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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

Wolfspeed is building a fab in North Carolina that will make SiC based chips. They are receiving $750 million from the CHIPS and Science Act and will likely receive another $1 billion in tax credits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

SiC transistors and diodes are used in high power applications like locomotives, EV chargers and industrial motor controls. In their catalog they have a half-bridge power module rated for 1200V and 760A, which to me is amazing that a semiconductor can handle that much.

https://www.wolfspeed.com/products/power/sic-power-modules/h...

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It really bugs the hell out of me that we are constantly forced against our will to fund these companies for basically nothing. It’s an utterly insane model. Sure, we get to then give them yet more money to use those critical chips after the same people squandered the time and gutted the American economy and shipped it all overseas for decades prior; but can’t there be a rate of return and not just give, essentially executives huge bonuses forever?

There should be no such thing as free grants, if anything they should be ownership stakes by the U.S. people by way of the government if, e.g., we are handing them 700 Million dollars and then basically deferring on 1 Billion dollars which also has an additional opportunity cost and a cost of the money, i.e., inflation and interest.

I can’t tell you how many people have become extremely wealthy from nothing by getting government grants and contracts that built and funded their companies, paid for by you, with your tax money and inflation you pay at the grocery store.

Whats your solution then, when Taiwan falls to China tomorrow and the chips stop flowing in? The parasite execs are a problem, but a much smaller problem than if the Chinese blocks flow of essential chips. It will cause all kinds of cascading issues. Which we saw when supply chains from there, all shutdown during Covid.

Absolutely agree. We need chip supremacy as a home-soil tech asap. Jet engines are no longer the challenge they previously were for China, we can’t afford to let the same happen with chips.

> The parasite execs are a problem, but a much smaller problem than if the Chinese blocks flow of essential chips

how dumping money onto those parasites solves the problem of the Chinese blocking the chips? So far it looks like :

1. dump the [boatload of uncountable government] money onto the parasites

2. ...

3. chips!

Nature hasn't been able to get rid of parasites for billions of years. Why? The reason they exist is, there are always parts of ever changing complex systems that can be exploited, faster than any reaction is possible. Same story with people in large orgs. If you hire 1000 people tomorrow to run a factory, there is no 100% guarantee a few parasites won't enter the system. Add to that fact, our culture is built around people worshiping Status accumulation, Wealth accumulation, Consumption etc (with Media signalling it 24x7) it sets the Environment up for parasitic/exploitative activities. Some of it can be minimized by strong/respected leaders setting up a better environment, changing what signals people are getting etc but its never 100% perfect cause of rate of change. There is always a dance going on where balance is shifting back and forth. Covid appears. Causes Chaos. It gets beaten down. Then something else appears. Thats the nature of parasites.

They are not arguing for not funding these companies, they are arguing for not doing it without counterparts:

> There should be no such thing as free grants, if anything they should be ownership stakes by the U.S. people by way of the government

> against our will

Let's not push that one too far, there is no "little guy" in these deals.

What does surprise me more is that we don't see "tax credits" in "pay your tax in shares". The amount would be higher then, probably - but many of these deals would in the end be profitable.

The whole point of an income tax is that it's paid in USD - basically this is what gives the USD its value, it has mandatory demand. (For sales taxes, it has a double effect where it encourages transactions being in USD.)

Public ownership of shares can be good too. That's a social wealth fund, but we have Vanguard and mutual funds instead.

> The whole point of an income tax is that it's paid in USD - basically this is what gives the USD its value

I'm not understanding correctly (not kidding): what gave the USD its value before the income tax in 1914 or thereabout?

Gold in a vault

"… after the same people squandered … decades prior"

The same people? Decades later?

OR perhaps is new, younger people with better ideas who just happen to work at the same company?

It's entirely possible for the government to pressure the corporations in the chip industry to move resources into research, development and manufacturing capacity.

What the government would have to do is increase corporate taxes and capital gains taxes but give various writeoffs and rebates for R & D and new factories. Essentially the government tells the corporation, "you can pay us this tax money, or you can put the money back into R & D and production starts, it's up to you."

This would probably upset the Milton Friedman neoliberalism proponents, but they've made a mess of things IMO. Regardless the shareholders and executives would have to take significant losses relative to their present situation under such new conditions. The money has to come from somewhere and fabs are expensive complicated beasts with demanding supply chain issues.

the other option would be cash for shares

> What the government would have to do is increase corporate taxes and capital gains taxes

Maybe if you put the executives under the lash, too?

> the Milton Friedman neoliberalism proponents, but they've made a mess of things IMO

Not hardly. The US is determined to tax and regulate businesses until it is cheaper to make things in other countries. That's the source of the problem.

> after the same people squandered the time and gutted the American economy and shipped it all overseas for decades prior

What same people? The ones who messed up US chips are Intel and the article doesn't show them getting any money. Theoretical neoliberals aren't really relevant here. China did not take the chip fab business - this isn't a deindustrialization issue.

(I believe deindustrialization was mostly Volcker and the 70s oil shock though, not the neoliberals.)

> I can’t tell you how many people have become extremely wealthy from nothing

Not to be rude, but you haven't told us that, that is true. The most important thing to remember here is that economic populism is wrong and you should never believe anything you hear like this because it's probably just made up.

Also, grocery prices are fine.

> which to me is amazing that a semiconductor can handle that much.

i'm also equally amazed at how much <5v can accomplish. 3.3v is common, but I also think back to the old NTSC video signal was 1v peak-to-peak. Of course, that was just the signal and not the voltage driving the CRT, but still impressive. I've done my own hobby electronics ala Arduino type stuff, and detecting voltage drops in analog of <1v can be challenging to do accurately.

The drive voltage of a modern desktop or server CPU is about 1V. Which means there's up to 300-400A flowing through through the motherboard and the pin sockets from the VRM to the CPU. Pretty crazy numbers!

(1V drop, though should be easy to measure. A badly noisy ADC would be at about 10mV. High-precision in analog starts at 10s of uV)

Basically any electroplating tank uses <5V, no matter how large it is. So are basically all line-level audio and most dynamic speaker drive signals: 5V at 4Ω is 6 watts, which is a fairly loud speaker.

Detecting 1-volt voltage drops is not at all difficult; that's enough to turn on any BJT, and any random opamp can measure voltage differences down to millivolts, often nanovolts. https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/AS321.pdf is a 50¢ random opamp, the one Digi-Key has the most in stock of at the moment; its offset voltage is specified as 5 millivolts max, but of course it can measure much smaller voltages than that if you null out the offset with a trimpot, or if you just don't care about it.

This is not Arduino's strong point, but it doesn't have any difficulty with that task either. The ADC in the ATMega328P used in most Arduinos has a resolution of about a millivolt when referenced to its internal bandgap https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-7810-..., and it also has an analog comparator with a maximum offset voltage specified as 40 millivolts. And any random cheap-shit multimeter can measure down to a millivolt or so. And, from the discussion above about audio line levels, it should be obvious that just about any dynamic speaker, and most headphones, can easily make millivolt-level signals audible.

Maybe you meant "detecting voltage drops in analog of <1 microvolt can be challenging".

And apparently they cancelled their fab in Germany.

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