> We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US

The very subsidies Intel now has to pay with shares for? How is that a subsidy? Companies now and in the future would be very concerned before taking any US subsidies because the terms can always change after the fact.

And it’s still owned by a foreign country and Taiwan is restricting TSMC from manufacturing their most advanced processors from being manufactured in the US.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ta...

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Right it would make a lot more sense to let this happen and then restrict that the buyers be American (or European, I guess).

No amount of money is going to create a new fab in a reasonable timeframe.

You can buy one, if a suitable one exists, but there isn’t spare stock sitting around; the lead time is long, especially for high end nodes.

If Taiwan becomes practically inaccessible, is there any way another country can setup a competing fab (for the latest generation of chip sizes) without years of R&D? As far as I understand, the practical knowledge of how to do it doesn't exist right now. (Neither does the prerequisite tooling)

What is the risk for Nvidia if TSMC diseaper? Wouldn't they simply switch supplier and pick the second best option?

I’d love this to be true but the tech involved is Sci-fi level stuff. Neutron beams used to chop off atomically perfect slices of giant silicon crystals and wacky stuff like that.

TBF garage fabs -are- a thing but it’s in the hundreds of nanometers scale. Thin film technology is also promising for low tech tape outs, but neither of those is going to be practical for anything better than 1980/90s tech. A modern die would be in the square meters range on those process densities, and could never achieve ghz speeds.

That said, there are a ton of scrappy companies sending out designs to 30-100nm scale fabs, companies with 5-10 employees cranking out cool designs and custom silicon… but they are still sending their tape-outs to giant companies to fab, just on their old, obsolete machines.

Silicon foundries are incredibly capital intensive, and short SOTA process lifespans burn through that investment at a frantic pace.

I think one of the people who got closest to that was Sam Zeloof.

He kind of had everything going: extremely clever and motivated, cooperation with his parents (who also worked in the industry), access to equipment. Kind of hard to improve on that.

He was able to replicate most of Intel's SOTA process... from 50 years ago. That's more than almost everyone else has managed in their garage but that's about the best you can expect without insane capex and ramp up (and again, it's not like he didn't have access to capital, it just wasn't monetary.) Even still it took five or so years to work everything out.

The SOTA today is really kind of insane. It's right at the frontier of what all of humanity is capable of. Of course as time goes on we'll push that out and today's SOTA is tomorrow's commodity but that won't change everyone's concern with being unable to replicate the contemporary best process.

The reality is all our "defense" needs (and arguably most other needs too) are far more than adequately met with processes a decade old now. It's really not the big deal everyone makes it out to be.

Sadly no. There isn't really a single person who understands the entire SOTA chip fabrication process in enough detail. Think thousands of material science PhDs with master and apprentice style relationships inserted at every level of a massive tech tree.

It's not like you can just look at the plans for a chip fab and copy/paste it into a new location and hire people to fill in who will have any idea how to work it.

There is no such thing as a “smallish” chip manufacturer that can manufacture leading edge chips. It’s about scale.

If it were that easy, Apple, Amazon, Google AMD, Nvidia, etc who all design their own chips would have done it.

It is not a straw man.

There is no amount of scrappy cleverness that gets you from zero to manufacturing cutting-edge chips without shitloads of capital investment, years/decades of R&D, a huge manufacturing workforce, and big contracts.

There's no such thing as starting small and scaling in that business.