Anyone here in electronic chip manufacturing?
Discussion
If the predictions are true and china does invade Taiwan are the western countries starting up their own factories? China controlling the world’s chip manufacturing should frighten the world.
Considering everything nowadays has a chip somewhere in it are the politicians savvy enough to plan ahead now and take steps, equipment, training staff and sourcing the chemicals needed, where is a Churchill when you need one, not in Westminster obviously
Maybe Rachel could invest £1000 of the billions she is going to make on the employers insurance could be invested in a manufacturing unit under a railway embankment in London?
Considering everything nowadays has a chip somewhere in it are the politicians savvy enough to plan ahead now and take steps, equipment, training staff and sourcing the chemicals needed, where is a Churchill when you need one, not in Westminster obviously
Maybe Rachel could invest £1000 of the billions she is going to make on the employers insurance could be invested in a manufacturing unit under a railway embankment in London?
fiatpower said:
It does seem a very obvious risk. Is there a reason it couldn't be done in the UK or does it all boil down to cost?
Facilities will probably need plenty of space, emit a lot of pollution/ pollutants, require experienced foundry workers and machine operators and do it all at an economical cost. Could park it somewhere in the UK for sure, but it would take years to reorient the chain. By then, we may be scribing things into stones. I'm in the Semiconductor business - Nearly all chip design companies are "Fabless" - i.e. they / we design the chips here and outsource the manufacture to TSMC (in the main) in Taiwan. (There are other chip fab companies (e.g. SMIC in China) but most use Taiwan as the best in world).
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) build the latest greatest Fabs (factories) at their cost - And then manufacture for nearly everyone amortising the huge R&D cost across billions and billions of chips for several years to recoup it a few cents at a time.
It's quite tricky (and expensive) to set these fabs / factories up.
(There are one or 2 old tech fabs still in the UK, and there are a few interesting things going on (at larger geometries than the bleeding edge) but nothing close to the scale of TSMC - i.e. we'd have to build it all from scratch).
The cost of a bleeding edge fab is many many (tens of) billions of dollars and requires a load of raw materials as well as the super fancy technology. There are other challenges as well - e.g. It is not very green when you look at all of the chemicals that are needed along the way.
As well as the fab itself, you also need the wider industry to be there (a bit like the auto industry is not just the car companies) e.g. Chip packaging companies (not boxes but the little black chip packages themselves which is its own high tech industry) and all of the other infrastructure around it.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I would estimate it would cost factors more than HS2 to do so from a standing start.
The US is trying to do it (by making TSMC build their new fabs in the US) - This is probably the only real way to do it. The UK / Europe have been perennially slow on this side of things and it is highly unlikely that this will change - If a politician says that we are going to become a world leader in Semiconductor fabs, you can safely assume they are a clueless muppet
.
TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor) build the latest greatest Fabs (factories) at their cost - And then manufacture for nearly everyone amortising the huge R&D cost across billions and billions of chips for several years to recoup it a few cents at a time.
It's quite tricky (and expensive) to set these fabs / factories up.
(There are one or 2 old tech fabs still in the UK, and there are a few interesting things going on (at larger geometries than the bleeding edge) but nothing close to the scale of TSMC - i.e. we'd have to build it all from scratch).
The cost of a bleeding edge fab is many many (tens of) billions of dollars and requires a load of raw materials as well as the super fancy technology. There are other challenges as well - e.g. It is not very green when you look at all of the chemicals that are needed along the way.
As well as the fab itself, you also need the wider industry to be there (a bit like the auto industry is not just the car companies) e.g. Chip packaging companies (not boxes but the little black chip packages themselves which is its own high tech industry) and all of the other infrastructure around it.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but I would estimate it would cost factors more than HS2 to do so from a standing start.
The US is trying to do it (by making TSMC build their new fabs in the US) - This is probably the only real way to do it. The UK / Europe have been perennially slow on this side of things and it is highly unlikely that this will change - If a politician says that we are going to become a world leader in Semiconductor fabs, you can safely assume they are a clueless muppet
. Edited by fat80b on Monday 7th April 11:33
i watched a vid a while back on AMSL, worth having a search on youtube.
essentially they make the machinery for the current cutting edge chips and are apparently 5-10yrs ahead of the game. they're in the middle of the political tug of war over who is 'allowed' to buy their machinery. interesting stuff.
india is trying to develop themselves as a manufacturing base, uae also willing to throw a whole load of money to attract TSMC and samsung.
essentially they make the machinery for the current cutting edge chips and are apparently 5-10yrs ahead of the game. they're in the middle of the political tug of war over who is 'allowed' to buy their machinery. interesting stuff.
india is trying to develop themselves as a manufacturing base, uae also willing to throw a whole load of money to attract TSMC and samsung.
Mercdriver said:
If the predictions are true and china does invade Taiwan are the western countries starting up their own factories? China controlling the world’s chip manufacturing should frighten the world.
If China invaded Taiwan I'd guess that the fabrication facilities they'd take over would be toast - even if the buildings were ostensibly intact you wouldn't need to do a lot of damage to the processing equipment to effectively kill the facility entirely, and the Taiwanese authorities would have a plan in place to make sure the CCP didn't get their hands on anything of value for their pains - so I don't see China controlling the world's semiconductor manufacturing capacity if they take Taiwan, rather that there will be a massive shortfall in capacity as China will have shat the bed for everyone. We'd have to do better with what remains.I started my career a long time ago at Fairchild Semiconductor shortly before it was acquired by National Semiconductor, but I've been out of that business for over 35 years now - Fairchild's rather poor reputation in the US as regards pollution, groundwater contamination and the subsequent lawsuits (meaning you didn't want a silicon fab anywhere near where you lived) was part of the reason a lot of chip production went overseas, and in particular to the far east, something which might now be regarded as a strategic mistake on the part of the US.
