Germany, France, 11 Other EU Countries Team Up For Semiconductor Push (reuters.com) 45
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany, France, Spain and ten other EU countries have joined forces to invest in processors and semiconductor technologies, key to internet-connected devices and data processing, in a push to catch up with the United States and Asia. Europe's share of the 440-billion-euro ($533 billion) global semiconductor market is around 10%, with the EU currently relying on chips made abroad. The 13 countries said they would work together to bolster Europe's electronics and embedded systems value chain. The group will reach out to companies to form industrial alliances for research and investment into designing and making processors and look into funding for such projects. It will also come up with a European-wide scheme known as an Important Project of Common European Interest which allows for funding under looser EU state aid rules. The group will seek to set up common standards and certification for electronics. The signatories include Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia.
As an obese thin-skinned American.... (Score:2, Funny)
Thet;;ll taach those euro weenies
Re: As an obese thin-skinned American.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is an on going problem with Europe. They don't have the startup culture that you get in the US and East Asia. So they rarely spawn disruptive startups and fall behind. Then once they fall behind they try to play catch-up with initiatives like this. But most of these industries have a big first mover advantages so playing catch-up is an uphill battle that they eventually lose. We've seen this cycle with their attempts to challenge FAANG.
They'd be much better off trying to develop their own startup culture like Silicon Valley / Shenzhen like the US and China or building up Keiretsu / Chaebol like Japan and South Korea. Not an easy task I'm sure. But what they are doing now isn't really a solution.
Re: As an obese thin-skinned American.... (Score:4, Interesting)
There have been more initiatives like this. They all failed, as far as I know. One reason is that there are too many rules here.
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Re: As an obese thin-skinned American.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Aerospace is another example, Boeing and Airbus aren't really products of a neutral global free market, they're a mishmash of free market and state-supported because losing all domestic aerospace industry is just too strategically damaging.
Chips are mature enough that you can built a workable infrastructure from stuff that's a few years behind.
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I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is an on going problem with Europe. They don't have the startup culture that you get in the US and East Asia.
That's only partly correct. I do think that the US is more startup-friendly than EU in general. But US companies also have a critical advantage: they have a bigger, local market in addition to the English speaking global audience.
German, French, Spanish startups have to cater to their limited local audience first before they go global. Therefore their growth is slower, their global appeal limited compared to the de-facto standard English competition. For example, Germany had its Facebook ("studi-vz"), but b
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ASML is Dutch... (Score:2)
Looks like it's possible to make some nice chips here over in Europe ;-)
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ASML doesn't make chips.
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ASML doesn't make chips.
Correct. But if you want to *make* chips at ultralow wavelengths with EUV lithography, you can only buy that that equipment from ASML. No one else can get you at 7nm and below...
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The next natural step (Score:2)
Would be for the US, Japan and Australia to establish a new multinational, state-owned corporation for rare earth exploitation and refining and agree to back it with the full might of our combined national treasuries. China wants to price dump? Now they face the wrath of Japan and the US simultaneously.
And this would fit in neatly with Europe's interests, as the EU would have a vested interest in weighing in on the company's side since it exists primarily to keep the supply of materials open to the global m
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Won't happen for various reasons. Politically, the Republicans will whine about centrally managing an economy and declare their faith the the free market to solve all problems, and then contribute burnt offerings to a bust of Ayn Rand. The Democrats will complain about the military-industrial complex and declare no public moneys for private companies, the Intels, etc. of the country work work overtime to get either get their nose in the trough or sink it lest it compete against them. The government won't se
Not Cost but Environmental Impact Killed Mining (Score:2)
no more UK. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny because the EU used to have ARM in the UK and then the whole Brexit thing happened, the pound crashed and suddenly ARM got bought up. It's really good that they are investing in semiconductors and I really hope this includes a push for making at least one high-end fabrication lab. The world has less than a dozen (seven, I think) of these labs so whenever there is a problem with one, it affects everybody. Redundancy is the best safeguard against disaster.
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Softbank happened also...
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Yes but as I pointed out, the pound crashed due to the disaster that is Brexit. This is what lead to Softbank even making an offer.
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Hence I think this is more about boosting companies like the Dutch NXP and the German Infineon to solidify their market position in the EU.
I hear that GlobalFoundries in Dresden, Germany will produce '12nm' (whatever that means) in the near future. But compared to what TSMC (Taiwan) and Samsung (South Korea) are already capable of, Europe is lagging about a decade behind of Asia.
