Posted on 09/28/2003 10:34:52 AM PDT by nwrep
Okay, what do you mean? I don't get paper or plastic.
He is suggesting that your son will become a grocery clerk if he studies electronics. I don't agree. There are a lot of things that could happen in the world and if we don't have people who understand modern technology we are in big trouble.
Intel, for one. Motorolla for another. Basically any designer of advanced semiconductors for the embedded market. Intel would love its StrongARM technology to be in every refridgerator, and Motorolla wants its PowerPC technology in every set top box. Like I said, DirectTV now has a TiVO like recorder in its settop box. That requires a CPU that has the power of a desktop PC.
Experience matters tremendously in the semiconductor industry. Nobody out there can build a Pentium 5 CPU unless they already have years of experience in the CPU industry. So if a TV set top box or a CD player with built-in MP3 jukebox requires a CPU the level of a PC CPU, only semiconductor companies with the experience in computer CPUs need apply.
And even the manufacturing of advanced semiconductors will remain in the US, and perhaps to some extent to Japan and Europe. I know one company that tried to take a small, 10-year old CPU design and get it fabricated by UMC in Taiwan, and UMC could not do it. It was too complex. If Taiwan cannot do it there is no way China could do it.
I was at a conference once, and somebody mentioned the number of CPU designers there were in the world. It is not a big number. I think it is about 6,000, and half of the 6,000 were employed by Intel. The number of CPU architects is much fewer (I seem to remember a number of 300, but I could be wrong on that one).
While the universities can instruct on very simple semiconductor designs, the real learning happens in the semiconductor companies, under the tutalage of the CPU architects. So the 6,000 number is no doubt growing, but slowly.
The problem is CPU design is a building block process. You cannot simply start from scratch, hire some electrical engineers, and have them design some complex circuits. Instead, the approach is more like going to the moon. First put a satellite into orbit. Then a monkey. Then a man. Then send a robot lander to the moon, and so on.
It takes about the same amount of time as getting to the moon as well. For example, new CPUs can take from three to five or even more years to go from idea to volume production. Some ideas are out there for years before the semiconductor technology catches up and allows the idea to be implemented. Semiconductor companies today are working on ideas that will not see the light of day until the end of the decade.
Modern CPUs projects today are on the engineering scale of the Manhattan Project or Project Apollo. I am not kidding. They are pushing the limits of physics every day. So you can't just bring somebody in as needed. I guess you could if bring in a team of 500 people for five years.
Because Americans bring in an electical engineer from a foriegn country and tell him to work on this one circuit out of 300 on the chip. And the person who tells him to do that is the engineering team leader in charge of that section of the chip, who knows how to manage a team because he has done it for the last 10 years. And that team leader is managed by the design team leader, who has done this for his entire working life. And beside him are a handful of visionaries with all of the radical ideas on how to make great things. And the design team leader decides what is practical, based on his 20 years of experience.
It is easy to hire in somebody at the bottom. It is hard to grow the experience needed to manage the complexity of the project. I know sombody that spent over 20 years at IBM working on CPU designs and leading PowerPC processor design teams. Because it takes 3-5 years to design a processor, and it takes 3-5 iterations to develop the leadership experience, it takes 10 to 15 years to develop a design team leader. IBM sent this guy to engineering managment school between each project. He took on increasing responsibility within the design teams over time.
What you suggest would be like hiring in a General, then conscripting an army, and expecting it to win a war. Such an effort would not win the war because an army needs career NCOs with 15 years of experience to make an army work.
If you could just bring somebody in, somebody would have done it. The fact that somebody has not done it is the best indication of how hard it is. It could be done, but it is a 20 year project.
Or shoe fitters at Foot Locker.
But I guess it's RACIST to suggest this...
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