I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash.<p>I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.<p>Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda</a>
Even better, Qimonda was ultimately bought (alongside all their patents) by SMIC [1] who is now the Chinese memory player. For 30 million.<p>[1] <a href="https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-challenge-dram" rel="nofollow">https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...</a>
Infineon still exists as a semiconductor manufacturer. Their stock has gone crazy since start of the year as well.
Germany’s austerity policy after 2008 may be one of the largest economic blunders in history. It would be one thing if they merely committed self-harm, but they also used their pull in the EU to drag the rest of the continent down with them.<p>Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High
One thing that I will never understand - how can german population not see through all that socialist bullshit she produced, promises undelivered, how much long term harm she generated across whole Europe (not just EU). Hard push for (now visibly) failed immigration at all costs, nuclear energy rollback (and she was nuclear physicist at least by her studies) and subsequent buying of foreign coal-based electricity, fragmentation of EU.<p>She literally licked putin's boots well into Ukraine war and <i>still</i> thinks licking his ass is the correct course to solve war in Ukraine (which started 2014 and it was pretty nasty already back then, the world just didn't care also thanks to her).<p>She is by far the biggest catastrophe modern Europe encountered after Hitler. She helped remove any proper fighting chance for the top dog Europe had for 21st century. She singlehandedly caused proper hate against EU in large parts of (not only) eastern EU population, and hence the rise of populist left or right wing politicians whose whole success story was just point at her failings and criticize, enough to get 20-30% of the votes and even win elections, repeatedly. She literally made people like Orban or Fico.<p>She <i>still</i> admits no mistakes, even wants to become german president. How effin' out of touch with reality she is.
> all that socialist bullshit she produced<p>... what? How's that the first thing that comes to mind about her, before "neoliberal", "conservative", or "austerity"? For that matter, when has the CDU ever been anywhere near socialist, in Germany or in the EU parliament?<p>100% agree we're still dealing with the fallout from her policies though.
okay, that is going too far<p>she has its flaws but remember that people vote for her, so its not only her fault
Yes people voted for her, she is still very popular. Doesn't change anything I said about her negative impact on entire continent that is <i>extremely</i> visible.<p>Maybe she did tons of good so it somehow averages out, but I certainly haven't heard about it (now is your time to defend her), everybody saw consequences of her disastrous policies that affected entire bloc.
> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.<p>Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.
There were plenty of other DRAM manufacture before them as well. But the Boom and bust cycle wipe out those who weren't big enough or adequately prepared.<p>Nearly every single DRAM cycle we go through the same thing. People are saying memory are so cheap we are going to get 32GB/ 64GB / 128GB very soon. Just like they did 2-3 years before. Then every single DRAM up cycle they were earning insane amount of money, with this one being exceptionally high. Not only covering their previous lost but also extra profits. And every single time people cry out price fixing.<p>And every single time, Interviewer, financial reporters or share holders will ask TSMC's CEO Morris Chang the same question, and this is before TSMC was even well known in Tech cycle, will they make DRAM given it is just Fabs, TSMC could do it. And every single time in the past 20 - 30 years Morris had to explain the whole thing again.<p>Frankly speaking I have been rumpling about DRAM being commodity on HN for nearly 20 years. It is the first time I have seen a few comments finally picking this up as shown in the current top comment.
> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?<p>My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn
Realistically, when it comes to the semiconductor market, there aren't many viable options outside of East Asia. I don't mean this in the sense that East Asians were somehow "chosen," but rather that the semiconductor industry inherently requires a large number of highly educated employees working together. The problem is that the working hours inevitably end up being very long. If you actually go work at one of those facilities, you have to wear a "cleanroom suit" (bunny suit), and it's physically demanding. What I'm saying is, you need highly educated personnel who can be mobilized at any time when a problem breaks out in the middle of the night, and who can be hired at relatively low cost. East Asia has a massive educational infrastructure — schools are very large-scale and the system is extremely well-developed — making it hard for other regions to compete. And indeed, the average working hours in countries that do semiconductor manufacturing are extremely long<p>In other words, it's an industry where you have to grind white-collar workers as if they were blue-collar laborers.
I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?
The industry inherently deals with extremely hazardous chemicals, and on top of that, during semiconductor production, there are many things that have to be recorded and tracked.<p>A lot of the processes are automated, but at the points where automation hasn't reached, there are quite a few things that are genuinely complex to handle.
