Economy Industrial High Tech (Redux)

[Deorum]

I have only been in the WR a couple months.

You're a great addition! "WPEM" is also brilliant.

Has anybody else read this brief?

I’m going to now

there better be gay pron intermixed in this or I’ll be disappointed

There's zero gay pron, dude! Even when I make 100% serious geopolitics and industrial sector threads, the queer vibe invariably manages to seep through and into them. I think this happens when the primary discussion of the OP starts to dry up. I remember the one I did on energy with the US, Russia and Saudis -- we ended up talking about Alexander The Great and Hephaestion (at least I did).

 

[Source]

You're a great addition! "WPEM" is also brilliant.


There's zero gay pron, dude! Even when I make 100% serious geopolitics and industrial sector threads, the queer vibe invariably manages to seep through and into them. I think this happens when the primary discussion of the OP starts to dry up. I remember the one I did on energy with the US, Russia and Saudis -- we ended up talking about Alexander The Great and Hephaestion (at least I did).

I wouldn’t say brilliant. I readily accept arrogant, and pretentious though. I’m not good at a lot, but I usually research a position.

 

[ElKarlo]

Btw https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-next-giant-oil-discovery-000000980.html. Possibly 128 barrels of oil and gas in the perm basin in Texas. No more Saudi oil ever again

 

[ElKarlo]

You're a great addition! "WPEM" is also brilliant.



There's zero gay pron, dude! Even when I make 100% serious geopolitics and industrial sector threads, the queer vibe invariably manages to seep through and into them. I think this happens when the primary discussion of the OP starts to dry up. I remember the one I did on energy with the US, Russia and Saudis -- we ended up talking about Alexander The Great and Hephaestion (at least I did).

Hahah it does usually end with Alex with conversations with you

 

[Jesus H. Sherdog]

Sherdog lied to me and said my good bud @Deorum quoted me itt today. But it was a lie? I’m tired...

 

[Deorum]

Hahah it does usually end with Alex with conversations with you

Yeah, but not without a lot of legit history discussion.

Sherdog lied to me and said my good bud @Deorum quoted me itt today. But it was a lie? I’m tired...

I quoted a bunch of people who had already posted ITT to ask about the S&E Indicators report but did a ninja edit removal because it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing, nor does tagging a bunch of users in the same post. I call them "phantom tags" because they still show up in notifications, and yes you were included.

 

[Jesus H. Sherdog]

Yeah, but not without a lot of legit history discussion.



I quoted a bunch of people who had already posted ITT to ask about the S&E Indicators report but did a ninja edit removal because it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing, nor does tagging a bunch of users in the same post. I call them "phantom tags" because they still show up in notifications, and yes you were included.

Phew. Well thank god sherdog didn’t lie to me. Idk if I could have handled that.

But I really am tired... so I was so confused idk wth you were asking about lmao

 

[ElKarlo]

Yeah, but not without a lot of legit history discussion.



I quoted a bunch of people who had already posted ITT to ask about the S&E Indicators report but did a ninja edit removal because it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing, nor does tagging a bunch of users in the same post. I call them "phantom tags" because they still show up in notifications, and yes you were included.

Word man. ATG was pretty interesting due to how dynamic he was as well as how surprisingly advanced things were in the ancient world

 

[Long Dark Blues]

Has anybody else read this brief?

Just started reading last night after you tagged me.

To respond to the section on education, we absolutely need to prioritize STEM learning as early as possible. And I would argue for less technology when completing more complex work. I know myself and both of my kids learn(ed) best in math when forced to work everything out with pencil and paper. Unfortunately, I don't see that being utilized as much with remote learning.

Since my childhood in the 90s kids have become increasingly surrounded by and absorbed in technology, but to what end? Why are our kids' improvments in the areas assessed slowing?

Could be because of the sheer amount of mindless garbage content being produced. It's mostly vapid, narcissistic, lewd and crude. Technology is being used as a tool for distraction, if what my 6th grader watches and does when left to his own devices is any indication.

I also think there should be more funding for community colleges, and they should perhaps partner with trade schools or offer education in the trades if they don't already. If going the traditional higher learning route, they are a great way to reduce college tuition costs.

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

Historically?

Why Can't China Make Semiconductors?

Almost from the start, central planning proved to be a serious impediment. Early government ideas included importing secondhand Japanese semiconductor lines that were outdated before they were even shipped. Expensive efforts to build a domestic industry from scratch in the 1990s faltered due to bureaucracy, delays and a lack of customers for the kind of chips China was making.

Another weakness was a lack of capital. For decades, labor-intensive industries -- such as assembling mobile phones -- were the route to riches in China, attracting investment from entrepreneurs and bureaucrats alike. Making semiconductors, by contrast, requires billions in up-front capital and can take a decade or more to see a return. In 2016, Intel Corp. alone spent $12.7 billion on R&D. Few if any Chinese companies have that capacity or the experience to make such an investment rationally. And central planners typically resist that kind of risky and far-sighted spending.

