Britain must start reshoring computer chip production before it’s too late, Rishi Sunak has been told.
Two of Britain’s pre-eminent microprocessor design companies have urged the Prime Minister to start lobbying big manufacturers to set up shop here, warning that Britain risks losing out without action.
“It’s not a case of ‘if the UK Government doesn’t support this, these things won’t go ahead’,” said Scott White of Cambridge-based Pragmatic Semiconductor. “They’ll just go ahead somewhere else and the UK won’t get the value creation from it.”
We’ll not carry the cost, nor gain the profit. We’ll also get to use all those wondrous new chips which is where the actual value is. So, let Johnny Foreigner make them then.
For anyone who really does want to invest and gain the profit Johnny F might well be willing to sell a few shares, after all. TMSC is quoted, for example.
Sun, Motorola and IBM and all sorts of manufacturers used to make their computers and components here in the UK. I know because I used to flog them stuff.
Where have they all gone ?
Where now are Sun, Motorola and, shortly, IBM? I’ve no doubt that small scale manufacturing still goes on but the large scale stuff has all moved to cheaper labour places, now that labour has become skilled enough.
Sun was bought by Whoracle.
Part of Motorola was bought by google, then sold on to the chinks once they’d used up the tax benefits of offsetting previous losses. The other half of Motorola is still going AFAIK.
IBM is still IBM.
Exactly TG.
A lot of these guys lobbying the govt for handouts think that we are still in the 1970s ( well yes we have reverted back to there ). We gave these companies huge tax breaks and grants to set up in Jockland or Swindon and they still buggered off after a dozen years or so.
Sun computers used to be works of art. Lovely kit. Sun themselves though were very excited about the conversion to PCI. I opened up a workstation in the late 90s. Inside was a Taiwanese Mitac bus with a Sparch chip plonked in it.
I closed the box up and concluded that they were finished. Everything that made Sun special had gone, because without the bus supporting it, their chips were no faster than IBM’s, the Solaris operating system was superior but most purchasing managers weren’t really interested in that. It was to buy stuff off the shelf in Taiwan that caused them to shut down operations in Cumbernauld.
BritishVolt 2 : Silicon Moneyburnaloo
Ummm… nothing stops anyone from designing an integrated circuit anywhere.
And that’s where the IP, credit, and caboodle is.. in that design. And the profit in the licencing if you manage to actually do something “New”.
Where they’re actually produced is irrelevant. And insisting you do this At Home is economically ridiculous.
Just another case of Glorious Britain ( She Rules The Waves ) Must Be Able To Do Everything The World Can By Itself.
Now gi’s a job!!
Well, to be fair there’s quite a few electronic components which are absolutely essential to defence and the like. But they are mostly not at the bleeding edge of anything, and the logical solution is to advertise a contract to build and run a fab stocked with second hand equipment and guarantee a certain order volume 🙂
@Ottokring: yes, the old Sun boxes were great. I know of an old Sparc Micro still running. Sadly, they just weren’t that much better than x86-64 once the latter had nicked all their special innovations
“A lot of these guys lobbying the govt for handouts think that we are still in the 1970s ( well yes we have reverted back to there ). We gave these companies huge tax breaks and grants to set up in Jockland or Swindon and they still buggered off after a dozen years or so.”
I think Swindon only really got Honda which lasted for 30 years, but that was a lot about the UK also being more efficient than many parts of the EU, and all sorts of EU protectionism around car making.
But yes, in general, there’s this idea about subsidies Creating Industries but the problem is that once you turn the tap off the incentives change and it’s worth leaving. Plus politicians are always late to the Creating Industries party. By the time they realise a thing is big, it’s already firmly established in a place. The gravity is there. You can create a satellite site with subsidies, but it’ll not become the new centre of gravity.
What a surprise to see IQE among the beggars. Government handouts will be a lot easier than the inevitable fund raise for this company that is rapidly running aground
Of course industry needs subsidies from the government.
Because otherwise there’s no way they would be able to afford the stupidly high energy bills, caused by, erm, the government…
“Part of Motorola was bought by google, then sold on to the chinks”
Yeah, that would be Motorola Mobility. Which sounds like medical products or something, but was their mobile phone business. Bought by Lenovo. Motorola Solutions is still among those present: serious radio and network infrastructure stuff. And still American, as far as I know.
Freescale, formerly the semiconductor arm, and so possibly the most relevant here, merged with NXP, which the Chinks said they were going to buy, but didn’t. It’s Dutch. I think they’re still making the good ol’ 68k CPU line. (Kinda-sorta. Coldfire isn’t 100% binary compatible, but it’s based on the same instruction set.)
Freescale are still making good with the 68*hundred* CPU line. I was wrangling some bare-metal 6812 code with Freescale development tools a couple of years ago.
Didn’t know that, jgh. Mind you, I never really ran into the 6800s. I’m an amateur enthusiast, not a pro, so my experience was Amigas and STs.
Otto: yes, Sun workstations were the business then. A Sparc II rapidly became my desktop when I got one for a project, and I soon abandoned the Mac I used formerly. I was also lucky to play with a DEC Alpha machine. What a fantastic ABI. Lovely to run Linux on it. Very sad that it was abandoned when DEC went titsup – that architecture was far better than the eternally bodged x86.
As for making chips, look at the very many Croesuses that people like TSMC have to invest every few years to keep up with volume demand and also tech advancement demand (We need even bigger, faster supercomputers to tell bigger lies about the climate!). UK can’t do that especially with government not understanding the first thing about that industry.
“the logical solution is to advertise a contract to build and run a fab stocked with second hand equipment and guarantee a certain order volume”
This is what US military does (or at least did) for its chips, worked for a company that supplied them with some parts for old kit many years ago
Semiconductor manufacturing and even building the equipment required has always been a volatile niche business. If memory serves there was a semiconductor place you passed on the M4 just by Newport
Building fabs for bleeding edge chips is horrendously expensive and notoriously difficult, it would take decades to build the engineering and technical expertise. It isn’t going to happen.
Building a fab for basic chips puts you in competition with every those who are established and have ironed out all the inefficiencies.
Tough market to enter. There’s some excellent background here:
https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/post/episode-81-the-geopolitics-of-microchips-and-semiconductors