Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes(ukdefencejournal.org.uk) |
Britain buys semiconductor factory for defence purposes(ukdefencejournal.org.uk) |
Imagine going to some rural area and trying to build a fab, chances are the town has no clue what your impact or needs are and you would be spending lots of money to basically speed up development of the area.
Side not to Semiconductors fab, where do you even buy one. Sure you can buy talent or machinery and then hire engineers to help get everything working, but if you wanted to for some reason buy a fan that already exists, say just the fab location and the equipment, how do you know what company to approach that might even consider selling. Who can even afford these purchases except massive fortune 500 company's breaking a piggy bank, or some massive credit institution, which I doubt would even do this because it would probably be a massive loan to any buyer. Seems like you need to have the money to build part of a fab if you want to buy one, idk who would even consider loaning that amount of money to a third party.
Once the knowledge of the workers is gone then it would be really hard to spin something up in country, and being the UK we would likely be forced to buy stuff from the US (or go to the far east anyway). If you built a fab in country then you would probably have to get staff from an existing fab to help run it and iron out any issues and gradually switch them out for local staff.
Governments are happy to subsidise fabs, and VCs are even happier to invest in AI flavoured semiconductors if you can market it that way.
Outside photonics definitely useful for high speed electronics, but that would probably take more process development to get going.
"This facility is the only secure site in the UK capable of manufacturing gallium arsenide semiconductors, a vital component in military platforms such as fighter jets."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_arsenide#GaAs_advantag...
The last steel furnace closing too?
There’s actually 23 semiconductor fabs in the UK, presumably with a diversity of owners [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/10/bri...
[2] tech uk report: https://pixl8-cloud-techuk.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod/p...
Same applies to maybe starting having again some kind of national OSes, and programming languages, not subject to export regulations.
Newport, South Wales has a fab that specialises in silicon for power electronics
This could be as benign as a government ensuring that the 100 jobs aren't lost, but given everything going in in both Europe and the Middle East it sure seems like more than saving such a comparatively small number of jobs. They could have just signed large(r) contracts with the company to financially secure the company, acquisition is a stronger play when the government needs more direct (and more private/secure) control.
Well that's the critical question. Is that being used?
Lithography using 193nm light varies from 130nm down to 10nm, if not wider.
365nm probably doesn't vary as much, but just saying the wavelength doesn't give a clear answer about the node size.
'With global semiconductor demand rising, this move positions the UK to meet future technological needs, including advancements in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and 6G'?
advancements in artificial intelligence depend on mass production of 4nm silicon cmos, not 100 people doing gallium arsenide for high-speed analog. 'quantum technologies' is vague enough to not be literally a lie (transistors depend on quantum physics to work, as do wires) but in this context it's clearly designed to trick people into thinking 'quantum computing' which is also unrelated to what these guys are doing
The “North East” in the context of the UK and “the North East of England” are not interchangeable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Territorial_Leve...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun#Modern_English_cap...
Even when foreigners are asking about travel advice. Must confuse the hell out of them. Or maybe some foreigners think that England = UK anyway so it all balances out?
For the last few decades Western countries aside from the US have basically just sat on their laurels assuming that, well, we're in the end of history and nothing will ever go wrong again. A rude awakening.
A sure fire way to ensure that there _is_ war is to sit about and sing kumbaya around the fire until the invaders turn up.
A big risk for Taiwan, at least in my amateur view, is China feeling emboldened both by seeing an anemic response to other major conflicts and a West that is already distracted by said major conflicts.
I grew up with the story that Hong Kong was just as off limits to China as Taiwan was. No one came to Hong Kong's defence though, even the British who should be on the hook for that situation just sat by in silence while the Chinese took complete control of HK and installed their own puppet government to manage the transition.
Which means Middle East and Ukraine are already part of a global-ish war. Proxy wars, so far, but in service of a larger goal. (No, I don't think China necessarily instigated, but they're sure supporting ongoing conflict)
As part of that, I'd also assume that the US nudged the UK to maybe consider their supply chain in case the US can't cover Europe's ass. (They can't, not if they expect a Taiwan conflict)
But that's just my opinion, man. Could also be the tail wagging the dog.
Either way, I think it's pretty clear we are moving from a unipolar world to at least a "more" multipolar world in the near to midterm future. Covid laid bare how utterly fragile the current supply chains are for almost everything from raw material to base chemicals to advanced chips and beyond in the western hemisphere - so it only makes sense for this to happen regardless.
Defense though can be a much more easier talking point from a political and budgeting perspective, especially when trying to unlock an ungodly amount of money towards a potential risk.
Investing in capability isn't necessarily a signal that we expect to deploy that capability. But it does force the enemy to level up, then when that enemy runs out of money, they tend to implode.
I literally have no idea, so more than happy to be educated!
In my opinion, governments buying (or taking over) producers that are necessary for the military feels like a drastic departure to how the military industry has operated for decades.
