Hahahaha oh brilliant move.
Doesnt even make sense. Okay, lets just lose the worlds semiconductor supplier to China. Yep, nothing problematic there
THANK GOD THE MBAS ARE IN CHARGE
Currently the US needs an independent Taiwan because that’s where all their chips come from. Makes sense for the US to move production to the US where it’s less vulnerable to Chinese takeover, but that also means that the US won’t need Taiwan to be independent anymore.
Seems to me like doing this is a sure fire way to permanently lose 50% of your chip production.
Bingo.
Rely on the US, get extorted. The US has no friends, only colonies to exploit and pillage
Wasn’t it that demon Kissinger that said something about it being fatal to be an ally to the United States?
Suddenly reunification with the mainland was on the table after years of tactfully avoiding the topic.
Whose asset is this trump character, anyway?
This is all about covering his own blunder.
He’s realized his tarrifs aren’t doing much to bring manufacturing to the USA, so now he’ll threaten to abandon his allies instead if they don’t prop up his idiotic economic policy.
The US is scared of the impending doom created when China invades Taiwan and takes over all chip production in a matter of a few months.
Nothing the US has can stop that when it starts, there can only be a deterrent, but that works only so far…
On the other hand it sees a solution to just hamfistedly claim 50% of the chipproduction to be local in the USA, easily forgetting the work ethics of the average American don’t fit for that scenario, let alone how the government is wrecking the needed education for a decade or two to come at least…
The odds of China invading Taiwan successfully and a single chip fab still functioning or being recoverable is 0%.
First of all the fabs are among the most complex projects in the world and the Taiwanese will just blow them up. China can do nothing about that. The workforce of those fabs will also try their best to move abroad. That is also why the US is building those fabs, so they can just have the Taiwanese work in those fabs.
Also Taiwan is a nightmare to invade. It is obviously an island, so you need to ship over the soldiers. We have seen in Ukraine, how fairly cheap seadrones can destroy ships and this is going to happen to China as well. Then Taiwan itself is either densly populated meaning urban warfare, which is really bad or it is a bunch of densly forested mountains, which might be even worse. Add to that sanctions and very likely problems with shipping and this is an insanely expensive thing to do. No amount of chip production is going to save China in that case.
Invading Taiwan is a very dumb idea indeed. I hope China is smart enough to not go for that.
You left off the part where there are very few practical spots for the ships to land invaders. So they know where they’d be going for and the areas are heavily fortified/defended/defenseable.
I’ve been lucky enough to see the real deal in deposition layering testing and research for chip making. From clean-room methods stricter than bio and radiological test lab standards to seeing the wafers with a shimmer even more gorgeous than diamonds to me. It’s so far beyond
We just ain’t going to manage to make that a nation-wide mainstay. We might be able to have started to approach the technical side of things if investments and education were started in the early 90s, but our culture just isn’t up to snuff to keep it going. So much of a society’s culture bleeds into business, and damn do they have it locked down where it needs to be.
What states even have the capacity to mildly mass produce that stuff? California, New York, maybe some random New English state?
Well to give you a real answer that would depend on how you look at it. Transport industry tends to favor east coast, but that’s mostly thanks to legacy infrastructure.
On the other hand, the past few years of infrastructure bills promoted southwest manufacturing uptick due to easier tax rates, preferred interest from government structures, and as well lower cost workforce that require lower per capita investment for bringing training up to speed.
California had a whole bunch, between strong port access, strong technical expertise, the whole Silicon Valley thing lol.
But given current administration policies, attitudes towards education achievements, and importance of targeted subsidizing, nevermind everything else the past 40 or so years of privatization. It’s a lot to catch up on, most of which requires long term planning.
Of course then you could get into the economics side of things, and that the amount invested through our own foreign direct investment brings about greater income in the long run. Basically by subsidizing foreign production of different goods, we don’t bear the cost of better research and investment in the future, we can use trade agreements to purchase, say computer chips to keep things consistent, which have stipulations that the exporting country purchase mass quantities of lower trade goods at a price advantageous to us.
So uh, it’s pretty much a loose loose situation here lol.
Brilliant, so in summary even if you could get some level of manufacturing going it’ll be somewhat crippled by decades of shit economic, social, and educational policies. Ya know to a degree I’m reminded how Roman manufacturing of certain key goods was increasingly weakened towards the end of the Western half of the empire before it ultimately spiralled into a failing economy in general.
Pretty much.
Interesting comparison though, sad to say my understanding of old world economics is too low to give a real answer in that regard lol.
If it makes it any better I may be lying inadvertently, it could just be standard economic slowdown or a shift in the type of material goods. It’s one of those things where what was being produced was simply recycled or decayed, it’s a bit of a controversial area in that regard up for debate and interpretation. My interest in the area is focused on Britain so largely removed from the Roman world in a lot of ways by that time.
