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To: magellan
no way. it won't get upleveled because there is no investment in it here, all of the investment (by the top corporations and the foreign governments) is offshore. who is going to invest here in the US to uplevel our chip industry?
9 posted on 09/28/2003 11:04:59 AM PDT by oceanview
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To: oceanview
"who is going to invest here in the US to uplevel our chip industry?"

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.

88 posted on 09/30/2003 4:48:36 PM PDT by magellan
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