Posted on 08/20/2022 4:25:02 AM PDT by FarCenter
With all the fanfare and foundry expansions around the signing of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the semiconductor shortage will soon be over, and the US will emerge as a silicon powerhouse rivaling that of Taiwan's TSMC and South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix.
But that is a nationalist fantasy that proponents of the bill on both sides of the political aisle have peddled for well over a year, and one companies like Intel, Micron, and others have only been too happy to play into.
The reality is the $52 billion in subsidies and $24 billion in tax credits allotted by the bill to fund domestic foundry expansions won't go very far given the extreme cost of these facilities and only keep pace with foreign rivals building on American soil already.
Building a foundry in the US can cost anywhere from $10 billion to $17 billion and take three to five years to complete. The subsidies will barely cover four wafer fabs in their entirety, and none of them will come online until the latter half of the decade at the earliest. A quick fix, the bill is not.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
Anything the government gets involved in goes badly. That’s because Congress wants X. But the people who administer the money aren’t really interested in X. They really want something unrelated to X so they impose other stuff. Okay, if you want the money for X you’ll have to install our diversity program or have mixed gender bathrooms or whatever. The people who could do X will shy away and the people who can’t do X but want the money will take it and, in the end, you won’t get X.
TSMC is building a facility in Arizona as we speak.
We should make our own, but we do not currently possess the same level of knowledge on chip fabrication.
Americans corner the market on the knowledge of the lithography used to make chips down to .1nm (ten times smaller “printing” than today) since 1993. The simple physics of it is the lithography will have to go to particle accelerators by the 2040s as the light source.
With the power and water concerns of TSMC other plants, the investment was going to be in US, Germany and Canada anyways. What was discovered over the past 2 years, All the employment costs are seconday to keeping the baked product flowing out the door daily.
The users of chips are paying 3 times 2019 prices for the exact same product with a solid contract to deliver steady streams. Those chip users are also stockpiling a years consumption in a accounting exercise.
Goverment is half a decade late and paying for something that was already financed. Chips are going to cheaper in 5 years, in a glut of stock in the warehouse, stock at the user and more and more solution on fewer chips being fabed by aircraft (mostly in entertainment systems) and automobile companies. The large verticals that make panels have already cut the chip count in their models to 1/8 of 2010 and 1/4 of 2015 levels. What has happened to phones is happening to all products, system on a chip are replacing daughtercards with 4 to 20 other chips. If your making 2 million of anything you are asking the fabs to spin a system on a chip for the entire production run or you making an arm jellybean do everything.
Everything I have read has stated otherwise, but it sounds like you know what you’re talking about.
Certainly more than I know by far.
I hope you’re right and we manufacture at home and be top dog.
Dahell is an arm jellybean?
Silicon has the diamond cubic crystal structure with a lattice parameter of 0.543 nm. The nearest neighbor distance is 0.235 nm.
There won’t be 0.1 nm semiconductors, since that’s smaller than the distance between atoms.
Even after that, operational costs would be double or triple what other countries can do it for.
DON'T YOU TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CANNOT DO!!!
It won’t end our reliance on foreign supply of chips, but it will make nancy richer. That was the purpose?
True and the cost of the chips manufactured here will cost more. There is a reason that these companies do this elsewhere. This doesn’t really account for that.
We need domestic sources of industrial NEON. Right now almost all of the world’s supply of this gas, which is critical to laser etching microchips, comes from Ukraine, Russia and China.
Didn’t the Pelosi’s invest a bunch of money in computer chips here a few weeks ago? Mmmmm!
If Nancy had anything to do with it all it does is put cash in the pockets of Democrat supporters
We have a source. All its suppliers mine it from the same shared source, the atmosphere. We haven’t invested the capital to mine it at prior market prices.
Refining semiconductor grade Industrial NEON from the atmosphere is inefficient and tremendously expensive. Refined Semiconductor grade Industrial NEON is derived from byproducts of steel manufacturing. The NEON gas in lighting comes from the atmosphere and is not suitable for semiconductor use without a tremendous amount of refining and purification. Semiconductor grade neon must be around 99.999999% pure. Lighting neon is nowhere near that.
The challenge to replacing Ukrainian Neon is not access to Neon, but rather the capital costs required to start large scale similar production elsewhere, the lead time required to bring that online, and the financial risk than Ukrainian sources may reapppear, again be lowest cost and thus render the replace efforts a poor return on investment. So getting Neon otherwise is more expensive than industry likes. Fine, but is that more expensive than the opportunity costs resulting from greatly reduced new chip production? I’m skeptical of that. But it is not like some of the green dream economics where the raw materials needed either simply don’t exist or only physically exist in very difficult locations (eg. Congo and cobalt.)
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