Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry The UK is missing out on investment in the semiconductor industry, according to a House of Commons Committee report, which said this is putting business in the country at risk as other nations seek to build greater resilience into their own supply chains. The report finds that while UK industry has strengths in some areas, the …
> The UK is missing out on investment in the semiconductor industry,
1983 called, they want their transputer hype back
The Transputer is a really good example of "Doing it the Wrong Way". What sunk Inmos was their building their own chips, instead of going fabless (like ARM effectively did). It was a combination of being really tricky to develop for, which limited appeal, coupled with the certainty of the fab going obsolete. This was made far, far worse by the underinvestment in development tooling, and not designing the hardware to support development. It was a total ****ing nightmare to develop for (I know - I did lots of it). Even it they'd just put JTAG on board too, it would have made a world of difference. The best thing I ever did for the business I worked for at the time was to wean it off Transputer and on to PowerPC, which (at the time) had a decent roadmap, and had decent tooling (like VxWorks).
Which was a pity, because the idea behind the Transputer - Communicating Sequential Processes - is actually a thoroughly sound one, and should be used everywhere by everyone doing parallel processing. Modern languages like Rust, Go, Erlang all implement it, though the irony is that that's synthesised on top of an SMP environment that is in itself sythensised on top of a NUMA architecture by core / CPU interlinks such as HyperTransport, QPI, and their modern Intel / AMD equivalents. Too many layers of abstraction.
"What sunk Inmos was their building their own chips, instead of going fabless (like ARM effectively did)". Maybe if Inmos had started ten years later this would be true, but the whole initial sales pitch of Inmos was to exploit the step change in manufacturing with the the shift to 10 micron. Inmos achieved that successfully, and were ahead of the world in manufacturing for a few years. (Hence the fact that the Inmos SRAM was dominant and used as the main upgrade between a Cray-1 and a Cray-1S).
What sank Inmos was not the Transputer, but the Thatcher government which hated anything associated with the National Enterprise Board, so dumped Inmos to Thorn-EMI who had insufficient capital, so could not make the required level of investment to grow the company and push forward the manufacturing. Before that sale, Inmos had exceeded its growth plans.
Note, too, that the Transputer was the first processor to include on die memory, which would not have been possible without the Inmos manufacturing ability.
"The certainty of the fab going obsolete" only follows from the lack of investment which brings us back to the decisions of the milk snatcher.
Although the Transputer may have been the most visible Inmos product (exactly because it took the most work to use!), it was not Inmos only (or, maybe even main) product. We manufactured memories (both SRAM, and non-volatile) and a "colour look-up table" (a RAM with onboard D/A converters to generate video signals).
I’m not really sure A one has the capital and resources for ARM - even under the Olivetti days.
Hence the partnership with Apple and VLSI.
Has anyone thought of spinning up a Patent Troll organisation citing prior art and leveraging the on-memory chip IP?? Pretty much everyone else making chips is in scope of that.
“ What sank Inmos was not the Transputer, but the Thatcher government which hated anything associated with the National Enterprise Board”
No. Indeed Thatchers fault in this is that she splurted public money to subsidise high-risk private development at all. When it was Coal
Unions she wanted to Hulk smash everything, indeed she even *prevented* private industry giving loans to economically viable pits. But when it was shiny things for Petty Bourgeois management jobs, she was all for it.
Your argument for even more public investment in the riskiest most cyclic industry on the planet, is the same as every shaman since Ugg King of Ugg. The rains didn’t come because we didn’t believe hard enough. The Sky God just needed twice as much cow sacrifice.
INMOS used a unique process, they could not have made the products (high speed memory, RAMDACs, Transputers, DSPs, etc) that gave them market position in the first place by going fabless. There was literally no fab around that could have done the stuff INMOS did when they formed, they were unique. ARM had the benefit of coming to the party a bit later when everyone had a decent CMOS process, with a couple of sugar daddies in tow.
FWIW there were discussions amongst the engineers about the fabless model with folks seeing the benefits of both. At the time I was there as a PFY (1990-92) they had a foot in both camps. In addition to producing silicon, they also produced IP in power management, DRAM addressing modes, (what became) FLASH, and plenty of other stuff, in addition to developing "reusable" cores (ie: ARM's core business).
Fair play to ARM they made it work well, but I think it's fair to say that ARM were innovating in a different dimension to INMOS. Specifically ARM were innovating in the business dimension, and INMOS were innovating in the technology dimension (speaking as a PFY computer architecture nerd of the late 80s/early 90s).
If only we knew which waves they were.
