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by schmorptron·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Yep. This is sooo frustrating. Why does Europe, and Germany especially, just NOT grasp digitalization at all? I'm growing ever more angry that almost our politicians are 80 year old mega-boomers who are voted in by other boomers and couldn't care less about any interests other than their own. Young people and their climate & computors be damned.
2 comments
It's a little bit more complicated. TSMC wants subvention for building the fabs, but the chips that will be produced will be sold elsewhere. So the EU gains nothing from it but costs. The EU needs a european chip manufacturer and developer not a subsidiary of Intel or TSMC
Guess what by putting a factory doing the newest node you educate a whole new generation of engineers that can build and run those next fabs.
That explains why global foundries stopped building leading edge fabs.

It only sounds good in the news, in practice it is a money pit, not a competitive advantage. You only do it because of national security.

TSMC buys their next gen stuff from ASML (Netherlands), so the problem is not knowledge transfer, it's good old manufacturing and scaling up. (And that means labor, and traditionally labor laws in the Members States meant that offshoring large scale production was the smart choice ... strategic importance or not, if it doesn't make sense economically and business-wise, then that means it'll be instantly worthless strategically too.)
The buy a tool from ASML. TSMC built up the knowledge to use that tool, to achieve these processes, themselves.

Knowledge transfer is key.

I'd say the working relationship is the important thing. (yaay, synergy!)

Naturally TSMC knows their tools and processes, works with product companies (nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) to actually implement their design on the target process node. And at the same time works with the various tool vendors to refine the process, the tools themselves. But as lately we saw it's increasingly impossible to do it "alone", both Intel and Samsung works with many-many vendors. (Intel - among others - funded the push for EUV by buying ASML equity in 2012.)

We already have em, but they lag behind TSMC by decades
Yeah, I made that comment more out of emotion and without doing any research, that's on me, sorry.
I feel the same way. Talk to your local IHK = chamber of commerce.

I did and mine will soon run an article series in all of northern Germany to educate business leaders about electronics, innovation and how that'll create jobs and lucrative patents.

It was some work for me to collect statistics and experts to cite, but I expect it'll help my business too by increasing demand.

I went with industrial cameras as the example product because they have a market yearning for innovation in factory robotics and optical AI.

Did you publish your research?
They will publish it in their magazine, but they'll remove company identifiers