At least in the US, though I think also in Europe, governments have been happy to keep up the status quo of writing massive checks to military contractors that, at least on face value, provide military equipment and training at a massive markup. In the US that markup also tends to be shared with those in power writing the checks through "gifts", campaign donations, and high paying jobs.
Military contractors generally don't seem to be hurting for capital to pay employees, especially the actually vital contractors. If the government takes them over, the most likely motivator I see is for the military to have full control over production, projects, and information security.
Keep an eye out for analogues to Aktion T4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
Enacted in October 1939, and retroactive to 1 September, it was the final domestic coup-de-grace necessary to activate the Reich's war machine. Don't expect for a moment that it will be any different for the Allied powers.
GaAs (and other III-V) would likely be an essential material for some kind of photonic or hybrid compute system.
The response below addressed the quantum sensors, but I would be careful of calling "everything" quantum such as image sensors. Sure they rely on the photoelectric effect which is quantum, but not really in the sense of what we would consider a 'quantum sensor' today.
I suspect what could be more relevant are III-V based SQUID Qubits. These are highly sensitive systems that multiple nations are exploring for submarine detection. More near term, quantum communication via quantum light sources also can leverage a III-V platform.
what are iii–v based squid qubits? google scholar is not helpful except for finding https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResea.... i thought a squid was a josephson junction device made out of superconductors and insulators, not semiconductors. gaas isn't a superconductor, is it?
this doesn't sound like a quantum communication and squid research lab though. it sounds like a 50-year-old radar chip fab that's being put on life support as a pork barrel project
Management by civil servants who have no stake in the business nor real understanding of the sector.
Interference from politicians.
A more official source puts "England" in brackets, as if it's not part of the name but just to disambiguate: https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/geography/ukgeographies/e...
I doubt it. Look at what a "border dispute" did to Russia - they became a global pariah. And modern countries cannot really function in a vacuum, even most stupid/populist leaders know it. Local wars in Africa and the Middle East will continue, that's for sure, but they don't have the potential to become global, at least not now.
For the US, that has not been a great role to be in considering the recent past.
It's been a pleasant surprise to see European countries start to take their own defense seriously in the face of the invasion of Ukraine. When other NATO members can pick up their own slack, it makes it feel much more like an alliance of equals that can make solid contributions.
A UK website making international articles should at least use “North East of England”, or perhaps “North East (England)” to comply with the official ONS ITL name as someone else pointed out. Even UK wide articles should do this.
If you want to complain about a subreddit, go there.
Deterrence + autocracy is pretty unstable, because eventually the generalissimo gets to thinking that if he already has military capability sitting around...
Both have announced plans to convert from blast furnaces to modern electric arc furnaces. This will greatly reduce emissions - they are among the largest industrial polluters in the UK (along with the Drax wood-burning power station). But conversion to arc furnaces also means that fewer workers will be required.
Phones beat that by a factor of x2-x4.
And has 1-16 processors of 1 gigaflop each; depending on how much precision you want, a phone can beat that by a factor of just over x2000.
Not sure when you grew up but that has been obviously false for at least 40 years
i think taiwan might get some defense but only cause shit is made there and the west cant pretend the chinese wont flex their power
But also: For China, Taiwan is only to a very limited extent about the economy. It is about ideology. For the US, a war now would be a bad idea - only slightly better than it would be a little later. There's an increasing gap in naval abilities (that'll - so the Pentagon thinks officially - close in the 2030s)
That means that we're currently in an unstable time. War is possible, but not a given. Meanwhile, if war happens, the US can't fight on three fronts. And so both Ukraine and the mideast conflicts strengthen China's hand if it comes to war, and weaken the US's. Similarly, an independent EU with at least some manufacturing capability lessens US constraints.
At the moment, things are all about shaping the odds.
Nationalism is a factor and the PRC is a totalitarian dictatorship. They’re going to go after what they consider their “rogue province” sooner or later, and whether it benefits them economically or not is a footnote.
similarly 'magnometers' are not a thing, and magnetometers are generally either superconducting or pretty classical, so i am getting the feeling you are just trolling me to see if you can get a reaction by posting stuff without any consideration for whether it is true or not
No, but it does mean that they are significantly more prone to irrational decisions. And Xi's not exactly ultra-rational to start with.
The PRC has actually managed to successfully stave off a few leadership crisis’s already, but one of the ways they did so was by moving away from a dictatorship of one and establishing term limits and a model that encourages leadership to think about the next generation and ready a successor. Xi Jinping just re-established a dictatorship of one with an unlimited term length and will presumably serve as the PRC’s strongman dictator for the rest of his natural life creating new opportunities for a succession crisis or for himself to just fall prone to old age. He wasn’t shy about killing off anyone that could have challenged him during his initial election to Premier and associated offices, we have no reason to think he’ll be any different than any other tinpot dictator in history and kill off anyone that looks like they might be gathering too much influence under his rule or looking just a little too eager to be his successor.
The UK exports 7-8 million tonnes of scrap steel every year, while producing about 5 million tonnes in blast furnaces. There's more than enough feedstock to replace all the UK blast furnace steel production with EAFs and still have some left over.