TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, NXP to jointly build semiconductor fab in Europe

As factual and valid as you could hope for. I find his work very thorough.

Here's a video about China's Gallium & Germanium Export Controls:

https://youtu.be/J4XU-QxXJMw

I didn't find it anti-China, neither are his other videos in my opinion.

According to the transcript below Jon Y. is half Taiwanese/Hong Kong, make of that what you will.

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/jon-y-asianometry-on-semi...

The video about the East German chip industry is well researched. Making the chip industry investments responsible alone for the collapse of the GDR is a bit click-baity (it was at most one contributing factor).

If it matters, in an interview he had, he said he thought China would successfully... reunify with Taiwan if it tried, and iirc, that it would happen eventually.

I think a lot of people in the Asian geopolitical theater just really don't like China because they do a lot of crappy things.

Can you provide some examples of content you felt was anti-China propaganda / brainwashing?

"space age" in the colloquial sense.

Certainly true, a 40nm transistor made in 2013 is not the same as one made in 2023. Likewise, a 16nm transistor made in 2017 will not be the same as one in 2027. The power efficiency on the newer wireless SoCs is unreal.

What would you consider to be small players when it comes to chip production? I mean, the factories cost billions. So where would small companies play a role except as contractor, supplier, etc. for the big ones?

Suppose you need automation for machinery in a cutting edge fab, that would be much further in the future? They could ship from Taiwan, so the idea that this is a back up does not sound entirely wrong. Sounds like fan-fiction, too, true enough.

AMD is already there and Intel is building in Lower Saxony. Must be something about the region, perhaps the chemistry since the Erzgebirge has a history in mining. Meisner Porcelain for example beat Venice and replaced good old China (pun intended).

> No one walked back anything.

I'm not sure about that (haven't heard this story).

My impression is that EU sticks to discretion very much, and they aren't free from corruption. The US on the other hand is not known to play nice with matters of law in international affairs (Edit: shouldn't have said "international law").

Taiwan is a partner was the point, I believe. Of course they aren't going to give away the crown jewels either.

The technology is roughly 10 years behind, but in the scenario that the replacement capability becomes important is something like Trump fumbles the great power competition and US and China have a nice nuclear moment. And frankly making do with Haswell era CPUs is lamentable but as far as nuclear exchanges go not that bad.

It isn't even thinking ahead. It is pure, plain and simple arrogance, of the most despicable and stupid kind. The German auto producers are used to be able to strong-arm politicians and their suppliers. What they say goes, because usually they can threaten whole regions with unemployment and whole companies (the ones that produce car-parts such as seat cushions or engine parts mostly/only) with bankruptcy. Don't want to accept a mandatory 20% price reduction mid-contract? We'll just delay payment until you do, good luck surviving long enough for the courts to recognize your claim...

With chip makers, it is different, because chips can be used in lots of different products and there is lots of demand from all corners. So car makers tried their usual strong-arm tactics and failed miserably. Chips being a sellers market, after all. After which car makers went whining to their politician puppets, getting them to OK billions in subsidies for "supply chain security".

But isn't a lot of modern automotive all about ai? Stuff like image recognition on camera's and sensors, error prediction, data-aggregation and, in future, self-driving?

Still in denial?

I have a hard time understanding the people who visit this website and havent used the technology.

> it's a 300mm fab.

300mm wafer diameter, yes. That's state of the art, with some vendors looking at 450mm with little to show for now.

> it's a 300mm fab.

300mm is larger than a vacuum tube!

Germany has build more PV capacity in the last three years than the total nuclear capacity it ever build, and the numbers are increasing thanks to regulatory cutbacks by the current government.

Meanwhile new nuclear reactors cost 4 times as much as renewables and take decades to build.

So stop spreading FUD.

This is false. Germany is one of the few countries making real progress towards a commitment to clean energy by 2050. I think you're uninformed about the details and failing to grasp the plan beyond a couple of headlines you saw.

Nothing, it's just hopium from people who haven't read the article, fishing for upvotes.

What abysmal software? The software in my VW is more than adequate.

Not that I see what interest I'd have in any kind of AI in my car.

Yes, these chips are for automotive and industrial use, what's the problem? Those are both important use cases.

You may think Europe is done, but who makes the EUV lithography machines used for TSMCs' cutting edge nodes? Who makes the leading ERP system used by a lot of companies around the world? Where was the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine developed?

The point is, Europe has plenty of innovation. But unlike the US, people don't go around boasting every chance they get. People just do stuff and are happy with that.

I admit that I talk to it in English the most (as it's my native tongue) but I had read here that it has gotten noticeably worse in other languages, even making grammar mistakes in linguistically-close-to-english-and-sufficently-present-in-training-data western european languages like German or French.

