Chip Talk

When I sat down to lunch today, I grabbed the current issue of The Economist.

The first leader was titled All-American silicon.

That looked interesting; ever since I read Chip Wars by Chris Miller I have been interested in chips as the pivot piece to the future. 

Since America's place in the chip business is weak and declining I read everything I can find in the hope of seeing good news for a change.

This article focused on Intel, the company that rode the PC wave to world dominance in the chip business.

According to my reading of The Economist, Intel is on life support and pretty much functionally out of business.

"Yeah, but that spot has been taken over by NVDIA" I hear you saying.

That's true; and there are other American chip companies that are also doing very well.

Notice I didn't say "chip makers".

That's because Intel is the only American chip company of consequence that manufactures what it designs.

The rest send their designs out of country, mostly to Taiwan, mostly to TSMC.

That could create a problem when China takes over Taiwan.

Anyway, back to Intel.

Their problem is they got fat, dumb and happy (hubris is the highbrow descriptor often used) and they didn't design anything competitive and new as the world moved past the PC to smart phones, gaming and AI; the fact that they had major manufacturing capacity became a moot point - if you don't have many orders you don't need much manufacturing capacity.

And in the lull that that new reality brought into IntelLand, they let their manufacturing capacity wither and fall behind.

That capacity is measured by how many semiconductor fabrication plants a company, has.

Those things are called Fabs, and the money, and technical skill, and logistical skill necessary to build them is daunting.

That's why, except for Intel, American chipmakers let a Taiwanese entrepreneur - Morris Chang, Stanford graduate and 25-year Texas Instruments employee - take the risk and create TSMC - in Taiwan.

America needs ALL of that Intel manufacturing capacity to be humming and state of the art and getting exponentially better every day.

She needs Intel to be fixed, post haste.

But there is a lot more: she needs lots more players building lots more Fabs.

A current player in supplying that need is the Korean company Samsung which is building a Fab in Texas.

It is progressing but struggling because there are no Americans with the necessary skills to build it and bring it on line.

Because of that the company has had to adopt the inconvenient and very expensive practice of bringing in highly skilled Koreans to move the project forward.

Samsung has brought in 500 people so far and plan on bringing in more as needed.

The winner of the chip wars is destined to rule the world starting in ten or fifteen years.

The Economist mentioned some other things.

They alluded to the fact that trump is busy working to fix Intel.

And, in analysis of his activities, they mentioned several things that he shouldn't do.

When I read the first one of those things, I thought to myself "I thought that he has already done that".

The second one brought the same reaction, and also the others.

"I thought donnie had already done all those things; how could I be imagining so much"?

Then I noticed the date of the issue I was reading: 23 August.

What I had thought was the current issue was from six weeks ago.

In only six weeks donnie has managed to do everything The Economist warned against in late August.

He has managed to fuck up America's position in the chip wars even worse than it was when he started.

I guess he's got America's position in the world just right, got the economy just right, so now he's working on her place in world technology.

And remember back a few days ago when donnie sent ICE agents in and arrested 500 Koreans at a Samsung Plant in Texas?

That was really a feather in his cap.

They all got sent back to Korea.

In celebration Krysti Nome shot a hole in the ceiling of her office killing a GS8 in the floor above.

She shrugged and said, "that's how we RIF at DHS".