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A comment on Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US.

Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by awinter-py on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:13PM (#22069019)
security risks aside, andy grove of intel publicly regretted offshoring semiconductor manufacturing because of his suspicions about generational shifts in innovation and expertise

I've tried to read econ papers on colocation of innovation and manufacturing -- they're mostly long-winded and unconvincing but the concept is compelling

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by Cedricgc on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:52PM (#22069930)
Dan Wang explores this idea in 'How Technology Grows' [0]. To summarize, he asserts that the main downside of offshoring is the loss of process knowledge (the tacit knowledge that is learned by doing and transmitted through culture).

[0] https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by jmole on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:18PM (#22069068)
intel is one of the few companies with leading-edge fabs in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by Turing_Machine on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:39PM (#22069261)
Doesn't Samsung have some fabs in Texas?
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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by trynumber9 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @07:41PM (#22070700)
Yes. It was Samsung's first 14nm fabrication facility. They were planning to upgrade it but haven't seen any articles since 2017 on that.

https://www.samsung.com/us/sas/company/history

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by bradstewart on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:52PM (#22069388)
Samsung does have a fab in Austin (maybe elsewhere), but it's mostly flash in the 50-180nm range, not a leading edge process AFAIK.
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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by bob1029 on Thursday January 16, 2020 @06:21PM (#22070165)
The Samsung LSI/flash lines in ATX are not a leading process node in terms of all foundries (i.e. TSMC), but last I heard they were pretty close to the bleeding edge of what Samsung is capable of in their Korean factories. The ATX lines were always intended to be exact copies of their Korean counterparts, but this may have deviated in recent years (I have been out of the loop for ~7 years now on their internals).

Some of the major reasons behind Samsung building that factory in Austin were to satisfy Apple and to also leverage the more "open" innovation attitudes of the average American worker.

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by tooltalk on Thursday January 16, 2020 @08:01PM (#22070825)
According to Samsung's own account, their first fabrication plant in Austin, Texas opened in 1997, followed by major upgrades/expansion in 2007 and 2017.
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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by bschne on Thursday January 16, 2020 @04:38PM (#22069250)
> I've tried to read econ papers on colocation of innovation and manufacturing -- they're mostly long-winded and unconvincing but the concept is compelling

Sounds interesting, do you have some references?

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by awinter-py on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:03PM (#22069508)
I think Ketokivi is the paper I read (no idea what website this is hosted on):

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/63693/1/519737458.pd...

aside from the basic claim that large factories are doing some amount of R&D on-site, this read like nonsense to me. Could be my lack of depth in industrial organization / economics.

maybe also search 'industrial clustering' or 'innovation clusters'

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Re:Washington pressures TSMC to make chips in US by lonelappde on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:20PM (#22069639)
> regretted

But not enough to lift a finger about it

> > Andrew "Andy" Grove was a Hungarian-American businessman, engineer, and author who had a net worth of $500 million dollars.

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