UK silicon startups to share £1.3M chump change as part of chip strategy The UK government has announced the ChipStart program as part of its National Semiconductor Strategy, which will see a dozen silicon startups share £1.3 million ($1.58 million) in funding. This two-year pilot program was confirmed by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as part of a long-awaited …
To be fair, it isn't intended to fund a single employee. It's £1.3m of monetary chaff being blown into the air to convince the hard of thinking that the government is doing something about semiconductors. We're doing the same on AI. But the reason it's so little in this case is actually because government have realised that long ago they missed the boat on making semiconductors. You can argue that the seeds of a semi manufacturing industry were there in years gone by, but over recent decades we'd long lost out to other countries for silicon-bashing. We have bright spots (that are then acquired) like CSR, ARM, Wolfson but they are designers, not manufacturers.
What's (mostly) happening in other countries throwing billions around is reinforcing an existing manufacturing base as a hedge against China taking Taiwan. So there's big subsidies, but to make use of them needs existing facilities and semi manufacturing talent (which we don't have), a lot of land (which we do have but don't use well), low energy costs (ours are very high by global comparisons), and planning systems that are effective. From time to time we can do this sort of stuff - the JLR battery factory is a good example, but that's the exception not the rule, and even doing this doesn't address the absence of local skills. There's also the culture and work ethic - look at the problems TSMC are having in Texas, where Americans won't work hard enough apparently, yet it's a fact Americans work longer and harder than Brits. Could you imagine how TSMC would cope with the likely workforce in say Grantham, Kilmarnock, or Warrington.
So if anything you might want to be pleased that they've only thrown away £1.3m. Now, if you want to talk about supporting chip designers that might be a different conceptual kettle of fish, and you might think that's worth more than £1.3m, but immediately that leads down the dead end of government picking winners.
There's also the culture and work ethic - look at the problems TSMC are having in Texas, where Americans won't work hard enough apparently, yet it's a fact Americans work longer and harder than Brits. Could you imagine how TSMC would cope with the likely workforce in say Grantham, Kilmarnock, or Warrington.
I would bet it's more down to not being able to find local people with the skills which, as the US is not a great chip manufacturer any more, is unsurprising. The solution as always is for employees who do have the skills to work longer.
So if they were to rock up in Grantham there is no amount of employee overtime that could get them out of that pickle.
I hope the government made an effort to find out a bit more than this about whether it is a worthwhile project, as otherwise it's dangerously close to "a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" which tried to snare in money during the South Sea Bubble investment frenzy 300 years ago.
《All conventional CPU dies are square and have limitations. Our new CPU is round, therefore unconventional and therefore logically doesn't have the same limitations》
Ouroborus Design and FabricationTM uses a breakthrough Mobius strip wafer technology which utilizes its unique single sidedness to optimize chiplet interconnects and other novel design opportunities this technology offers to realize our unique semiconductors' unchallenged capabilities, features and performance.
The next generation will seek to weld together two of our first generation wafers into a Klein bottle configuration for an order of magnitude scale up in chip capabilities and performance.
"Think what we could do with Bernie Ecclestone’s taxes"
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/13/think-what-we-could-do-with-bernie-ecclestones-taxes
That should boost things up a bit - but still small change compared to the waste during Covid lockown
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