It's about normal for the UK by this point. Anything that needs active investment, or ever protectionism from the government and they'd rather let whole industries sink. Innovation? Yes! Great, need investment to capitalise on that innovation? *sound of air been sucked in through teeth* "We're not sure about that... We'd much rather you took it and let some foreign entity commercialise it".
Even for private investment, we don't have the framework around it like in the States the encourage technology developments.
Almost there. The government expects to spend half that but they disguise the investment as a loan.
The money is loaned to an investor, who decides that 50% of the total investment goes straight back to him with interest and only the remaining 40% goes into "the business" but only transferrable fixed assets, labour has to be cheap and foreign. Then when the business implodes the assets are transferred, liquidated and the investor gets his windfall.
Investment needs to go straight to the hands thtbwill use it. If that's a man in a shed, so be it.
Protectionism does work - look at Germany, US, France etc - countries whic still have some industries left. This country has consistently encouraged its beloved finance sector to sell off any budding UK industry to any foreign bidder at the first opportunity. There is nothing left to build on now - the only thing anyone is interested in is making a fast buck with a quick IPO. Industry is hard work - everyone wants to get free money by being an instant celeb on TV or by being an influencer.
“Look at Germany, US, France etc”.
Yes, what would you like us to look at? You’ve picked three examples that couldn’t be more disparate in approach if you’d tried. One is protectionist, one isn’t, and one you’ve misinterpreted because its terms of reference are so alien to you.
France is extremely and insanely protectionist. Well more than half of its large companies, industrial or financial, is National-controlled by the Élysée Palace. Either directly (Golden Share), or indirectly (more than 50% of its open market shares, owned by companies with Golden Share), or very indirectly (financed by EU subsidy / bailout funds, including EIB, ECB etc). In fact, the only French companies I can think which aren’t, are the family companies, and since their owners are eighteenth generation French aristocracy, I think we can safely call that nationalist.
Germany is actually not protectionist at all. It doesn’t need to be. It does have several nexus of companies with their suppliers. In Economics, this is called comparative advantage, and arises even when there is no State at all.
The USA is not at all protectionist in *consumerist* matters. You can see this because it has such a ridiculously wide import-export trade gap. Trump is a loud-mouthed idiot, and as such, was entirely ineffective at getting things done. The US however invests extremely heavily in its military and military-industrial complex. If your view of the world is so narrow that you only know Airbus as a template of EU National champion, you will naturally see Boeing, Rockwell etc being the template of a US National champion. But they really aren’t, they are USA military-industrial complex which is very different ballgame.
To be fair, Germany is definitely more protectionist than the UK, but it's also selective and does favour mutual dependence as a mitigation strategy. However, it's also realised this year that there are limits to this, which is why arrangements with China are being adjusted after the Russian strategy was shown to be a failure.
I did say outright protectionism and went on to qualify it. Subsidies such as the laughable "flood protection defences" on the River Ems in Germany are a very expensive way to maintain the cruise shipbuilding industry in Papenburg. It would be cheaper to give the employees the cash and relocate production to the coast but that's not good for local politicians.
Where competing with state actors, such as China, in solar cell and now wind turbines, you have to walk a fine line between preventing your industry from being undercut by subsidies and insulating it from real competition. Properly calculated import tariffs are generally the best choice along with funding for training, research and product development. But simply handing cash to companies continues the policy privatising profits and socialising costs.
Britain keeps "missing the boat" because every time it looks like it has a "ticket" (i.e. anything that might make the UK a player in anything of interest), it sells it off- usually with UK government encouragement or involvement- to some foreign interest, typically at a cut price.
That's been the case since I was a kid in the 80s (at least) and it's still the case today.
Plenty of industry in the UK is government-owned, it's just that the governments in question are usually those of other countries.
No-one gives less of a toss about British industry (other than finance and money laundering) than the Tories, and New Labour wasn't much better.
Champagne, or at least the champenoise method, with its secondary fermentation, was invented by an Englishman, several years before Dom Perignon. It was also the English who worked out how to bottle it without the bottles exploding under pressure. Yay for us.
No champagne icon, so closest thing --->
Reg Article> There are no fabrication plants in the country capable of producing the most advanced silicon semiconductors, defined here as a node of 28nm or smaller
The fact that UK politicos are being told 28 is an advanced node again shows the massive lag when it comes to semiconductors in the UK.
I think you are confusing node choice for product lines, based on the availability of IP and technology (such as flash memory) with the need for advanced (smaller, denser, lower power) process nodes.
So as an example, anything needing flash is currently at 40 or 55nm, not 28.
