Re: Why The US Doesn’t Stand A Chance

Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

So, North Mexico’s new President wants to bring more high-tech
manufacturing back to his country, instead of relying on the advanced
skills of those pesky Asians.
>
Unfortunately, that won’t be so easy
<https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/building-a-chipmaking-fab-in-the-us-costs-twice-as-much-takes-twice-as-long-as-in-taiwan>.
The Taiwanese can get a new chip fab built in half the time it takes
in the USA. Anybody can get it built quicker than the USA. Even those
backward, Socialist Europeans can do it a little bit quicker than the
USA.

This is because there aren't many fabs in the US.  When there are a lot of
big industrial operations of some sort, it's far easier and cheaper to
buy and set up related manufacturing hardware in that place.

I live near a large shipyard.  I can get huge mills and drills for very
cheap on the surplus market.  If I wanted to set up a company making
heavy machinery, I would be able to do it pretty well.  But PC board fab
hardware is nowhere to be seen here.

There are some small fabs in Silicon Valley that are running 3" wafers
using equipment like Intel was using in the seventies.  That can be very
profitable in a small niche market.  But expanding out of that niche
market isn't easy since the next step up requires machinery that you
don't find on the used market in Silicon Valley... you'd need to go to
Taiwan or Korea for it.  You run out of resist in a small job shop in
Taiwan, you borrow some from the next guy down the street.  You can't
do that in Silicon Valley so easily any more because the density of
fab businesses is so much lower.

You don't START by building a state of the art nanometer fab.  You start
by making cheap opamps and TTL glue chips and once you have that down you
work up.  But you want to do that in a place where there is surplus hardware,
readily available supplies, and local expertise.  Attempts to start at the
top invariably end in failure too.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."