Interesting, I’m starting to see what you mean there. Comparable to US steel quality dropping and being supplanted by Japan, or currently China.
Hell even the axis started using compressed cardboard by the end of the war.
I recall hearing the statements about bone health increasing in the generations after the collapse of the Rome and the such. That ring true? What piqued your interest in the era?
LOL. That’s not even a real ask. It’s like if I walked into work tomorrow and asked for a 200% raise.
Oh this isn’t good.
They prop up all of our biggest companies. World war III could sneakily start in the south China sea. Over this.
China is already making moves to go to war with Taiwan. It’s likely going to start in 2026.
What is it about these chips that makes them so special? Are they for something practical or are they for advanced weapons or AI? Why does a country need them so badly?
The silicon foundries in Taiwan are some of the most advanced in the world right now - they can make manufacture integrated circuits down to a 3nm process node. They’re absolutely cutting-edge.
Basically, every phone or consumer electronics processor, memory same solid state storage chip, plus a ton of custom circuits are made there right now. This includes multi-GHz radios (WiFi, radar, sensing technologies, global navigation systems) and a ton of new MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) sensors for gyroscopes, accelerometers, compasses, barometric pressure, gas sensors…
The foundries in Taiwan are absolutely critical to worldwide supply chains and defense. There are rumors that the Taiwan foundries are wired with explosives as a deterrent to Chinese invasion - China wants the foundries but Taiwan will try to deny them if they invade.
How long has this been the case? And do all of those devices need chips with 3nm process nodes? Why can’t a slightly inferior chip be used?
You can use an inferior chip, but the few fabs that are out there are many generations behind. Suddenly your cruise missile has reduce accuracy, or range, or detection avoidance etc. Your targeting lock on is slower, your radar doesn’t detect as well etc.
The fab Taiwan built in the US is 2-3 generations behind I believe, intentionally, so the most cutting edge stuff was still theirs.
Samsung is the next closest at 7nm if I’m seeing things right and it gets much worse from there and it quickly goes to the teens or higher.
For you and me, it could be like getting laptops/phones 5-10 years old tech wise as there aren’t enough of the near level fabs to support everything, and that’s not getting into all the fancy things like what Apple does with their SoC, no one else might be able to do that kind of thing.
This guy gets it! :)
This has been the case for at least a couple of decades.
All those devices don’t necessarily need the 3nm node - but all the engineering effort to make, say, a new mobile phone processor - will go towards a specific process node. Each process node your target for a new chip needs a set of masks for the photolithography process.
The smaller the process node, the more these masks end up costing (newer process nodes are approaching $50M per set). These masks are also custom made for the foundry you’re using them in (due to manufacturing variations), so if you want multiple foundries for security of supply, spend a few more tens of millions for each additional foundry.
The advantage of a small process node, though, is that the cost of the individual chips start to approach “free” once you’ve paid for that first one. :)
You can’t just make a new processor and run it on multiple process nodes without doing a whole lot of work, even besides mask sets. Any custom logic in the CPU core will have to be designed to work with that process node’s timing and power parameters. The timing closure on any process node is painstakingly detailed work - especially because you’d need a new mask set, or at least part of one.
Then you have to consider peripherals - when you build a processor, you’re going to need RAM. If you want to use the newest DDR5 on your processor, you need a DDR5 controller in your CPU to be able to talk to the memory. That DDR5 controller (provided and guaranteed by a third party, unless you want to try your hand at rolling your own) is only going to exist for one or two process nodes - again, because it’s a lot of work and expense to get up and running in the first place, so the vendor that provides that controller is only going to invest in the process nodes that make sense for it.
You’ll need these controllers for all your communication interfaces - USB, eMMC, PCIe, SPI, GPIO… And they all have to exist for the node you’ve chosen. Then you need to verify in simulation that your logic can interface to their logic at the speeds you want to run. It gets complicated really quickly.
Source: I’m a chip designer.
Edits: Fixing my terrible grammar.
Currently they make the best ones and are basically the only ones that can. These chips go into most cutting edge electronics such as AI
So they’re not really needed by the average person
Current 3 mn fabrication is being used in more and customer devices. Mediatek and Xiaomi are already shipping devices. ARM Cortex-X925 is using 3 nm and AMD will switch to 3 nm with Zen5 refresh and Zen6 in next 1-2 years.
Taiwan is a major center for chip manufactoring and development. Being a vital supplier for the U.S., Taiwan was protected by the U.S. as far as possible without openly disagreeing with mainland (communist) China. One could argue that Taiwan’s chip industry has essentially protected the island from being invaded or nuked by mainland China. Without their advantage in chips and implied cover by the U.S. military, Taiwan would be under direct threat by mainland China “unification”.
Didn’t answer my question bot
