EU still getting its act together on European Chips Act funding The EU is groping towards a consensus in order to allocate funding for its scheme to revitalize the European semiconductor manufacturing industry, with representatives of member states agreeing an amended version of the proposals. According to reports, EU ambassadors gave their unanimous backing on Wednesday to an agreement …
1, Create a pan-european nominally commercial semiconductor version of Airbus = good luck with that !
2, Fund existing european semiconductor maker = Greece pays Germany to prop up some failing 80s German company ?
3, Grants to a S.E. Asian chip maker = they build a plant in some poor region promising jobs, import all the skilled roles and close as soon as the subsidy runs out.
4, Chuck money at every country directly in proportion to their payments into the program = just move money around -20% admin costs
3, Grants to a S.E. Asian chip maker = they build a plant in some poor region promising jobs, import all the skilled roles and close as soon as the subsidy runs out
Just closing a fab is not really an option. They cost billions to build and likely need to operate a minimum of 20 years before they've actually earned their investment back. And you can't just relocate the content of a fab somewhere else and expect it to work when it gets there.
Fabs there were built in a time when break even was achieved far earlier, outset investment was far lower and most fabs there probably produced for quite a while until they went obsolete. I'm not very familiar with Greenock specifically but from what I can see it basically ran it's economic course and finished getting IBM it's investments back. I wasn't saying fabs never get closed, I said they don't usually get closed before earning enough back for their investors. Keep in mind an average high end 300mm fab will nowadays set you back a cool 10 to 40 billion. (depending on how much litho/wafer-starts capacity you need) I think you'd be hard pressed to get it under 1 billion even for a very small scale fab.
"They cost billions to build and likely need to operate a minimum of 20 years before they've actually earned their investment back."
And if the governments of the countries where they are located decide to ban exports of certain chips or ones using certain process parameters, the likelihood of that company ever building a fab in that country drops to zero.
The smaller asian countries are far more interested in having fabs built than they worry about "national security" concerns surrounding those components.
What the politicians never seem to get is that it doesn't matter if they deny IC's to a particular country or not. The USSR had a supply chain to get what they wanted and could build something good enough to do the job of sending an ICBM anywhere they liked. Some universities in the US have so many Chinese students that it's more common to hear people talking in Mandarin than English (ok, American). Another huge problem with government bans is they are maintained long past the time the prohibited tech is antiquated. They're a bunch of lawyers so what do they know about electronics?
To get a company to spend billions of dollars/pounds/Euros building a facility in a country, they have to feel they will see a good return on that investment. They don't need to be paid to do it.
To get a company to spend billions of dollars/pounds/Euros building a facility in a country, they have to feel they will see a good return on that investment. They don't need to be paid to do it.
Yeh, but a little subsidy can go a long way. I'm kinda wondering what the point is though, ie the whole supply chain thing. So I'll happily take $40bn to create Eel & Chips Ltd. Or I guess that should be Plc. But what chips am I going to produce? I probably won't want to make Apple's latest brain because I've heard how they treat their supply chain, and no idea if Intel, AMD or other big chip producers are any friendlier with their outsourcers. I guess I could dust off my logic design book and make 555s, or mebbe find the IP for the Transputer and make those. Seems challenging to decide what kind of fab plant to build though, ie chase the latest/smallest and most expensive chips, something that can churn out generic microcontrollers that are stuffed into cars or washing machines. And then hope the market doesn't move away before I've made some ROI.
I'm kinda betting that by the time the EU's made it's mind up, the market will have moved on and there'll be no demand for the whizzy EUFab.
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