I do enjoy translating things into Sindarian or other conglangs from literature though.

I had a theory that giving it the custom instructions in latin might give better results, but i haven't had time to figure out how to benchmark something that's so non-deterministic and black-boxy

> Aren't LLMs potentially great to ward off language death due to their significant abilities to transpose ideas into different languages?

What do you mean?

Language is culture, and if the sapir-whorf hypothesis holds, different languages are literally different methods of thinking.

there are also other potential benefits, e.g. "the" in english gives little information about what noun may follow. "die/das/der" in general cut the probability space to a third.

From a practical point of view it is probably good to have an international lingua franca, most likely a variation of English not only due to its current popularity but because it has accommodated a lot of simplifications [1,2] to make itself easier to learn. But for local cultures it would be an awful lot of work to translate centuries of tradition and literature into a global language, or a lot to lose by forgetting it. There is also a natural human tendency to modify and evolve the language that we use, while an international language has to be more stable or changes regulated lest it fragment as Latin did 1500 years ago.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

2: Contrast particularly major rivals French and Mandarin

Kids cannot use foreign language tools to their full abilities. However, if ChatGPT is good for english only, it might stimulate some competition for providing similar service in the local language. I won't mind it, tbh.

imperialism

It's also all coming together: it's about Germany, which a lot of Europeans don't have a positive opinion on (to put it mildly), then it's about East Germany which a lot of West Germans don't have a positive opinion on (to put it mildly), and finally it's also about the EU's / Germany's governing model which most startup-scene-hipsters on HN don't have a positive opinion on (to put it mildly).

There's hardly a topic like this where almost everybody finds something to complain about ;)

Still living here I must point out that you are pointing an equally one sided picture.

While all of what you say is true and problematic, there are people from all over the world living in Dresden and some parts (especially Neustadt) are politically rather left leaning.

Sorry to hear that. I wasn't trying to downplay the issue, I was just recounting from own experiences just visiting the cities (Leipzig, Dresden) multiple times.

>The city itself and university are super nice though.

Then, I hope this will get more widespread :)

I only ever see crying about racism in Dresden in the Media and on HN.

Is this an actual thing or just something pushed up because victimhood is idolized too much? The blue collar workers here are diverse af.

Isn't this a rampant problem across Europe thought?

I went on a beach vacation with some French friends and was sort of stunned/apalled at the sort of non-stop "it is all the muslim/immigrants" fault talk.

What are countries less racist than the United States or Germany? I've found Canada to be incredibly racist against French Canadians. Casually mocked in the streets. If we did that in the USA you'd lose your job

> I've witnessed visiting Indian colleagues of mine being threatened on the street for having dark skin and racist demonstrations are a weekly occurrence.

So, like the US?

Question: does that mean there are no indian restaurants in Dresden?

The car industry in Germany already makes a huge number of chips for cars -- they just aren't as sophisticated or as small as the ones made in Taiwan suitable for personal computers so by your own logic they have followed the South Korean model already.

How do they know the latter works out better vs South Korea just executed better?

Like what if SK & Malaysia took the opposite approaches? How do we know that SK wouldn't still have been the successful one, and we'd be saying everyone should take the opposite approach because that's what SK did and it worked?

You do the cheap manufacturing to get from low-income to medium-income. Once at that level you need skilled workers to get to high-income. If you don't have these, low-cost jobs will move to other countries affected you are trapped. Germany already had a highly educated workforce and is high-income. No need to go back to square one.

Source: Invisible China by Scott Rozelle which does a great job explaining economic development and comparing different countries.

Ahistoric nonsense. Its just that south-Korea is at a empire gradient. One empire borders another empire. Which either means you gets you eternal proxy wars - or you get propped up, by the competition of the empires and can milk that sweet soft-power gradient for benefits. You get preferable trade-agreements, even if you use protectionism. You get other sweet deals. Look at all the countries who made it, dwelling along the fault lines of the past and the present. Germany. Turkey. Austria. Italy.Hungary. Greece. Japan. China. South-Korea. Soon Ukraine. The list goes on and the reason has little todo with strategy. You cant plan for location.

Dresden actually has a history with making chips:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Robotron

The Max-Planck-Society [0][1] is also an e.V. and they have a yearly budget in the order of 2.5B€ or so. e.V.s can be very diverse in their nature.

[0] (de) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

[1] (en) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society

Not really. The factory will not produce CPUs GPUs or other high end chips.

