bring manufacturing back

View on HN

There are basically only 3 close-to-cutting edge foundries left - Intel (American), Samsung (South Korean) and TSMC (Taiwanese), and TSMC is in the lead by quite a bit. We're getting extremely close to the end-game of moore's law, so the lifetime of a <7nm fab is likely to be long, and there are likely to only ever be a handful built because they are absurdly expensive (20+ Billion dollars), particularly if you can't keep them fully utilized. There are no 'smaller companies' with cutting edge fabs, and these aren't really American companies who outsourced and are no bringing them back - Intel has always had a large manufacturing presence in the US, and a large part of this is trying to get foreign companies to 'offshore' fabs to the US rather than continuing to concentrate in south korea / taiwan.

This is true for large digital integrated circuits.

There's also analog fabs, MEMS fabs, LED/photo/laser fabs.

Places like Analog still have smaller fabs like that. Those fabs also seem likely to create technological progress into the future, and so the US should be funding those too.

Unless I'm mistaken, Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well.

They do but they have explicitly given up the game of competing to be the first to the next fastest smallest digital logic (i.e. cutting edge nodes).

Micron is still pushing DRAM and NAND tech but it's more for cost cutting since they are strictly commodities. The work it takes to be a pure-play fab like TSMC is pretty different - lots of working with fabless vendors to bring up their chips. Even Intel isn't any good at this (yet). It's a collaborative process.

> Micron and Texas Instruments have their own foundries as well.

At their tech level there's probably hundreds of companies with fabs[1]. GP was explicitly talking about cutting edge fabs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

TSMC straight out competed the 1st movers in the chip space. They’re not dominant because American companies moved their own factories to Taiwan. It was homegrown and they really nailed it.

TSMC were almost single-handedly bankrolled by Apple. Had Samsung not tried to establish themselves as a competitor to Apple in basically every product offering, they would be in first place.

Well, TSMC delivered on what Apple needed and Samsung spread themselves too thins. That's how it goes sometimes.

> main problem is that we are rewarding companies for being disloyal and offshoring in the first place, now they win again with free money after raking in profits for decades. We should have some funding for smaller companies and R&D but also massive tariffs to force companies to bring manufacturing back

I'm no corporate apologist but the current mess is the result of a government policy designed to encourage globalization. An American company that builds stuff here will always be at a competitive disadvantage versus a foreign company that builds stuff using dramatically cheaper labor.

So I don't think it's really correct to think of these subsidies as "rewards" - it's done strategically to keep American manufacturing alive.

I would suggest that the real alternative is not to fund the smaller companies, but to simply nationalize Intel.

That would slow an already injured economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com