China seems to recognize this problem. Since 2000, it has shifted away from subsidizing semiconductor research and production, and toward making equity investments, in the hope that market forces could play a larger role. Yet funds continue to be misallocated: Over the past 18 months, there's been a spate of government-juiced overinvestment in semiconductor plants, many of which lack sufficient technology. Those that eventually open will likely contribute to a glut in memory chips, spelling financial trouble for the domestic industry.

But perhaps the biggest long-term challenge for China is technology acquisition. Though the government would like to develop an industry from the ground up, its best efforts are still one or two generations behind the U.S. A logical solution would be to buy technology from American companies or form partnerships with them. That's the route taken by cutting-edge firms in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Yet China can't do the same. Its efforts to purchase American semiconductor companies (often at huge premiums) are regularly blocked for security reasons. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have put Chinese acquisitions under similar scrutiny. By one accounting, China has made $34 billion in bids for U.S. semiconductor companies alone since 2015, yet completed only $4.4 billion in deals globally in that span.

As of today, WPEM (lmao, awesome handle) is right and it's really more because they are choked off from these suppliers and there is absolutely no way around it at this juncture. They hold the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

That's all true but billions is nothing for China, really. I believe they will eventually do a Manhattan project on semiconductor technology to catch up. 50 billion, is 0.3% of the chinese GDP. You would need to keep it for some years but it's a better investment than buying shitty soviet carriers.

 

[Deorum]

What I am wondering is what exactly is so difficult

They are quite far behind in process technology. They are catching up on this rather quickly as they are not opposed to stealing IP. Which is not uncommon in the IC field. They just make no attempt to hide the theft.

The US also makes it difficult for companies to sell them the most advanced lithography equipment needed. Without them you will always be at least several generations behind.

That's all true but billions is nothing for China, really. I believe they will eventually do a Manhattan project on semiconductor technology to catch up. 50 billion, is 0.3% of the chinese GDP. You would need to keep it for some years but it's a better investment than buying shitty soviet carriers.

If they can't purloin the IP, they need to figure out a way to engineer their own chip designing tools, equipment and machinery. They're mostly locked out because the semiconductor equipment industry is completely locked down and denying China is not causing much collateral damage to their business. It is literally impossible - at this juncture - to make cutting edge chips without access to Applied Materials (US), ASML (Netherlands), KLA-Tencor (US), Lam Research (US) and Tokyo Electron (Japan), particularly ASML. They spent decades developing extreme ultraviolet lithography tech specifically for semiconductor manufacturing and it's eye watering.

http://www.brookings.edu/techstream...e-at-the-center-of-chinese-dual-use-concerns/

An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is a technological marvel. A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer—itself a marvel of materials science—with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon.

This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers—approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds. This wafer with billions or trillions of transistors is eventually made into computer chips. An EUV machine is made of more than 100,000 parts, costs approximately $120 million, and is shipped in 40 freight containers. There are only several dozen of them on Earth and approximately two years’ worth of back orders for more. It might seem unintuitive that the demand for a $120 million tool far outstrips supply, but only one company can make them. It’s a Dutch company called ASML, which nearly exclusively makes lithography machines for chip manufacturing.

EUV machines are at the frontier of human technological capabilities. China has virtually no lithography experience or industry. Any Chinese firm trying to develop EUV lithography would have to start from scratch. It would have to close the gap with ASML’s billions of dollars, decades of experience, and the accumulated experience and tacit knowledge of their tens of thousands of employees. And it would have to succeed where experienced, billion dollar companies failed. There is little chance a Chinese company will make an EUV lithography machine in the foreseeable future.

So, that's just one of them and it's not like AM does light work.

Applied Materials, Inc. is an American corporation that supplies equipment, software and services for the manufacturing of semiconductor (integrated circuit) chips, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones and televisions, and solar products. The company develops and manufactures equipment used in the wafer fabrication steps of creating a semiconductor device, including atomic layer deposition (ALD), chemical vapor deposition (CVD), physical vapor deposition (PVD), rapid thermal processing (RTP), chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), and ion implantation.

 

[JDragon]

The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter.

 

[Deorum]

#IndustrialHighTech

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

If they can't purloin the IP, they need to figure out a way to engineer their own chip designing tools, equipment and machinery. They're mostly locked out because the semiconductor equipment industry is completely locked down and denying China is not causing much collateral damage to their business. It is literally impossible - at this juncture - to make cutting edge chips without access to Applied Materials (US), ASML (Netherlands), KLA-Tencor (US), Lam Research (US) and Tokyo Electron (Japan), particularly ASML. They spent decades developing extreme ultraviolet lithography tech specifically for semiconductor manufacturing and it's eye watering.

http://www.brookings.edu/techstream...e-at-the-center-of-chinese-dual-use-concerns/

An extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is a technological marvel. A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer—itself a marvel of materials science—with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon.

