| ▲ | octoberfranklin 2 hours ago | |
Nonsense, it would force vertical de-integration. Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way. Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you really own them?). And on and on. For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part, but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful technique. | ||
| ▲ | philipkglass 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
In another comment you proposed a sane version of the parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the minimum viable scale of different businesses. | ||