I think it’s more like highly skilled technicians, to scale up. Plus PhDs and other scientists to do the simulations and analyze the data for new designs.
The people in the fabs aren't PhDs, they're extremely skilled technicians. They may have a similar number of hours of experience/training as a PhD, but that training is in troubleshooting automation systems, not doing research.
Answer: they don't, they just work them into the ground because they can.<p>Mainland China also has the 996 schedule for office workers purely as a cargo cult ritual, forcing people to sit at a desk at midnight and pantomime doing work.
You're not wrong, but from what I understand, the issue really comes down to on-site personnel and supervisory staffing.<p>As for the 996 culture, I agree to some extent. My Chinese friends hated it too. But in China, there's this thing called neijuan (involution / the rolled up scroll).
there are just so many job seekers that people are forced to endure it. What neijuan means here is "Eating one's own flesh" basically knowing that this competition is damaging to everyone involved but doing it anyway.
I believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have?<p>When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship.<p>What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indirectly through favourable arrangements for the industry players via the chaebol system, while China and Taiwan did this with more direct government investment into the industry.<p>Sure, you can't just dump money into the industry and become a semiconductor player, else the Middle Eastern countries would have tried that ages ago. Yes, the talent being locally present is important but you're once again bringing up tired tropes about Asian working culture as being relevant.
I'm not saying Asian culture is the main factor. Yes, it's true that authoritarian governance driven by dictatorial regimes and chaebol politics has played a strong role, but fundamentally, the long working hours are simply inherent to this business.<p>You brought up the New Mexico story quite well, but that place is notorious for the exploitation of Navajo women's labor. In the first place, the factory was occupied and shut down by the American Indian Movement. You know full well that this is a story about the exploitation of Native Americans, so why are you bringing it up like that?<p>The history of Shiprock itself is, at its core, a history of "cheap, obedient labor." You frame it only as state-led investment, but the reality is that the culture behind it is complex.<p>What my post is pointing out is not that "Asian culture is superior." What I'm pointing out is the harsh working conditions in Asia — where working hours are extremely long, and even highly educated workers are inevitably subjected to grueling hours. Why do you think TSMC's Arizona fab in the U.S. keeps getting delayed? The U.S. invested money through the CHIPS Act, but American engineers refuse to accept the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" that exists in Taiwan. TSMC founder Morris Chang himself has pointed this out before.<p>What I'm saying is that the educational infrastructure is so well-established that it's easy to produce a large supply of highly educated workers, and that these highly educated workers then have to be submissive to inhumane working conditions. This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia. But from the context of your comment, it seems like you misunderstood me as saying "Asian work culture is superior" and replied based on that assumption. That was never my intention.<p>Before you leave a comment, I'd ask you to show some basic respect to others.
This is extrapolating from a single example of something that has worked and the conflating correlation with causation.<p>There are plenty of places with highly educated cheap workforces who work hard. Eastern European culture is almost identical down to the whole "tiger mom" stereotype.<p>And there are numerous counter examples: Ireland has a huge semiconductor industry: <a href="https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semiconductor-companies-ireland-chips-electronics" rel="nofollow">https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semiconductor-compan...</a><p>The US is full of the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" - at the high end silicon valley is built on this, and at the low end every single non-unionized factory is this.<p>TSMC has never built a fab outside Taiwan. Of course there will be problems.
There were probably many complex factors at play. Personally, I think the biggest one, as TSMC's Morris Chang said, is the inhumane working conditions imposed on highly educated workers. But there were likely also issues around permitting and regulatory procedures, as well as the overall cost structure.<p>As you said, if it were just about labor, other countries would probably have some supply of it as well. But in the case of Eastern Europe, there was likely American pushback against the European continent. As you know, semiconductors today can't be made entirely by a single entity. They're connected through a chain of trust. If Europe were to move beyond just producing semiconductor equipment and start directly manufacturing semiconductors through fabs, it would easily become a competitor to the U.S. rather than a supply chain partner.<p>In fact, the semiconductor chain is deliberately fragmented so that no single player can monopolize it.<p>On top of that, the U.S. is using South Korea and Taiwan to contain China. Under the ideology of protecting foundries from Chinese aggression and industrial attacks, the U.S. is sending the signal that it can cut off the supply chain. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is tied up with the EU, making it much harder for the U.S. to control.<p>In the end, what matters when the consumer nation, the U.S., outsources production is how securely it can relocate it. Look at what happened to Japan's semiconductor industry. It was crushed through the 1986 agreement. The U.S. simply does not tolerate the emergence of an independent manufacturing hub that possesses sovereign economic power.<p>What matters is whether the U.S. can maintain control while keeping the price low.
