News US Aims to Bring Chip Manufacturing Industry Back to Its Soil

[Ajay]

The US Senate and House of Representatives have recently started converging around a bill that would pour taxpayer money into domestic chip production, laying a framework for $25bn worth of direct incentives to stimulate investment in manufacturing capacity, along with advanced research. This plan has been eagerly supported by Texas Republican John Cornyn and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer - representatives of two of the US states with the highest silicon manufacturing rates. However, it's expected that incentives covering some 20% to 30% of the total cost of any new fab and development investment are required to make the US a worthwhile consideration against other, more established countries with higher incentives, existing support logistics and infrastructure, and cheaper labor.

So, we the people are putting up $25B to help our semiconductor businesses. Great, if it works. Now all we need is a decently managed company to put that cash to good use.

 

[maddie]

Like I said, unless you have someone embedded at the vendor - almost certainly the NSA/CIA did indeed have such a person in place for precisely this reason.

Or worse and a significant portion of the company engineering and/or administration was in league with those govmt agencies.

As we know from the multitude of security fracas in the last 2-3 years, SGX is far from as secure as Intel claimed or supposed it to be - whether due to intrinsic problems with the system or the underlying security faults of the uArch it simply was not fit to purpose.

Ironically was held up by the UHD Bluray Association as the paragon of PC security to play UHD Bluray discs on - still no apology from them to AMD since the holes in SGX were discovered.

It's endemic, and most certainly can't be eradicated. Nature of the beast sort of thing, as any reader of The prince will know.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Nope, I think America deserves to be more poor and out of jobs too so they can suck it! I sincerely hope America keeps biting the dust as well ...

2020s most appropriate username

 

[tcsenter]

So, we the people are putting up $25B to help our semiconductor businesses. Great, if it works. Now all we need is a decently managed company to put that cash to good use.

As with so much else the government does, it would be great if the money actually went to do the thing it is supposed to do. I hope it's at least some kind of conditional matching plan. i.e. company only gets $2B assistances AFTER if it commits $2B and cannot back out.

But from what I read, the semiconductor shortage was not limited to the advanced ICs and ASICs. There was a shortage of some circuitry components, too, such as voltage regulators, FETs, diodes, resistors, bridges, rectifiers, transformers, et. al.

 

[Doug S]

As with so much else the government does, it would be great if the money actually went to do the thing it is supposed to do. I hope it's at least some kind of conditional matching plan. i.e. company only gets $2B assistances AFTER if it commits $2B and cannot back out.

But from what I read, the semiconductor shortage was not limited to the advanced ICs and ASICs. There was a shortage of some circuitry components, too, such as voltage regulators, FETs, diodes, resistors, bridges, rectifiers, transformers, et. al.

It is being implemented as tax credits based on capital spending, so it can only be used against money actually spent.

What they should have done though is a further required that it is only allowed for projects that were announced or started AFTER the bill was signed (and take away money if existing plans are canceled or scaled back) If you give money for stuff they were already doing, it isn't encouraging any additional investment in the US. They could take the tax break money and use it to build fabs in Taiwan, South Korea or Europe and the US taxpayer gets nothing out of it.