One of the redundancies, and not a very high end one

> the leadership was mocking China's capability to build their own domenstic supply chain

Well, ASML is primarily and rightly very concerned that once "China" has their machines they'll attempt to reverse engineer them, ignore any western patents and IP and try to build 'Chinese chip machines'. It's happened to many industries, from Lego to fashion to hi tech. Hell, apparently there's even Chinese Knock-off Movies.

So, above everything else, there's a legitimate concern for ASML that once they move or deliver too much into China, they'll enable their own competition.

> the US has been talking about bombing TSMC themselves[]

The U.S. said nothing of the sort. One Congressman, in the minority no less, did.

> People who don't understand what OP just wrote should look at what just happened to the South Korean semiconductor market. over 36% plunge in exports[] and that samsungs memory profit dropped 95%.

Is demand for electronics finally dropping? I want to be able to buy a 3 year old Nvidia low-range GPU at below MSRP...

Wasn't there a whole DRAM price fixing cartel that blew up recently?

The stated reason for delaying the fab construction is a lack of skilled labor in the USA, which does make sense - that's what happens when you hollow out domestic manufacturing in the name of increased corporate profits from outsourcing.

> "“There is an insufficient amount of skilled workers” with the expertise to build a chip factory, TSMC chairman Mark Liu complained during a call with analysts. The executive warned the company might have to fly in “experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time.”"

https://fortune.com/2023/07/21/tsmc-complains-cant-find-enou...

All this while demand is not growing like it once was. Lot of these projects will bomb. And the west doesnt have docile easy to dominate labour that east asia has. They will never achieve the same margins. And as soon as China-Taiwan chapter is over, corporate robots will happily return.

If there was a spark of integrity left, a whole generation would step back from there posts in lock and file out of the building. Not a grey hair to be found after the whole Neo-Lib-Con episode.

It's extremely unlikely for the US to do that as if China takes Taiwan it will be a huge blow to the US and to the value of being a US ally.

I think this is true. China is working really hard to get it's domestic semiconducter industry up to speed.

They are willing to burn a lot of money and time to reach their overall political goal of annexing Taiwan even if it takes a very very long time.

Ultimately it's unrealistic to assume that a country of 1.4 Billion people can not catch up eventually espescially if they would otherwise have to rely on a global competitor (US) or a military target which factories are rigged to blow (Taiwan).

The best thing Taiwan can do (once their semiconductor lead is no more) is to make themselves into a strategic ally located on Chinas doorstep.

But only like 5 countries matter for Taiwan national security and those have the budget.

How many of those countries are going to protect Taiwan?

It's game theory no?

Having this beefy reliance on a small island that gives china the middle finger

-OR-

derisk the reliance on taiwan

So far they don't feel that expansionist. More likely they just don't want US to be able to cut them off from the rest of the world by naval blockade.

Also ASML has a super long backlog I think so even if they build it they would have years to wait to even get and install the equipment

NL could block it on national security grounds.

>Everyone knows that China is not going back on a territory that is theirs by international treaties

When you said China, which China are we talking about?. the fact is, Taiwan and China is still in a Civil War.

    The United States did not explicitly state the sovereign status of Taiwan in the three US-PRC Joint Communiqués of 1972, 1979, and 1982.

    The United States "acknowledged" the "One China" position of both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

    U.S. policy has not recognized the PRC's sovereignty over Taiwan;

    U.S. policy has not recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country; and

    U.S. policy has considered Taiwan's status as unsettled.

"that is theirs by international treaties"

The PRC has never, not even for a single day, controlled Taiwan, Kinmen, Matsu, etc.

The continued existence of the ROC (1912-present) truly causes tankies to lose their minds.

To make Taiwan less critical makes it less attractive as a target - China won't be able to damage the US so much by taking Taiwan. It will be harder for China to force other people to accept their action.

This is the most CCP comment I’ve read in years. Okay, Xi

Not sure how the state population is relevant, the vast majority of people living in Arizona live in the Phoenix metropolitan area which is where these new fabs are being built. The population size for that area is also around 5 million. Also, how is immigration between countries in Europe easier than immigration between states in the US. That is simply not possible when the US has no language/cultural barriers.

And NXP too (albeit relatively small site)

What are you talking about? Galileo is a big win for the EU, even after taking into account the initial problems.

Eurozone leadership will never do that, because of national egoisms. Just look at how Airbus builds its airplanes, because everybody wants a slice, so they fly each airplane body halfway across the continent and back... And Airbus is just 4 nations (FR, DE, ES, UK). Collaboration across all of the Eurozone or all of the EU would be a mess of ITER-like proportions.

Singapore’s economy is also significantly planned, despite the opposite being the common knowledge.

Same with South Korea.

First, what is your definition of neoliberalism?

