Re: And so the end run around merrica begins...
Maybe…. but I wonder if you are clear what you actually mean by US-controlled IP….or if it’s more of that “ARM / x86 ISA royalty” nonsense.
To prototype any new CPU design, you need FPGAs, lots of them. And for complex CPUs you need really high-end ones. You just can’t do this fully in simulation, it’s orders of magnitude too slow. There are only two viable FPGA vendors, and both of them are US-owned.
All the vital chip-design EDA software vendors, like Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Keysight, Altium are all US-based. Whether its synthesis, place-route, power analysis, clock trees, power domains, computational lithography, DFM / DFT / reliability. It’s all US software. And it’s all *annual licenses, seat-based*, none of it is “bought and owned”. The open-source stuff is just toys for university students.
There are certainly stages in the chip-design / manufacture that are *not* US-bottlenecked. But enough of them *are* that EU cannot make a chip without US agreement without at least 20+ years R&D.
Similarly with the various sets of expertise out in APAC: not just the silicon fabs, but test, advanced packaging etc.
What EU excel in, is the most complex silicon fab tools, a fantastic high-margin business, selling in units of only dozens of machines worldwide, but each one selling for tens or hundreds of millions. They lead the world in that. Not just ASML, but various Austrian, Swiss and a couple German companies.
Look, it’s an incredibly complex global supply chain. Every region has its specialism. This tariffs/protectionism stuff is literally suicidal for all concerned. The EU trying to make sovereign chips, with the other regions actively sanctioning, is laughable. But so would be if the USA tried. And so would be Taiwan, or China, or South Korea. It just *doesn’t work that way*.