Silicon fabs take a long time to build, and in some cases even longer to come into production as even insanely tiny sources of contamination can kill your yield levels entirely, so as I say, if China do occupy Taiwan then the whole world is going to be facing the mother of all semiconductor shortages, making Trump's tariffs look like a bitt of a minor kerfuffle.
Honestly never thought about that eventuality, i.e. Taiwan destroying the chip fabs to stop the Chinese getting their hands on it.
Its so complex, saw a video where China have built massive landing craft to infiltrate Taiwan and deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
We are heading for a massive crisis here arent we, Russia still at it, Trump doing Trump things, middle east still f
ked.
Trump now seems less interested in Ukraine, would that sort of green light China for invading Taiwan ? Would the US etc seek to protect Taiwan and the precious chip production infrastructure ? Is he too busy invading Greelannd, Panama and maybe Canada ?
Be nice if everyone stopped being imperialist knobs, just make what you have work and quit it ffs.
Its so complex, saw a video where China have built massive landing craft to infiltrate Taiwan and deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
We are heading for a massive crisis here arent we, Russia still at it, Trump doing Trump things, middle east still f
ked.Trump now seems less interested in Ukraine, would that sort of green light China for invading Taiwan ? Would the US etc seek to protect Taiwan and the precious chip production infrastructure ? Is he too busy invading Greelannd, Panama and maybe Canada ?
Be nice if everyone stopped being imperialist knobs, just make what you have work and quit it ffs.
eharding said:
If China invaded Taiwan I'd guess that the fabrication facilities they'd take over would be toast - even if the buildings were ostensibly intact you wouldn't need to do a lot of damage to the processing equipment to effectively kill the facility entirely, and the Taiwanese authorities would have a plan in place to make sure the CCP didn't get their hands on anything of value for their pains - so I don't see China controlling the world's semiconductor manufacturing capacity if they take Taiwan, rather that there will be a massive shortfall in capacity as China will have shat the bed for everyone. We'd have to do better with what remains.
....
How dependent would China be on Taiwan for chip production? The chinese have spent years trying to build up their own chip manufacturing capabilities - that ramped up (significantly) since the US hit them with advanced chip import limitations but they had been pouring a heap of money into that already before. If it's just the western countries that would be significantly impacted or even that they are impacted to a far greater degree, the potential risk of a move against taiwan would probably be a decent amount greater in that case........
J4CKO said:
.
We are heading for a massive crisis here arent we, Russia still at it, Trump doing Trump things, middle east still fked.
.
It feels like it. Maybe not so much a third World War but perhaps a Great Depression or global reset of some description. Certainly a period of vast turmoil. We are heading for a massive crisis here arent we, Russia still at it, Trump doing Trump things, middle east still f
ked..
Taiwan aren't going to give the crown jewels to the US or anywhere else I wouldn't think. They are their protection policy.
Investing in industries like this (and antivirals nuclear power etc) is something we should be doing. And should ha e been ages ago. We need to stop kicking the can down the road on it all.
Investing in industries like this (and antivirals nuclear power etc) is something we should be doing. And should ha e been ages ago. We need to stop kicking the can down the road on it all.
I don't work in chip manufacture but have used some of the tech to make other devices. To explain why it's hard, the latest chips have features of around 5nm across. Your hair is around 50um across, ie 10,000x wider. Chips have multiple layers which need to be positioned repeatedly between deposition/ removal processes. Nominally identical machines for each step need to be fine tuned and calibrated to give the same result, which can take multiple iterations.
J4CKO said:
Honestly never thought about that eventuality, i.e. Taiwan destroying the chip fabs to stop the Chinese getting their hands on it.
Its so complex, saw a video where China have built massive landing craft to infiltrate Taiwan and deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
China has developed the ability to put hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Taiwan Strait so Taiwan can drown them. The last successful forced landing was Inchon over 70 years ago, imagine trying to maintain tactical surprise for an armada of ships rivalling that used on D-Day in the era of universal satellite, radar and electronic surveillance and cheap drones. It's delusional, they will all die in a hail of anti-ship missiles or be sunk by mines and torpedoes.Its so complex, saw a video where China have built massive landing craft to infiltrate Taiwan and deploy hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Ed Conway's book 'Material World' has a chapter on this topic. It's a sobering read when you realise how far ahead of the rest of the world Taiwan is:
https://amzn.eu/d/gNJSnir
https://amzn.eu/d/gNJSnir
Simply, it's really hard.
What's weird a out chips is that it's very often build to print. So vertical supply chains are quite rare, and ARM (one of the popular chip architectures) don't manufacture anything themselves, it's all licensed).
The market is already supply constrained, with Cloud Computing really fighting for resources (everything from weather prediction to F1 racing teams), and that's before you get into consumer electronics which have generally been quite deflationary (bug TVs are cheap these days!).
What's weird a out chips is that it's very often build to print. So vertical supply chains are quite rare, and ARM (one of the popular chip architectures) don't manufacture anything themselves, it's all licensed).
The market is already supply constrained, with Cloud Computing really fighting for resources (everything from weather prediction to F1 racing teams), and that's before you get into consumer electronics which have generally been quite deflationary (bug TVs are cheap these days!).
Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff