- The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability.
Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.
I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.
1. Became web developers
2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China
How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.
It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.
There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.
I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.
Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.
Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.
I work a lot with electricity markets though and find it to be very interesting and challenging as the field is surprisingly vast and incredibly dynamic. It requires knowledge of power fundamentals as well as economics, operations research, and honestly history. It isn't at all what I thought I would do back when I was in highschool, but a pleasant surprise all the same. I do sometimes get the itch to be like the guy that invented the lotus office software who lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere and implemented his own product, but the software market is already saturated in this space. Also, I have a family now which prevents my hermit dream and that is yet another wonderful surprise and has been very fulfilling as well as maddening at times :)
I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.
Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China
PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.
I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.
The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.
As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.
It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.
https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...
It might, but how do you measure that?
I am kinda surprised to see it so far on the top
America stills gets a lot of immigrants.
For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.
China is the only country that pays even remotely competitively. Yes, even including all the nice benefits of living in a european welfare state, yes including the other anglo colonies.
Still, their culture basically does make it so certain types of people simply can't exist there. And I hear there's a healthy dose of racism as well. Nothing unique to China, sadly.
so basically, like everything else, you make a lot of money but it isn't a great place to live unless you make ALL the money.
Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)
Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.
>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.
Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.
[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...
The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.
I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.
Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.
I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.
> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.
Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.
"What is water?", said the fish
The USSR would like a word.
A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $672 billion in 2023 when accounting for inflation) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.
In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.
Material delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed.
In practice, most equipment was destroyed, although some hardware (such as ships) was returned after the war.
Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006.
Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off.
Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.
The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.
Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.
I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.
Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.
It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.
And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.
Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.
That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.
I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.
Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...
We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.
At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.
From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.
Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.
Both degrees can be made super hard, as hard as the school desires them to be...
I never studied the hard sciences very seriously, although I feel like in retrospect I could have done so at much lesser proficiency than someone with much more encouragement, discipline, and interest, so my path of starting with web/software and then diving into electronics and EE would feel quite different
Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.
(A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.
If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.
Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.
Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.
Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.
It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.
The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.
There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.
Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.
An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.
It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.
The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.
These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.
Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.
US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.
They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.
But not for 50k, lol.
This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.
I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)
did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.
There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.
Yes.
"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/asml-euv-machine-lithography-chi...
No one should be forced to work those kinds of hours. It's unreasonable to call Westerners/Americans lazy if they refuse to work 996.
But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.
Median US Salary is $59,384. Half of workers make less.
Men with a bachelor's degree who work full-time have a median income is ~$89k - (basically the entire demographic of these TSMC workers).
They will indeed burn themselves out, but that's their choice of work/life balance vs. pay.
That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.
you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want
To be blunt: yes, slavery is cheap, isn't it?
Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.
Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
1. Japan's urbanization stopped long ago,
2. and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough,
3. so the urban areas have stopped growing.
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.
* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025
Packaging facilities cost ~20% of a fab, right?
Naively, I'm assuming packaging is also not as complicate and difficult as fabrication.
Surely if they can build a fab in the US, they can build packaging facilities, too.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Why?
If the packaging facility was ready early it would have sat idle losing money.
If it's ready late, products from the fab can obviously easily be shipped off to be packaged.
Tight coordination of timelines adds needless cost when there is an easy alternative.
This is a massive supply chain weakness and presumably will be addressed as soon as possible.
It just illustrates it is really quite cheap and so won't be that expensive in the grand scheme of things.
(Also not certain the GP's comment is necessarily correct even.)
A tick can contain a lot of blood, doesn't mean it produced that blood.
Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.
Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.
Especially if it's an ecommerce business.
Regardless of which side of the camp you fall on, you can’t argue that ads are “good” just because some businesses need them to survive. In fact, I’d wager if a business NEEDS ads to survive, it’s probably a net negative on society as a whole.
I won’t die on that hill, but that’s my hunch.
Advertising is nothing more than bringing attention to your product to your target customer.
And without this so called immoral behaviour I fail to see how any business works.
The tech is fine. The toxic parts (data collection, spying, etc) aren't even in the ad tech divisions and aren't done for advertising purposes.
They collect data because it gives them bargaining power and a seat at the table with state-level actors.
It’s not even debated that advertising as it exists with Google, for the sake of profit at all costs is a net-negative in society.
It’s not the same as putting a sign by the road.
The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.
It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.
Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).
Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.
At the end of the day, if most of company's income is from ads, it can be safely assumed that whatever else it does is somehow about ads even if it doesn't contribute directly. Well, or else Google is incredibly inept.
Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)
From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.
But most ads are trying to convince you to buy their brand’s version of a product that you already know of, or (even worse!) a new version of an old product. Any demand induced there is just wastefulness.
If Amazon can figure out that I’m interested in headphones, I already know more actual information about headphones than their ads will give me.
An alternative explanation is that prospective tech CEOs who are willing to overlook morals are scarcer and thus mandate higher salaries. ;)
There is good and bad advertising.
I'd want to receive ads for things that I'm really interested in.
The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.
Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?
like Cola vs Pepsi, McDonald vs KFC, etc.
There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.
Imo, profits != productive or to a benefit of society.
Taken to the extreme, literal theft can pay well, and produces absolutely nothing.
Pay indicates the transfer of wealth -- it can be a heuristic for productivity, sure, but productivity is clearly not its only source.
Because fundamentally I think there is an effect where the people in proximity to lots of money earn more. Obviously the Walmart receptionist and the JP Morgan receptionist are doing basically the same job. But the JP Morgan receptionist is surrounded by people who wouldn't think twice about doubling the receptionists pay and I would imagine that has a significant effect.
Crazy how the same box of pasta is suddenly three times the price once you cross the border.
If you want to be the receptionist at Goldman Sachs at their headquarters at 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, then you're looking at paying $616,250 for a 556 sq. ft. studio apartment. And that's just the housing. If you want to live within 30 minutes of work, you can get that number down to $400,000, but that's also a studio apartment.
Then you have to consider some place to eat - or you bring your own meals.
What about clothing? You need clothing that looks the part.
It's the proximity to real estate, which I guess you could argue is a proximity to "lots of money" as you put it, but... not reeeaaaally...
For example, Boston has a higher per-capita income than NYC but somewhat lower housing costs, and Austin has around the same per-capita income as Los Angeles but significantly lower housing costs. Because it's a lot easier to build housing in Texas than in California.
Why else would Google need 182,000 employees? Or how about Facebook with 67,000? Microsoft clocks in at a whopping 228,000, and Apple at 161,000.
These are staggering numbers of employees. So many, in fact, that it would be an exercise in futility to try and manage so many for the number of products they offer, especially Google and Meta.
It's cheaper to make busywork than risk the cash cow.
You're just shifting around a bunch of numbers temporarily to make a bunch of money for someone and lose a bunch for someone else.
Lots of shit we do is well-paid and unproductive.
If, as a species, we eliminated all bullshit jobs, there's a good chance only 20-30% of the species would be working. Here in America, only around 50% of people are actually working. Everyone else is in school, or retired.
Despite what some people may think, options are not just for gambling, but some people - like farmers who have to plan for uncertain weather - use them for a real purpose. And of course the use of option in the financial sector for hedging is extremely important too. But it's easier to dismissively say that trading options is a "bullshit job" and go back to one's ivory tower.
STEM salary gap
I suspect the Taiwan workers have on average much lower salaries.
Edit: This is not news. This (combined with their higher EE education) is why Taiwan won IBM PC-clone-related manufacturing in the 80s. And why they now have TSMC.
Say TSMC pays supper competitive US salaries to attract US-only labor, higher labor cost which is causing the end product to be more expensive, which makes that fab uncompetitive globally causing Apple to go buying from someone else and TSMC either choosing leaving the US or going bust eating the losses.
You can't compete with lower-wage countries in a globalized world with no trade barriers and no tariffs, when Apple wants higher profits and consumers want lower prices. Something has to give.
You can put tariffs on imported chips to equalize the field, but then iPhones would be more expensive for the average American and Apple's stock would tank.
So, pick your poison.
It is. Semi fabs aren't fire-and-forget. You need highly skilled people to constantly check and tweak all the operations in a feedback loop 24/7 and every hour of downtime due to any issue means millions lost. You hire the right people to minimize that downtime while also keeping the costs in check. It's a delicate balance.
I think you’ve correctly identified the solutions.
Trump wants chips that say "Made in 'Merica". I dont think cost comes into it that much.
I mean, maybe it's okay that some other country is better than you at something important. Excuse me but: the arrogance.
This is not arrogance. This is not even about China and Taiwan fighting a war. (Heck, that's probably never gonna happen anyway.)
This is about the US manufacturing important things on our own. And it's not just the US either by the way. The Europeans want to be able to manufacture their own chips. The Russians. The Chinese. The Japanese. The Koreans. And on and on and on.
Why? Because the current system is dumb for everyone who is not Taiwan. For a whole lot of reasons. (Most of them economic.) No one wants to say that out loud, but it's the truth. We can't have everyone dependent on chips but only one nation capable of making them. Again, we're not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. Are the Chinese also "arrogant"? Are the Japanese "arrogant"? The Europeans? The Russians? Are the Koreans "arrogant"?
So everyone else can make common sense moves, but it's "arrogant" if the US does the same common sense thing? So we should just keep paying out an increasing share of our GDP as chips become more and more important and expensive while everyone else makes moves to cut their costs right? Is that what we have to do to be considered not "arrogant"?
People need to be a bit more reasonable.
Trump is inviting Xi as a troll / show of power.
This is entirely unmoored from reality. CBP One only allows people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to make appointments, and once they have one, they have to actually show up and argue their case (why they need to come to the US for their own safety). You can’t just show a border patrol officer that you have CBP One and walk on through.
Making chips isn't something you learn the details of at University. You can take all the classes you want in advanced semiconductor techniques but the simple fact is University level manufacturing is nowhere close to SOTA.
Basically, you need fab workers to spend time in Taiwan/China, and then return to USA. It's the same model that most foreign students use at schools in USA/Canada. Get USA/Canadian name brand school on resume, learn english, and go back to home country = profit.
I don’t think this is about salaries. Nor is this about facilities.
This is about process know-how. And it’s currently not available outside of Taiwan. I’m glad we’re finally starting to transfer knowledge. It will take a couple more years.
You can find many great opensource projects here: https://theopenroadproject.org
But to get some context, and try out the flow and how everything works together, start here: https://tinytapeout.com
There's going to be some niches opening as a result of this IMO.
Apple is well known. If they say the new iPhone SE 7 has a Made In America chip, people will know about it to buy if they care about that.
There's your real issue right there. People are already paying $1199 for new phones. According to this article: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/9/13/17851052/apple-ipho...
Another $100. That's a little over six years old now though, so bump it up to $200.
Would I pay $1399 for an American made iPhone with American made internals, as the article suggests it would cost ($100, but I doubled it for inflation, because, why not?)? You bet your sweet ass I would.
You have to crawl before you can walk. Apparently this is where we are at.
It might be worth getting up in front of the kids in middle school + and saying "Hey you're in competition at a global scale here. You're going to have to work your butts off to stay relevant."
In the mean time, the situation in EU and Asia is going to deteriorate and North America can absorb more talents as it sees fit. The last two times it was mostly EU but this time Asia might be the new talent pool we can draw from.
However, it's safe to assume cyber attacks will hit Arizona. It's not unreasonable to assume crazy people will attack critical infrastructure, and we'll have to deal with the social fallout from that.
If they have to keep staffing it that way, that's different.
Clustering is a feedback loop where production creates people with experience in production, something needs to kickstart that process.
This seems to be a much more achievable barrier to work around than not having a fab.
It's a new fab, and people need to be trained on current processes and work roles. If you have a skilled work force, you use them to train.
The planet burned, but at least we made a few chips in America.
By my rough calculations a million iPhones of a15s is about 200kg of silicon. excluding packaging, which would dwarf this mass entirely.
I wonder what % of work they did.
this is starting to feel like the best of intentions that has spiraled into a political theatricality where close-enough will be good-enough.
given the current state of declining US college enrollment, the affordability crisis of college, the growing wage gap, the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living, and the failure to reform predatory US student lending practices I do not see how the US will in the next 25 years ever manage to curate the type of braintrust for which it was once renowned across the globe.
Also, over half of the employees are local hires and the ratio will increase as more of the fab spins up. IMO it would be much worse political theatre to delay and balloon the cost of the project by forcing TSMC to exclusively use a workforce that has no experience with the companies tools and processes.
Over 50% of the workers flew in from Taiwan to work on this plant and make these chips.
Those are the 50% we’re willing to bring in no questions asked via any visa program.
Not the elusive Java developer.
I saw so many predictions of how this couldn't happen and "yeah but" ... but it seems to be happening for the most part.
There's simply no real reason we can't have a deep and robust manufacturing base in America. Well except for the fact that some specific people made a whole lot of money while letting it fall apart, and have paid for decades of media relations trying to convince everyone otherwise.
If you're reading this statement I just made and want to instinctively disagree with me, start by interrogating your own opinion. Why do you think America can't compete with China, for example, over the long term? What "well everyone knows" facts are you using to create that opinion that you don't have any first hand relationship to.
Not saying I necessarily disagree with you, but just to give an example, the US has considerably better labor practices and labor laws than China. It's not perfect but there are protections about making sure people are paid what they're owed, how much you are allowed to work someone, safety protocols, etc. All of those things could, in theory, cost more money and make labor more expensive.
Compare this to nations that don't have the same work protections, where they can pay people peanuts and have them work much longer shifts with effectively no protection (e.g. Foxconn in China [1]).
This might translate to decreased cost, and Americans have made it excruciatingly clear that we're apparently fine with slave labor as long as it doesn't happen within the US.
[1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/chinese-workers-foxc...
I think the person you responded to is right. The USA can and should restore its manufacturing base, for many reasons. The whole country would greatly benefit from the return of blue-collar jobs.
I don't have sources for this, but the info is out there.
Also, there are a lot of nuances around this topic that I'm not getting into here. Just want to acknowledge that...
There's probably a few hundred reasons, but I think the core one was "manufacturing in China is cheaper because labor is cheaper."
Even if China starts demanding better worker protection (and they should! I am actually fine with my products costing more if I have a guarantee that the workers were treated well), I think that there's still a reasonably high chance that manufacturing would still move to another developing country that doesn't.
Again, my comment here is super simplified.
Or, said another way, because the Chinese prioritized and subsidized manufacturing growth and we did the opposite.
Why? Because it made some specific Americans very rich. It also ruined the lives of many other Americans. While making the country much less resilient to shocks or conflicts.
Which is, of course, the problem.
It's also simultaneously sanctimonious sounding when development is very difficult and America sacrificed three generations to industrial capitalism, stole half a continent of land, and used slaves to do our own development depending on how you count inputs to the process.
Just because the US has committed major sins in the past doesn't mean we should be slap-happy about other countries repeating those sins.
It might be "sanctimonious", but I don't think "I'm against slave labor everywhere" is an especially brave take.
China is building more warships than the rest of the world combined. And NATO can't even recruit enough people to man their existing fleet.
But it seems the West is a victim of its own propaganda so there's no political will.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-repo...
"TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."
There’s not enough rail lines and gas pipelines from Russia to feed them with significant quantities of fossil fuels.
Imagine how bad Russias invasion of Ukraine would’ve been without energy independence and food security. The invasion of Taiwan is an order of magnitude more difficult, and Taiwan now has the recipe for how to knock out the entire naval fleet of a more powerful nation (see how Ukraine has essentially incapacitated Russia in the Black Sea).
I do not think China could survive a blockade.
If renewables was adequate they would not be importing vast amounts of oil.
But ultimately, it's about hardware+industry - current trend = regional force balance shifting in PRC favour vs US+co every year with no end in sight. PRC better off accumulating capabilities at scale, not just regional, but global (i.e. prompt global strike) and increase autarky (less net population + more electrifcation = more calorie + energy security). All trend incentivizes waiting and building.
TLDR waiting and building becomes less costly (or rather less risky) to pursue PRC's ultimate strategic goals associated with TW scenario... displacing US posture out of east Asia and perhaps hitting CONUS infra at scale as response to US intervention. The latter part is key, there are important stretch goals to TW scenario that secures PRC geopolitical interests for 50-100+ years. It's much more important to be able to tackle those "costly" scenarios "cheaper", where cheaper is also relative to making intervention much more expensive for adversaries, i.e. PRC "winning" hand in TW scenario is to show US posture in east asia not sustainable, and CONUS (including TSMC Arizona) not defendable.
If you then ask yourself whether China would rather invade during the Trump administration (with its tendencies towards isolationism and "deal making") or roll the dice on a subsequent U.S. administration, you might find yourself thinking that the odds actually seem considerably higher than 25% that this could happen in the next four years.
To the extent that this narrative comes via the U.S. intelligence/defense community, one has to assume that it may biased towards exaggerating the threat. I for one hope that is the case, since I do not want to see a U.S.-China conflict any time soon. At the same time, I unfortunately don't think it's likely to be completely baseless.
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/24/2003205865/-1/-1/1/07-...
[2] See, e.g., https://cimsec.org/the-maritime-convoys-of-2027-supporting-t... https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4547637-china-potential-t...
Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.
But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...
I am happily imagining opening a recent Apple device and seeing 74 gates with through holes in green PCBs, with an Apple logo made in soldering lead marking in the corner of the board.
What comes to my mind is wrapping a piece of electronics in some bubble wrap and cardboard, which doesn't sound that hard...
So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.
Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.