A lack of investment over the last 20 to 30 years
Mind you, it's not the lack of investment - we have spaffed untod squillions over the past 50 years. But improving a parade of MPs et ses mates retirement prospects isn't quite what was needed.
Yes, but we have become world leaders in announcing that it might be a good idea to have a debate about whether we should have a plan to decide a roadmap to setting out a strategy at some point in the future, allowing the government to convince gullible people that we're not falling behind at a rapid pace, but are at the cutting edge, without having to spend any money actually doing anything.
We have not had an energy policy in the UK for 30 years. Let the market decide. Instead of British state-owned electricity generators we now have French and German state-owned energy companies. Yeah, the privatisation which lined the pockets of a few in the City.
The French are having trouble building nuclear power stations now (huge delays and cost overruns). We can't do it because we have a nation of wannabe Britain's Got Talent celebs instead of engineers. China can do it, with the average age of all its nuclear power stations is about 9 years. They are current with the knowledge.
It's much easier just to buy what you need from friendly states than attempt to compete in the semicon industry which would require eye-watering and frankly infeasible levels of investment. No need for any fancy new strategy or yet another stupid quango. That's coming from someone that does R&D for a living, by the way.
Instead, the government should be laser focused on keeping the lights on.
There seems to be an underlying presumption that customers will come in droves to buy whatever ICs these new UK startups come up with. Brexit doesn't help with selling to EU, which has NXP and ST anyway, the US has consolidated to TI-ADI-Microchip. Since UK industry is mil-aero, needs to be hi-rel and rad-hard products, which is a high ASP but tiny volume market.
We've missed the boat with more industries than that now. Battery manufacture seems to be held up by lack of support and investment. Our gaming industry is lagging behind because the government doesn't seem to ever consider them. Our green industry has been effectively killed at birth, with some of the early companies either closing or moving overseas.
What exactly is something we excel at now?
It seems that the UK government is very happy looking at the monies provided by the finance industry and saying, "That's enough, thank you". It seems after their debacles of helping to plan industrial investments with the auto industry, they've simply given up and walked away.
My guess, and this is likely incorrect: latent, lingering Thatcherism. They are so entrenched in their politics that they no longer know how to be pragmatic.
"Oh, and moaning about how shit we are, when actually we are pretty good at quite a lot of things."
The problem is what little we get out of it. Piss-poor standard of living for a majority. Piss-poor infrastructure and amenities.
Seems that riches are siphoned off to some elite class -no?
@anonymous boring coward
"The problem is what little we get out of it. Piss-poor standard of living for a majority. Piss-poor infrastructure and amenities."
Really? Piss poor standard of living for a majority? Which country are you talking about? The infrastructure and amenities are what the people want.
"Seems that riches are siphoned off to some elite class -no?"
No
@anonymous boring coward
"Do you even live in the UK?"
Yes
"And if so, have you been to the continent?"
Yes
"UK is famous for its poor standard of living. It's tiny damp houses. We even have slumlord caused deaths now. Friggin victorian."
Which is scary how much better that standard is than some of the other countries!
@anonymous boring coward
"Some specifics perhaps?"
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/European-union/
Also one of the least racist countries in the world. 6th largest economy. 9th largest per capita PPP-
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gdp-per-capita-ppp
Top ranking universities competing with only the US until Switzerland ranks 11-
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2023/world-ranking
"Your view goes against all statistics and expert knowledge."
Do go on
Are you serious?
Proud to be in 17th place on the "happiness index"? You realise that it's tainted by people like you who don't know any better?
Have you actually LIVED abroad at any point? Not just touring and bringing your prejudices along?
You are happy because you are ignorant. Ignorant of what it could have been like.
@anonymous boring coward
"Are you serious?"
Oh wow you really are throwing your toys out of the pram for being wrong! Grow up.
"Proud to be in 17th place on the "happiness index"? You realise that it's tainted by people like you who don't know any better?"
About as tainted as the 16 other countries higher up. Probably also tainted by people like you desperate to complain.
"Have you actually LIVED abroad at any point? Not just touring and bringing your prejudices along?"
Yes. In continental Europe. With a family who didnt want to stay in their high tax high cost and miserable country. That is their opinion of where they live and they also shockingly dont like the EU.
"You are happy because you are ignorant. Ignorant of what it could have been like."
Are you sure? Are you sure its not you? Are you so certain that you are so right? Especially since you asked- "Some specifics perhaps? Your view goes against all statistics and expert knowledge." and I proved you wrong with 6 examples of you being completely wrong to which you throw a strop about the happiness index.
What country? I'm sure it's not top secret?