This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers—approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds. This wafer with billions or trillions of transistors is eventually made into computer chips. An EUV machine is made of more than 100,000 parts, costs approximately $120 million, and is shipped in 40 freight containers. There are only several dozen of them on Earth and approximately two years’ worth of back orders for more. It might seem unintuitive that the demand for a $120 million tool far outstrips supply, but only one company can make them. It’s a Dutch company called ASML, which nearly exclusively makes lithography machines for chip manufacturing.

EUV machines are at the frontier of human technological capabilities. China has virtually no lithography experience or industry. Any Chinese firm trying to develop EUV lithography would have to start from scratch. It would have to close the gap with ASML’s billions of dollars, decades of experience, and the accumulated experience and tacit knowledge of their tens of thousands of employees. And it would have to succeed where experienced, billion dollar companies failed. There is little chance a Chinese company will make an EUV lithography machine in the foreseeable future.

So, that's just one of them and it's not like AM does light work.

Applied Materials, Inc. is an American corporation that supplies equipment, software and services for the manufacturing of semiconductor (integrated circuit) chips, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones and televisions, and solar products. The company develops and manufactures equipment used in the wafer fabrication steps of creating a semiconductor device, including atomic layer deposition (ALD), chemical vapor deposition (CVD), physical vapor deposition (PVD), rapid thermal processing (RTP), chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), and ion implantation.

Interesting, we are all on the hands of the Dutch.

 

[Deorum]

Interesting, we are all on the hands of the Dutch.

Well, lithography isn't everything but it's certainly fundamental to the advancement of chip manufacturing.

 

[Cuauhtemoc]

Well, lithography isn't everything but it's certainly fundamental to the advancement of chip manufacturing.

I mean, if they stop making the machines we are all doomed and will have to keep using old phones and pcs.

 

[Deorum]

I mean, if they stop making the machines we are all doomed and will have to keep using old phones and pcs.

Yes.

 

[Deorum]

Intel is the national lab for chips, Intel doesn't need the government. The government, indeed America, needs Intel.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/36500...lking-tsmc-samsung-outsourcing-decision-nears

Intel really didn’t think about this very well

I think this will probably turn out to be a great move.

http://newsroom.intel.com/news-rele...ech-industry-leader-pat-gelsinger-as-new-ceo/

SANTA CLARA – Intel announced that its board of directors has appointed 40-year technology industry leader Pat Gelsinger as its new chief executive officer, effective Feb. 15, 2021. Gelsinger will also join the Intel board of directors upon assuming the role. He will succeed Bob Swan, who will remain CEO until Feb. 15.

Most recently, Gelsinger served as the CEO of VMware since 2012, where he significantly transformed the company into a recognized global leader in cloud infrastructure, enterprise mobility and cyber security, almost tripling the company’s annual revenues.

Prior to joining VMware, Gelsinger was President and CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products at EMC, overseeing engineering and operations for information storage, data computing, backup and recovery, RSA security and enterprise solutions.

Before joining EMC, he spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer and driving the creation of key industry technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. He was the architect of the original 80486 processor, led 14 different microprocessor programs and played key roles in the Core and Xeon families.

 

[ElKarlo]

I think this will probably turn out to be a great move.

http://newsroom.intel.com/news-rele...ech-industry-leader-pat-gelsinger-as-new-ceo/

SANTA CLARA – Intel announced that its board of directors has appointed 40-year technology industry leader Pat Gelsinger as its new chief executive officer, effective Feb. 15, 2021. Gelsinger will also join the Intel board of directors upon assuming the role. He will succeed Bob Swan, who will remain CEO until Feb. 15.

Most recently, Gelsinger served as the CEO of VMware since 2012, where he significantly transformed the company into a recognized global leader in cloud infrastructure, enterprise mobility and cyber security, almost tripling the company’s annual revenues.

Prior to joining VMware, Gelsinger was President and CEO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products at EMC, overseeing engineering and operations for information storage, data computing, backup and recovery, RSA security and enterprise solutions.

Before joining EMC, he spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer and driving the creation of key industry technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. He was the architect of the original 80486 processor, led 14 different microprocessor programs and played key roles in the Core and Xeon families.

I glanced at that earlier. I think Gelsinger is a good pick and think he will do well. But I think this may be 2-3 years of turning things around before you see any results. Hopefully they don't lose their edge in the meantime. Aka don't have a GE type of experience, where GE is still wandering in the desert waiting for their salvation

 

[Deorum]

I glanced at that earlier. I think Gelsinger is a good pick and think he will do well. But I think this may be 2-3 years of turning things around before you see any results. Hopefully they don't lose their edge in the meantime. Aka don't have a GE type of experience, where GE is still wandering in the desert waiting for their salvation

Yeah, results were supposed to come when Intel reached an agreement with the legendary AMD engineer Jim Keller to come on board in 2018, but he inexplicably left the company last Summer for "personal reasons". It turns out that it was over the executive level clusterfuck and arguments over how much production should be outsourced to TSMC. The ship needs a fucking captain, and Gelsinger is plenty qualified. It also helps he spent the first three decades of his career there.