Second, why do you think a country like Germany (where the ratio of government expenditure to GDP is around 50%) can be classified as “neoliberal” in the sense you mean it?

It's a perfect example of neoliberalism.

The automotive industry made the mistake of cancelling their orders during Corona and were then surprised to find that the capacities were allocated elsewhere when they wanted to order again.

So they whined at the government to subsidise the fab.

Nowadays you need AI chips in cars too.

That's exactly the issue, isn't it?

The Chips Act was marketed as an attempt to bring back "cutting-edge chips" to Europe, and to promote research and innovation. In the end it turns out to just be a huge government subsidy for a bog-standard fab which is at least a decade behind what TSMC is building in Taiwan.

Great for automotive companies who want to strengthen their supply lines, but pretty pointless when it comes to doing what it was actually supposed to do. Europe already has plenty of fabs like these which did not require billion-euro handouts.

To be pedantic, I think it does matter there, but the cost / benefit tradeoff is in favor of the 10 year old processes.

And it can vary too, mass produced / generic chips can be more cost efficient if they can make more of them on a single wafer.

3nm has already hit mass production. Considering this fab won't be ready for at least another two years, 2nm will have hit mass production already.

22nm dates back to 2012, and TSMC has been doing 14nm FinFET mass production since 2014. So yeah, a decade behind cutting-edge can indeed be called "old" when the entire point of the Chips Act was to catch up with Asia and become a center for innovation.

and zero of the shortages were caused by lack of fab capacity - companies cut orders for over a year. Old stocks got depleted, prices skyrocketed, then companies reluctantly put new orders and started selling at those inflated prices.

> totally sufficient for embedded stuff.

No, TSMC 22 has no eFLASH, expensive SRAM, lacking of analog capability, lacks high temperature tolerance, and is tied to multiple patterning design flow.

TSMC 40 on the other hand is the last portable node, with MRAM, eFLASH, high temp, some mixed signal, RF, no MP, and everything else your soul desires.

that's if we don't expect Germany to become an AI powerhouse, where GPUs are useful. Apparently this does not seem to be a priority.

Easier to make low power devices on older processes too. Much smaller leakage currents and more robust.

Not only that, but the fab undergoing the 2 - 5 year refit would also not be in full production capability. So there is the revenue loss in addition to everything else. and suddenly just building new makes even more sense.

Is modern really better? If you are waiting on a compile, or running the latest game or - other performance critical task of course it is. However for embedded systems older processes are likely to result in chips that operate longer under harsh conditions and so may be better. It depends on the application.

I know where I work we have customers that run our products at -70C and +50C, we can't run a lot of modern chips because they fail our tests at those operating temperatures.

Smaller nodes also do not inherently have better performance for all tasks. They bring performance penalties in some regards, extra costs, and more complexity, which might make something older like 65mm a far better choice

Maybe https://www.ddr-museum.de/en/blog/2016/gdr-1-megabit-memory-...

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMDI ?

Great video from Asianometry on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrkC-pMH_s

The collapse of the GDR has many reasons, mostly it ran out of money during the 80s. There have been several reasons for running out of money, e.G. taking on massive credit in the 70s to produce more consumer goods and build flats (the reason Honecker was very popular after his coup against Ulbricht), which it had problems to pay back in the 80s. Also minor things like spending millions on importing coffee (all experiments to replace coffee with something else failed - Vietnam is one of the worlds biggest coffee exporters because of GDR investments that came too late).

Another reason was Russia cutting cheap oil during the 70s after the oil shock. The GDR had imported cheap oil from Russia, was refining it and selling it with high margins to the West for $/Deutsche Mark. That source of money dried up in the 80s.

With sparse resources, the GDR was between a rock and a hard place. For modern production it needed chips, reverse engineering western chips e.G. Z80s (reverse engineered chip called U880 in the GDR) or smuggling chips was very expensive (~5-10x the price). Building chips on their own was also expensive. But they decided to invest billions into home grown chip production (they smuggled a whole factory via Austria, see "Red Fini") leading to the famous 1mbit chip "U61000" - which was old at that time, also the Japanese produced the same amount of chips in a day that the GDR was able to produce in a year. So things went nowhere.

But those billions were not available for other things.

Without money ($, Deutsche Mark), in the 80s to pay back credits to western banks a lot of vegetables, fruits and consumer products like clothing and washing maschines were exported to the West (most of the fruit production of the GDR around West Berlin went to West Berlin, many products in the West German QUELLE catalogue - like Sears - were made in the GDR). These products were missing in local shops, shelves were often empty, especially outside the large cities like Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.

