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Comment by sponaugle | Hacker News Reader

What Pat said is 100% correct. The actual manufacturing of EUV ICs is incredible difficult, only eclipsed by the difficulty of figuring out HOW to do it. Doing the fabrication here in the US is great, but the much more difficult and key skill is the 'figuring how to do it'. Modern EUV is unbelievably complicated, and there are a continuous supply of new engineering problems that at first glance often don't even appear to be solvable.

In many cases you have an idea and it take 2-3 weeks to determine if it made any difference, and the feedback loop just gets slower after that. The steps in EUV requires some extreme engineering, and it is that core engineering talent you want to develop. The fabs are complicated, but the recipe is the key.

(Note I worked at Intel in the 90s, funny enough in Pat's group)

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This is a complicated problem so the US won't be able to figure it out? We do complicated manufacturing here that many countries cannot do.

Not without investing in figuring it out:

> "If you don't have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor leadership in the US," Gelsinger said, according to a report this week in the Financial Times.

It is a worthwhile first step. Yes we won't regain leadership without making follow on steps, but that is hardly newsworthy.

Fair enough. More of a reminder to pay attention to how TSMC approaches R&D in the states, since a part of the $165B investment is for a proposed R&D facility. If they focus on optimizing existing processes (as has been suggested) and keep the development of new processes in Taiwan, then that's a signal that we're not on a path to success (at least in Pat's eyes).

Agree on the newsworthy.. quotes like this are not super valuable... however the concept is that without real R&D the actual manufacturing is not as valuable. Of course it is better than no manufacturing, but in EUV, the real magic is in the process development.

A suboptimal amount of would be engineers works for spyware companies I guess. And the mind share is with top of the pyramid financial engineering fluff not actually doing stuff.

When I worked with machine engineering there was this gloomy prospect of all these "lifers" who would reach retirement age some day and be replaced by an consultants burning out every 6 months.

The US could figure something out decades ago doesn't mean it can now. I think ship building (even military ship building) is another example that the US could do decades ago with a very large capacity but I'm not sure whether it can reboot to such capacity nowadays.

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