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Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

If silicon/chip IP becomes free, and the only major cost to tape-out is an integration team, and Fab related stuff, China, not silicon valley, is the real winner

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All the more reason for companies to focus on true innovation instead of milking IP licensing.

All the more reason to make it profitable for fabs to exist within the US.

>All the more reason to make it profitable for fabs to exist within the US.

I'm particularly interested in this space. Anyone more familiar with it care to comment? Is there a push for more US fab capacity? Any startups? Any political push to change laws to make it more favorable to start one?

I can't answer your questions but may I piggy-back?

What stops Fab Facilities existing in "western" countries at the moment?

Someone told me a major reason for the move was because the chemicals used in top-tier facilities are basically banned in the west. Not technically banned but considered so dangerous (they're all carcinogenic) that the cost (health and safety, insurance, compensation) make them uneconomic.

Is that right?

Does it matter whether fab facilities are near to final manufacturing locations? Will Apple\Foxconn buy chips from a San Fran shop if they then have to be shipped to China for inclusion in the device? Since most devices are put together in SE Asia, the delay might be killer...

Sorry, not much to back it up other than lack of knowledge of any shared-wafer fabs in the US. From what I can tell, having a fab in the US is more a consequence of wanting to make one's own chips, not 'chips as a commodity' (foundry) business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry_model

Additionally there is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

Note as a result of this comment I did some digging and it does seem like Global Foundries does do wafer-share: https://www.globalfoundries.com/design-services/multi-projec...

The story stretches the rapid adoption of RISC-V to a "revolution." A non-proprietary ISA doesn't automatically lead to ML accelerators or signal processors or 10 billion transistor 5 nm ULSI devices.

RISC-V is great; a universal commodity ISA is welcome and will remove some impediments. But RISC-V isn't going to reduce the IC business to simple integration and fab. Specialized devices are already indispensable and will only become more critical as the general purpose CPU performance curve continues to flatten.

"Fab related" stuff is the biggest portion of silicon/chip IP in any given design - the "software-like", front-end part is quite minor to begin with. Of course it is important to get it right, which is why improvements in high-level design and the like (including open source designs) can still be a big win.

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