Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> Another concern is that even advanced silicon produced in Ireland or at ESMC is then shipped to other regions for packaging, meaning that European companies have largely lost their ability to produce sophisticated chips entirely in Europe. In turn, this means that, for now, there is hardly any strategic point for European authorities to create demand for chips that are 'Made in Europe' because they are either not assembled in Europe, not produced in Europe, or not developed in Europe. We have no idea whether this is eventually going to change, but there are currently no signs that it will.

This is just such a dire situation to be in. Even USA has seen the writing on the wall regarding China-Taiwan which is why it has been strategically re-homing all the most advanced chip fab technology to Arizona [1].

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

They can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that aren't packaged there, and then they can create demand for "Made in Europe" semiconductors that are packaged there and try to get a packaging plant to open up.

If you have a two step problem, the strategy of "I can't do two things at the same time so I'll just give up", is not a good one.

This was a major flaw that I and others brought up a couple years ago when the EU was consulting industry about making its own CHIPS Act.

While bleeding edge backend processes got the bulk of reporting, the major push for the American CHIPS Act was the rebuild packaging capacity in the US (Samsung is working on this in Texas).

This was also the same approach Taiwan, Malaysia, and China used to climb up the semiconductor value chain.

The EU also failed to tie design capacity together as well, as semiconductor design capacity is almost nonexistent in Europe.

Semiconductor design capacity is a massive issue almost always overlooked in these conversations. Spot on.

There's certainly semiconductor design capacity in Europe, but it's mostly geared towards low-end semiconductors, like the ones used in automotive and industrial. NXP and ST are designing ICs in Europe but relatively commodity stuff like low-end MCUs and motor controllers.

Is EU chips act 2.0 any good?

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