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The only issue with that theory is that the price of stocks rises when the value of their underlying currency falls. As in this instance. ARM was trading at 1019 just before the Brexit vote, and was up to 1189 just before the offer was made, a rise of 16.68%.
ARM was bought for 1700/share.
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There's few fabs because fabs are horrendou
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As far as ARM is concerned, RISC-V is gradually overtaking the low end it seems. Not at desktop performance levels yet, but as embedded controllers in various devices it should do fine by now. Just now the German online computer magazine Golem reports that Seagate and Western Digital are working on RISC-V SSD controllers.
The ISA is also open source, so there will be no license problems with building compatible CPUs.
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Perhaps but RISC-V is currently the rare bird of ICs. In 10 years it might be somewhat common to find... or maybe not. WD seems to be hedging it's bets but they benefit from economies of scale. CPUs take a lot of time to fully develop and ARM has the benefit of complete development ecosystem and corporate inertia. Nothing is forever but ARM may be dominate the SoC market for decades more.
Belgium has a head start (Score:4, Funny)
They've got pretty good chips [recipesformen.com] already.
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It's a very old recipe which dates from the spanish inquisition. Cook twice in boiling oil , first time lightly and the second time till they're crispy. The part in between where they take confessions got lost over time.
Germany, France, Spain and ten other EU countries. (Score:2)
So basically Germany brings the technological expertise and money to the table, and the others bring...crumpets?
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Isn't it The Netherlands bringing the technological expertise and everybody else tagging along?
That is somewhat true; but if The Netherlands and Germany combine forces it could become quite interesting... that would not be a stretch of the imagination.
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There are plenty of high end semiconductor companies in Europe, e.g. NXP. But really most of them are doing R&D, the manufacturing happens elsewhere.
The biggest cluster is in Germany and The Netherlands. The area around their borders has a lot of tech companies.
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Do you forget STM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Huawei (Score:2)
This is a reaction to Trump cutting off Huawei, there is no reason for the EU to do this other than the fear that the US would cut them off too at some point. End result the world wastes resources on ensuring redundancy instead of benefitting from division of lavbor and innovating new things.
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If everyone does their own thing there's usually a lot more overhead than with carefully planned cooperation where tasks are divided.
But if the partners you have to work with in order to achieve that cooperation aren't reliable and trustworthy, you better think at least twice about how dependent you want to make yourself on them.
And not everything that has happened in the last couple of years is because of Trump. Sometimes th
Better late than never (Score:3)
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Europe was at the vanguard of the industrial revolution but missed the semiconductor one.
Sort of. They had industry leaders like Philips. But when I was in the product development biz, any call to them for technical data on their semiconductor lines was answered with "Who the f*k are you? And why do you want to buy our products?" Evidently they were waiting for a call from someone like Sony or Siemens. They missed the little 20 employee no-name engineering shops that would crank out a design, ship it off to China and produce 100 million TV sets.
Re: Better late than never (Score:2, Troll)
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In Europe, old habits die hard. They still operate under a system of royal corporate charters. They've just moved the throne to Brussels.
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I feel pretty bad for the Taiwanese, but Hong Kong is their future. Both places will be shells of their former selves once the mainland has their way. Time to hedge some bets and put more semiconductor fabs outside of Ch
ASML (Score:3)
While we hardly make any chips indeed (the largest plant - NXP ICN8 - has a capacity of only 500K wafers/year), Europe does make most chip-making machines; ASML is Dutch so it's kind of odd that almost all their customers are abroad.
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Siemens be like: Lol, my money, come to me! (Score:2)
As a German... that's where that money will end up. Always. And be wasted. :)
What kind of computer chips? (Score:2)
A different approach could be to use the machines to research new tech and or open source hardware.
For example, if they created their own open source CPU, (or used one of the existing ones), they would be free from licensing. At least that aspect of the computer. Then perform some research on open source memory... until they have something usa
More details? (Score:2)
The article doesn't have much details, and no further links ar provided.
At this point i assume, that this is about the European Processor Initiative (EPI) [european-p...tiative.eu], so the list of countries in the article would mean that 3 more EU countries joined it recently.
Apprently the EPI has 3 core activities:
a RISC-V-based accelerator for a future supercomputer in Barcelona [european-p...tiative.eu]; with a particular emphasis on the RISC-V vector extension, and improving support for the RISC-V vector extension in LLVM.
Some combination of a general- [european-p...tiative.eu]