Some tightwads will never be happy to pay tax, but very happy to draw from the benefits derived from it (like excellent public transport).
My disagreeing with you isn't "throwing toys out of the pram", so you may want to adjust your language.
Really? Piss poor standard of living for a majority? Which country are you talking about? The infrastructure and amenities are what the people want.
No. They're not. The people want energy security and affordable housing. They want public transport. They want active transport infrastructure.
British governments have withheld investment for all these things for decades (mostly Conservatives but Labour were extremely poor in some areas too). And once they were done cutting, they legislated to prevent anyone else (like local councils) providing them in their stead. They have cut back healthcare, policing and social services. And the cuts to social services mean the Police get called to deal with mental health crises because the social care crisis unit no longer exists. So Policing (with 20k fewer officers) gets an increased workload. They prevented local authorities from building new council housing, and withheld the revenue power they needed to fund capital infrastructure.
They promised the north a new railway. And when Transport for the North actually designed one, they said "No, no - we didn't mean to actually give you one. We need you to keep being deprived so we can talk about levelling up. We can't do that if you've already levelled up - then people will want something else, and where will that leave us?"
And when the North said "that's bullshit", they stripped TfN of their commissioning powers on the grounds of insufficient cap doffing.
It might be suggested that people voted for that. They didn't. Not exactly. They foolishly voted for the person shouting loudly about ImMiGrAtIoN, and perhaps they deserve what they get in that respect.
But they didn't vote for any of that. They were promised a better future. They were promised NPR, affordable housing and for the lights to stay on over winter... and (perhaps unsurprisingly), they're not getting it. Because they gave all the money to Baroness Mone.
@rg287
"No. They're not. The people want energy security and affordable housing"
Since when? People wanted green energy, which included not fracking for the gas we need and stopping nuclear from being developed. And who wants affordable housing? Its all about protecting the green belts and making things more restrictive and difficult i.e expensive.
"They want public transport."
Do they? Only if it is subsidised and not their problem, otherwise nope.
"British governments have withheld investment for all these things for decades"
Except the govs (labour and tory) have blown loads on energy investment into those glorious monuments to a sky god. People are complaining about housing not being up to higher spec's and wanting to attack the rental market, which of course pushes up the price. So on it goes.
"They have cut back healthcare, policing and social services."
By shoving more money at them? The NHS for example keeps being shoved money and they still complain. The UK pays about OECD average for healthcare and gets a worse result. But people want the NHS, they love the under-performing institution. Police are funded more than in 2010 before it started to come down a little bit before rising again. The department of health and social care has seen rising payments especially over covid.
"withheld the revenue power they needed to fund capital infrastructure."
Thurrock council takes exception to the infrastructure claim- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/politics-isnt-a-good-way-to-do-things
"They were promised a better future"
They can be promised a unicorn it doesnt matter. This is why they need to be asked about what they propose and then honestly look at the trade offs. Such as when they all spout green credentials, you know we wont have energy. They promise to build more homes, will they be removing the regs that get in the way of house building? The commies promised a better future, you need to use your brains that their plans are insane and dont work.
People got what they wanted. Years and years into decades of what they wanted. If they dont like it they need to rethink their opinions. Government keeps spending more, we have high taxation, the public sector ever increases and people complain about how public services are run. It isnt correlation there its causation.
British science has depended, in large part, on trans-European cooperation, and, while we were in the EU, Britain was an attractive place for students and researchers. Now we're cut out of Horizon, and have an actively hostile attitude towards students from our nearest neighbours, there is a definite brain drain.
Even our home-grown bing-pharma industry has become multinationalised and is being siphoned away to the US and the continent. GSK is headquartered in London... for now, but the pattern there is very much of smaller companies being borged by larger ones (I can remember when Glaxo, Wellcome, Smithkline and Beechams were all separate entities). It's only a matter of time before the next merger with someone like Pfizer, and all the research is moved to the US or the Netherlands, where they can actually attract researchers.
> Even our home-grown bing-pharma industry has become multinationalised and is being siphoned away to the US and the continent.
Sale of £200 million UK [publicly-funded] vaccine manufacturing centre to US business condemned.
Said it elsewhere, but this has for decades been the British way across numerous industries. As soon as anything looks remotely promising, sell it off cheap to foreign interests.
If it's not finance, the UK government doesn't care.
It's a consequence of an adversarial political system, lack of PR and a four-year election cycle. Nobody is planning for five years time, when they have to have something to show for the next election in four. If they do make plans for that length of time, they are usually pie-in-the-sky promises that are uncosted, because the next government isn't bound by them.
