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A comment on The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple. Parent comment

Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by baybal2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:39AM (#18138959)
America has fabs, both old and leading edge, but ask industry giants like Gemalto to even bother to manufacture chips anywhere outside of Taiwan, assemble the final product outside of China.

They will never do that, because they look for the cheapest solution.

The bigger the company, the less it cares about things other than cost. This is why Mediatek and Broadcom can usurp the market of network SoCs, while making products with atrociously bad support. I personally dealt with both, and say that they wholely match their popular culture image.

I don't know how it is with USA, but for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres, for as long as they get them made inside the country.

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by FourthProtocol on Thursday October 04, 2018 @10:59AM (#18140472)
Gemalto manufactures and assembles many, many products in Europe. The entire European security cluster won't use anything else. I know because I played a part in smart card development there. And all of that was from Europe. Wafers, chips, holograms, mag stripes...
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by m_mueller on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:48AM (#18139378)
What about Japan? I know they've lost most of their semiconductor business as well, but they still have some capacity no?
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by village-idiot on Thursday October 04, 2018 @10:37AM (#18140261)
I’m under the impression that China does not make chips, but they do final assembly cheaper and faster than everyone else.

I don’t know if any companies do PCB manufacturing and assembly outside of China in large numbers.

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by baybal2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @11:06AM (#18140542)
Not exactly, PCB assembly is super cheap everywhere thanks to propagation of chipshooters, what makes the cost go up is logistics - what do you do after you populate the board for your part? Ship it across the world, or to another factory behind the corner?
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by hef19898 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @12:16PM (#18141232)
That largely depends on the size of your board and the total number you want to ship. As soon as you reach full truck loads or full container loads that additional shipping cost is marginal on a board level.
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by baybal2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @12:31PM (#18141376)
But still, that complicates the whole operation immensely in comparison to "just go next city block"
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by hef19898 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @01:10PM (#18141706)
You are right in a certain way. What increases with distance is lead time and as result inventory. Both of which are off set by volume. Cross-border adds customs issues. Complexity is not that much of a problem nowadays, maybe it never was. You are right that all of this oblyakes sense with large numbers, small scale production is better done locally as a rule of thumb.
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by chasil on Thursday October 04, 2018 @02:55PM (#18142542)
Sony production lines assemble Raspberry PIs in the UK:

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3014651/sonys-penc...

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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by antoniuschan99 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @12:39PM (#18141459)
That is true I think because of what happened to ZTE earlier this year.
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by baybal2 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:33AM (#18139699)
I don't know that.
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Re:The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Am... by gandhium on Thursday October 04, 2018 @02:54PM (#18142533)
> for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres

Well, if your chips are bigger and slower, you will need more chips and mounts/packaging to place them. If you need more chips then the weight of missile/plane/tank will be increased and available space decreased.

So at the end, the 'uncaring' military will receive a weapon which is worse than competition.

All thanks to an outdated chip.

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