So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
The interest you'd pay just losing a couple days in transit time would exceed the cost of purchasing a dedicated private jet and the crew to fly it.
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo...
That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship.
Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it.
Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
Guys these are microchips on wafers. You can put a million dollars worth in your jacket pocket. They aren't being shipped in containers.
Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.
^certainly there's activity in that space
However, low-end processors will be worth radically less ($100 CPUs aren't 10x smaller) and things like top-end FPGAs will be worth substantially more. An Agilex 7 can be $40,000 and if it's got less then 4 grams (around 1700mm², or 41mm*41mm), the wafer is worth over $10k/gram. The entire chip is 56x56, and from the package drawing, the die appears to be around 30x30, so it exceeds the threshold.
This is assuming all the value of the retail price is the main wafer, which is also not true.
Thousands per gram, certainly seems possible, though I doubt it's even that on average across all chips, and considering that there is non-wafer content in the price. Tens of thousands is probably pushing it. However, it's certainly likely to be rather more than gold in terms of specific value ($100/g, ish). Harder to fence, though.
A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³.
A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
But you are right on that it is CoWoS which is the missing ingredient.
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...
But they could make iPhone 14’s and the smaller 15’s.
If I was nervous about a new fab, there’s the iPhone SE, the Apple TV, lots of choices for a less aggressive manufacturing node and less aggressive sales figures. If yield is shit you can still offer a product that isn’t killed by its own success.
They don't usually do it for very long, and my recollection is that they usually bring it down market before (maybe concurrent with) introducing yet another new killer feature.
So you'll be correct soon enough, but there's slack time there that they can use to hedge their bets on the new fab before leaning on it for the WWDC keynote.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/tsmc-cleared-for-2nm-p...
Even more depressing: it's like a very complicated baking recipe arrived at by tweaking parameters over and over a again. There is no deep understanding... just a giant list of baking parameters that seem to work, sometimes.
(Yes, a bit like an AI. Hmm....)
2 gens ago, sure.
from both legal and realpolitik lenses the Taiwan issue is fully legitimate. your country has done far worse to Cuba for far less. Even setting aside the historical context and the Chinese civil war, what is illegitimate about not wanting an antagonistic and belligerent foreign power installing weapons in an island mere miles off the mainland coast?
Perhaps there is a skill gap because nobody actually knows there is a demand? I have no idea what to recommend to people who are trying to choose a college degree.
With my industry in infosec, at least there are certifications one can take, even proper masters degrees these days. In my experience, there is no skills gap in cybersec, despite what CEO's and linkedin-types' sentiment. They just don't want to pay market price for skilled talent. "skills gap" has meant "we need more talent so we can pay less", there is no actual shortage of people who can do the jobs adequately.
Is it different for chip fabrication? and if so, how can regular people work/study to obtain these skills? If I, having read HN for years and reading about the fab process have no clue, how can regular people who don't visit HN?
If you all can help me answer this, I'll try to recruit a few people into pursuing the right career to help meet this demand.
Most all major cutlery companies have product lines that are produced solely in Taiwan (Spyderco, Cold Steel, Demko, etc.)
It would be nice to see Taiwanese steel industy move some production to the US as well.
This plant was the foundation that the CHIPS act was built upon. The Secretary of State had to secure an agreement with TSMC to build this fab before the bills could be drafted, as a lot of the recipients of the funding are suppliers for this plant.
It is completely truthful to assert that this is the result of the CHIPS act. Congress agreed to introduce the bills as a result of TSMC's agreement to build the fab in Arizona. If you have to avoid giving Biden credit, then you can point out that it was Trump's SoS who negotiated this original agreement.
Intel, on the other hand, is a great example of a how a company dependent on the government funding for semiconductor manufacturing behaves. Heck, look at the Foxconn debacle; companies prefer incentives up front.
If you remember, TSMC had the immediate fear of losing ~15% of their revenue with the Huawei export ban. I wouldn’t be surprised if that influenced their decision to cozy up to America.
USA lost.
What could happen is that once the US has manufacturing capacity it decides to tariff imported chips, causing your country to retroactively do the same. This is decades away, and the US has a problem sourcing chips it can trust right now, so it's not currently on the radar. It's not something I'm going to worry about.
Viewed through a pessimistic eye, the US finally is realizing that its arms production critically relies on chip production and it can't says its chips are US made when selling arms on the market. A change in mindset like this typically takes a generation and so even though this change in weapons really happened around the turn of the century, the people in power have mostly retired and the new generation now understands this reality.