Incidentally, notice how all the actual tax cuts and spending rises promised in the recent budget were scheduled for after the next election...
PR does indeed lead to longer political horizons….but that isn’t the great wonderfulness you make out.
In Germany, PR leads to perma-coalition. The Coalition plans for eternity, because they will always be in power. It was allegedly earth-shattering that the populace voted out the CDU after *77 years* in government. What policies changed? None. That isn’t democracy.
About half of German MPs don’t bother campaigning for the public vote at all. The German PR system does have MPs that are direct-voted by the public…..but it backfills Parliament with exactly the right number of Party nominees to make up the total PR vote. As an individual prospective MP, with a career plan, it’s really more optimal to ignore the public vote entirely, and just focus on internal Party campaigning to be on the nominee list. And that’s exactly what many do.
If you prefer rule-by-experts to democracy, then you do have a point. Democracy *doesn’t* produce the best managerialist decision-making. Neither does it optimise economic output. Whether you like it or not, Chinese state capitalism, with top-down allocation, has proven itself *much* more efficient at producing consumer goods to cost. Doesn’t mean I want to live like that.
What democracy does do, is ensure that people aren’t “done to” by governments and organisations who think they know what’s in everyone’s best interest. And that’s just more important than anything else.
It really depends on whether you think compromise, which coalitions bring, is favourable to the one-party-rules-all system we have, where the party in power can force through any policies it likes just by having a majority (that is actually a minority of voters). For example, we currently have a Prime Minister who is being actively encouraged by his own party to rush through legislation that removes workers' rights to strike. If you know anything at all about the history of workers' rights, that will not end well for anyone. It either results in rich business-owners starving whole villages, or lethal violence. Either way, people will die as a result...
"Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry"
More like :
Britain has missed the boat for having a functioning growing Economy ....
[Looking back fondly on the 1970s ... perhaps it was not as bad as I remember !!! ..... YES it was !!! .... but we are having a good go at trying to be worse !!! ]
:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof is already at 300nm in his parents garage with its 2nd hand 90ies tech and homegrown equipment.
Most universities should be able to jumpstart this.
You can also do a lot similar to xilinx with massive FPGAs, I think they are at 7nm with Versal.
I bet there are lots of ways to improve still.
I was a student in the mid 80's in Silicon Glen. There were strong links between various Uni's and the Semiconductor plants.
I spent on and off 2 years at National Semiconductor whilst getting my EE Degree from what was then Paisley College of Technology which had strong links with them. My final year project was based on chip fabrication and utilised wafers from Nat Semi
All gone now.
We had a semiconductor industry, quite a good one in fact. A cursory look back at the early 80's BBC documentaries on the subject showed some of the manufacturing that used to be done here.
Reality is energy, water, logistics, land, buildings and staff costs here don't stack up when you can operate in e.g. Malaysia or Taiwan at a fraction of the cost.
Yup, once Rees-Mogg has got his deregulation bill through the Commons, China can start shipping their polluting industries back here again, so the Chinese can have clean air and drinkable water, and we can all cosplay at being Victorian urchins. I look forward (back?) to times when the principle risk from falling into the Thames is not drowning, because the chemicals in the water will kill you first.
"China can start shipping their polluting industries back here again"
I thought polluting industries were supposed to be bad? That we were trying to eliminate them for the sake of the world? Are you suggesting the people were sold a lie and that these industries were just sent to other countries because we still want and need those products? Thats one way to upset the green movement.
And as this is about manufacturing the semiconductors we need are you saying that the US and EU with their 'chips' subsidies are encouraging polluting industries into their territories to the detriment of their people? As I said further up in the comments its a good job we dont go that route!
Conventional chip fabs are, indeed, pretty nasty in terms of pollution. You can have "green fabs" but they're going to cost more than the polluting ones. It's best for our economy that we essentially export all our pollution to the Far East, but it's not exactly good for the planet, and manufacturing on the sort of scale as goes on in China (and Taiwan) doesn't exactly confine it's waste products to the home nation.
Talking about building large-scale industry in this country is fairly moot anyway, even if you do try and "do it green", which we really should, from a selfish point of view, if it's on our own doorstep, and from a global point of view, because we all live on the same planet, and even the far-offshore stuff will come back to bite us eventually. It's moot, because we don't have the energy or transport infrastructure to support it, because of the same decades of underinvestment and navel-gazing that has led to us having no large-scale manufacturing industry to speak of. The blame can't even be laid wholly at the feet of the current government, it started with Thatcher flogging off everything and closing down state industries, rather than modernising or replacing them with greener ones.
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