We need much more robust industrial policy. All these firms trying to corner markets with IP for proprietary chipsets need to be flayed alive and everyone needs to settle on standardized chips. There's no reason smartphone manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. There's no reason auto manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. This shit should be interchangeable.
The desire of fabs to produce the most complex, smallest scale, highest margin chips means that perfectly serviceable 5-10 year old technology gets put on endless backorder and it is fucking everything straight to hell. The market, predictably, will not solve this problem. Particularly as long as semiconductor manufacturing is viewed as a geopolitically strategic industry (as well as one where superprofits are reaped) and productive capacity is limited to the global north.
As usual, This Machine Kills explored this problem in incredible depth (its behind the paywall though :( ).
Shit stops selling, it’s not like capacity was exploded in a war
Sure but it’s the interconnectedness and complexity of it all that worries me
We need much more robust industrial policy. All these firms trying to corner markets with IP for proprietary chipsets need to be flayed alive and everyone needs to settle on standardized chips. There's no reason smartphone manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. There's no reason auto manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. This shit should be interchangeable.
The desire of fabs to produce the most complex, smallest scale, highest margin chips means that perfectly serviceable 5-10 year old technology gets put on endless backorder and it is fucking everything straight to hell. The market, predictably, will not solve this problem. Particularly as long as semiconductor manufacturing is viewed as a geopolitically strategic industry (as well as one where superprofits are reaped) and productive capacity is limited to the global north.
As usual, This Machine Kills explored this problem in incredible depth (its behind the paywall though :( ).