New Mexico has (pockets of) exceptionally well-educated population. 3 of the top 100 counties for PhDs per capita are in New Mexico (including #1, Los Alamos).
Feels like the real clash happening here is that the reality is suggesting that the values of mean educational level of the bottom 99% of workforce outweighs that of the top 1%, and that being uncomfortable to some so much so that there has to be something else. But isn't that just it?<p>There's a story in one of Feynman's memoir where he figures out that pausing the live system and debugging its physical RAM stack is turning out to be more time consuming than simply scheduling a new corrected task, on some particular 1940s mechanical supercomputer he was assigned to as a tech. It might not have taken Feynman to notice that, but you can assign Feynman for that, and it worked for the Manhattan project.<p>The parent comment isn't (just) reiterating the tired tropes, but pointing out that East Asia has an "educational base" similar to industrial base that supports its high tech. I don't think that much is so strange way of thinking. The state of ME countries(maybe except Iran) soft proves it - they don't believe in such a thing. And they don't have a semiconductor industry. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.<p>(And on "This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia." from jdw64, yuuup 100% it is quad plus bad - IMO a thing about East Asia is that there's zero inter-national mobility due to the notoriously high language barrier, so competitions are closed to within borders, and the bar just drift skywards indefinitely because of that. There was a massive domestic hiring freeze in Japan during the 90s that made "janitors with a PhD" actually not so rare, but none of them hit the global labor market or started companies - the Japanese bar for janitors just went up to PhDs. It is said that success of Japanese 7-11 was partially attributable to that event, that, when you happen to have all the cashiers manned 24/7 with top scientists, you can just throw million different tasks and they can handle it perfectly, put aside whether they're happily doing it)
Chip fab locations have traditionally had more political than economic importance. Matrix multiplication chips and RAM have been the recent exception, while TSMC has long been the geopolitical exception. ASML's location only matters to the extent that it gets ordered not to sell to someone.
According to late Intel founder Andy Grove, having domestic manufacturing, including chip fabrication, is very important for a country's ability to innovate.<p><a href="https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/20100701_howtomakeanamericanjob_bloombergopinion.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05...</a>
Not just ASML, but Zeiss the optics company is German and optics are one of the most important parts of lithography.<p>Regardless there are fabs in Germany, I know of at least 7, most located in Dresden. They mostly focus on older larger nodes, since for the German auto/industrial sectors that is all that is required. It's a much bigger industry than other European nations, especially like the UK which only really has one main fab in Newport.
The AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries has a fab in Dresden.
The whole semi manufacturing(/electronics) supply chain moved to Asia in the 1980s.<p>E.g. Siemens tried to compete but lost back then in the manufacturing part.
IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.
Intel was supposed to build a fab in Magdeburg, which would have been great, but apparently the reason it was canned (2025) was they couldn't secure enough customers.
apparently bosch semiconductor exists. whatever theyre doing over there they should do more of it tho, I want cheaper ram
same thing that happened to Japan/US: they financialized their economy, companies moved from making things to pushing papers and outsourcing the making to China
Memory has only really recently become lucrative. Germany still has heavy machinery, trains, drilling machines etc all of which will be needed for a long time regardless of whether the "bubble pops" or not.
Siemens?
> I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train?<p>Socialism or more its german variant, a system that can spend much more than more capitalistic power holders can ever earn and doesn't really plan well for future. Just look at it - very protected jobs, stifling bureaucracy, very hard to fire people, brilliant folks are definitely not compensated accordingly compared to (below) average peers - more often than not they earn the same. Its not agile economy nor workforce by any means, in contrary.<p>The feeling that the German Way (TM) is The Right Way, regardless of situation. If it worked in the past, it will in future, right. That leads to stagnation, complacency and when competition leap frogs them by the mile, surprised puzzled looks and wondering how it all happened.
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Germany is done.
The Germany fetish still going strong I see.