Additionally factories in the 80s in the GDR were in a very bad state (my father in law was head of production in a large machine factory in East Berlin during that time), lots of stuff was being stolen on a constant basis, maschines were old and lacked computer support (see above). This again reduced available consumer goods.

Because consumer goods were scarce, when things were available people bought more than they needed, leading to more scarcity (as seen during the pandemic). It is said that every household in the GDR had a second car as spare parts (another example are agricultural factories hoarding harvester spare parts, so when broke down, spare parts where hard to get).

Missing consumer goods in the GDR led people to leave their jobs in factories whenever something was available, e.G. rain boots, which reduced productivity even more.

In the end so many things were missing that people mass fled the GDR when Hungary opened the border.

All this together made the Central Committee believe everything is lost (book to read in German "Das Ende der SED - Die letzten Tage des Zentralkomitees" with meeting notes from the Central Committee), and the Russians not willing to come to help with tanks this time [0] (like they did in 1953 to kill Germans to keep the communists in power in East Germany) power was transfered to the people leading to reunification.

[0] For comparison: When Poland went bancrupt in 1980/1981 Russia and the GDR were near an invasion - which Poland prevented with a military coup.

USA (and yes, I know they are building some here already). Maybe UK as well.

40nm-ish. IO logic doesn't really scale, so going much beyond that doesn't really make sense when the price per mm2 keeps increasing with every node. If your logic is simple enough that it doesn't really benefit from the increased transistor count or power savings, IO is going to be the main factor when it comes to node selection.

I wonder how much the decision was influenced by the general lack of opportunity in the east, and the rising alt-right movement as a consequence. I really want eastern Germany to have a better economy.

Had no idea about it. Thank you for the valuable information!

Intel will settle in Magdeburg. The "AMD" Fab in Dresden belongs to GlobalFoundries (AMD sold its last GlobalFoundries shares in 2012).

Eindhoven (NL) would have been obvious as well (NXP, ASML, Infineon, Philips)

Makes sense. Thank you!

>The planned joint venture will be 70% owned by TSMC, with Bosch, Infineon, and NXP each holding 10% equity stake, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions.

I wonder what them "providing" 5 billions as news reports put it actually means. Is this a loan, a gift, or some other type of deal?

I live nearby, it is finished and it is producing Teslas.

All those are regional monopolies by law or by fact. You cannot move land, so land prices will always be regional. Energy and water networks are local monopolies, usually owned by the municipality or a local company monopoly. With electricity, you might have some choice, that is, you rent the power line from the local monopoly and buy the electricity from one of several companies. However, the choice is limited to companies serving your area, and the exact rules and companies strongly differ between European nations.

I would assume land costs are higher in NL, as there is less (I don't think Tesla paid a lot for the land) water in Germany depends on the region (but even Tesla in a dry region seems to do fine, although there are protests), there is more water in the south and less in the north, but again more near the coast (where I live), Netherlands has 26% corporate tax, Germany has 23% to 32% corporate tax, depending where you are (federalist state, some portion is determined by municipalities).

Energy prices are currently high b/c a lot is produced by gas powered plants, but as Germany peaked renewables at 82% lately, and new renewables are very cheap (there are solar plants popping up everywhere here), energy should not be a problem (chip production is not aluminium or fertilizer production).

The main reason TSMC builds there is that there are already lots of chip makers and knowledgeable staff to hire (and state subsidies, which if correctly used can be a good thing, Bavaria made the transition from an agricultural country to a high tech country with state subsidies, money transfers from the richer states in Germany to Bavaria - of course if used badly are just lost without effect).

> As a dumb American

This is one of the most annoying openings to a sentence you could device, just fyi

As to the why. (With the premise that the comment you're replying to is overstating it)

An open border is pretty irrelevant to all of the above, more relevant is that both are in the EU. So you can somewhat imagine them as US states on steroids. They set their own taxes with a large degree of freedom, devise their own policies with a large degree of freedom etc

- energy costs are a factor of market price and taxes, the electricity market is the same but taxes on energy can impact differently - land costs are fully dependent on factors that have nothing to do with open borders or the EU, just local/national taxes and zoning etc - water supply depends on the geography/geology of the area. I don't know if they're that different but I don't see why they couldn't be

Each country has their own energy and water providers, land taxes, etc.

There are a bunch of regulations on how companies can operate in the economic block, but it's still a bunch of sovereign countries there.

All of those vary significantly between US states too.

France has Mistral, it might actually be a perfect 1-2 EU combo, the French do the aesthetics and the Germans do the engineering.

The Dutch have beat the sea back for hundreds of years. They will be fine

"God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands"

Most of the Netherlands is already below sea level. This is a non-issue.