UK government prays that size doesn't matter as it chips in £1B for semiconductor sector UK government has published its long-awaited semiconductor strategy, promsing a disappointing £1 billion ($1.24 billion) to be focused on areas seen as the country's strengths – chip design, R&D and compound semiconductors. Expected at least a year ago, the newly announced plan aims to safeguard supply chains from disruption …
"However, it won't have escaped the attention of Reg readers that the Biden administration is ponying up $52 billion in subsidies and other incentives to boost domestic semiconductor industries in the US, while next door in Europe, the EU has agreed a €43 billion ($47 billion) funding plan to attract chipmakers to set up facilities there and secure European supplies of chips."
Unfortunately some people will look at this and think the UK is somehow doing badly by not spaffing so much money on the same things. This is the thing we should be happy about, let other countries tax payers fab the chips for us to use.
Whilst we were in the EU in 2012- Jaguar LandRover opened up a plant in Slovenia with the assistance of EU taxpayers money. Jaguar thought they could shift operations there and still sell their products in the UK tariff free.
The corporations will always follow the inducements.
BMW will build their electric Minis in China..
You missed out back-seat drivers.
It's notable that amongst the engineering community in the UK at the moment, there are apparently millions of people who can tell you exactly how wrong you're doing it, but very few who can articulate a coherent strategy to make it better. Just saying "you should spend more", or "of course it will make money/solve world hunger" doesn't cut the mustard.
There's a reason arts/humanities grads are the ones who end up making the policies - they can articulate a plan and sell it to other people. That's the same reason they're usually the ones who end up running the company whilst even the senior engineers earn less than half their salary. It's all very well having deep knowledge of your specialist subject area (and being able to quickly pick up adjacent fields) - but we see time and time again that this tends to be orthogonal to knowing how to run a business/organisation or country at the sort of level needed to instigate real change.
"they can articulate a plan and sell it to other people"
Let me FTFY - they can articulate a plan that is more often than not unrealistic and over optimistically costed and can run away blame somebody else before the proverbial happens ..
If you are an IT or engineering person then you will know that no significant project ever gets finished on time or on budget. Basically because the people buying would balk at the real price and would never buy, so that the people selling adjust their prices unrealistically as a consequence. If folks were honest both to themselves about the effort and the costs involved things would be easier and no less expensive in the long run.
Just that when deals are to be made honesty and facing facts are the first victims when money and gain is involved - on both sides.
Again, if a project delivered by engineers is over time and over budget, it's not good enough to blame the muggles for not understanding our brilliance. It is our failure to communicate, and willingness to go along with poor implementation that leads to this consistent failure. "The project manager made me do it" isn't good enough.
One of the largest, most successful projects I have ever been involved in (billion dollar unicorn from what started as five people in a shed) was on time and on budget. It is possible. And, for all their faults, we have big corporates who've demonstrated it's possible to scale out and run a profitable business based on high quality engineering.
Yet, particularly in the UK we seem to have a mindset that consistently rips defeat from the jaws of victory. It's pretty depressing that there seems to be "something in the water" that makes us miserable at large collaborative projects. Maybe we should accept that this is something we're doing wrong, rather than trying to blame everyone else.
Yet more money poured into meaningless temporary little PR exercises about launching strategies for opportunities for future unicorns ....... much easier than doing something that actually produces something, even if all they actually get for the money are a few positive headlines because of the illusion of activity it generates.
@Howard Sway
"Yet more money poured into meaningless temporary little PR exercises about launching strategies for opportunities for future unicorns ....... much easier than doing something that actually produces something"
To be fair this is government. Of course they dont produce anything
Biden is planning $50+bn on fabs, we're planning $1+bn on design and research.
Since both Europe and America are committing to buying the expensive things that struggle to turn a profit (Fabs), we do not need to spend money on the expensive things that struggle to turn a profit.
This, on the whole is a good thing.
If you adjust for size of population, the US is promising to fund about 8x what we are - but it's not on equivalent things. We're still not spending enough right across the board on science and research, but it's a bit misleading to just compare the budgets. Ours is still not enough, and I doubt it would ever reach a value that satisfies the science and engineering communities, but we should be aware of what it is we're asking for here.
The other battle is on where the money *is* spent - the UK Innovate quango really seems to get far too little scrutiny, though that appears to reflect the complete disregard for the sciences from both Government and civil service.
because that's really what it was intended to do. Buy headlines.
By the time you have factored in inflation and all the layers of cronyism you will need to have in place for this sum, I would be amazed it it covered the hot drinks budget for a medium sized company for a month.
Also, watch out for it becoming £10 billion by being re-announced another 9 times (see also hospitals).
The point is not the size of the GDP, but the size of the existing specialist industry and talent. TSMC accounts for something like 70% of the world's semiconductor output. It has a market cap that's approximately TEN times the amount Biden is proposing to invest. It employs over 65,000 people - and it's just one of a set of companies based in Taiwan.
When TSMC alone is capable of spending more on development and infrastructure in a single year than the whole of Europe - yes, we're not in a position to compete with them.
There is also "purchasing power parity", these fabs cost billions to build in Taiwan while in Britain sheds can be built for only a few hundred quid.
If we assume that a cutting-edge 3nm gen-5 fab, and a shed on an allotment are basically the same thing - then Britain could be a major player
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