The Biden administration’s new technology restrictions are already causing disruptions in China as US semiconductor equipment suppliers are telling staff based in the country’s top memory chip maker to leave, according to WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter.
State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. has seen US chip semiconductor equipment companies, including KLA Corp. and Lam Research Corp., halt business activities at the facility. This includes installing new equipment to make advanced chips and overseeing highly technical chip production.
The US suppliers have paused support of already installed equipment at YMTC in recent days and temporarily halted installation of new tools, the people said. The suppliers are also temporarily pulling out their staff based at YMTC, the people said. –WSJ
It’s hard to overemphasize how badly fucked China’s chip industry is with this latest move. Semiconductor equipment not only needs regular maintenance, but extremely specialized expertise when something goes wrong and your yields crash, wizards who can look at a wafer defect chart and determine by experience what’s gone wrong with which tool. Without support and spare parts from the western semiconductor equipment giants, expect yields to start crashing in a matter of months, if not weeks, especially if Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron join the pullout.
I just put in a call to the Applied Materials press office to ask them about this. I’ll let you know if I hear back.
As Peter Zeihan notes, these sanctions screw not only China’s semiconductor industry, but every segment of the high tech assembly chain that depends on them.
Takeaways:
Not only is China now unable to import the equipment to make semiconductors, or the tools to maintain and operate the equipment, or the software that’s necessary to operate the equipment, or any mid or high level chips at all. Now any Americans who want to assist with the Chinese semiconductor industry have to make a choice: you can have your job with China or you can have your citizenship.
I’ve read this elsewhere: “One of the provisions of President Joe Biden’s executive order is that any U.S. citizen or green card holder working in China cannot work in the Chinese semiconductor industry or risk of losing American citizenship.” The thing is, I don’t think such sanctions are constitutional, and I’m pretty sure stripping citizenship over trade regulations with a country we’re not at war with would fail the Ninth Amendment “necessary and proper” test.
Back to Ziehan:
“Within about 48 Hours of the policy being adopted last Friday, every single American citizen who was working in China in the industry either quit, or their companies relocated their entire division so they wouldn’t have to lose their staff.”
“For all practical purposes the Chinese semiconductor industry of everything over Internet of Things level of quality is now dead, and that has a lot more implications than it sounds.”
“Chinese have proven incapable over the last 25 years of advancing sufficiently [to run the technology required] to operate this industry, beyond being able to simply operate the facilities that make the low end chips, and even that had to be managed by foreigners. So there is no indigenous capacity here to pick this up and move on.”
“In terms of industrial follow-on, this doesn’t just mean that the Chinese are never going to be able to make the chips that go into cars or computers, it also means that any industry that is dependent upon the hardware dies.”
China can’t do anything remotely high tech (hypersonic missiles, AI, Great firewall, etc.) without buying chips on the gray market.
“This is a deal killer not just for the industry, but for a modern technocratic system from a technological point of view. China is done.”
What’s China going to do about it? “I would expect this kind of ‘bag of dicks’ diplomacy that has evolved in China to get this hard, and loud, which will probably only encourage the Americans to act more harshly.”
In many ways, the Biden Administration’s approach to China has been a continuation and escalation of the Trump approach: No More Mister Nice Guy, with sanctions and reshoring of American industry.
Short of actual military action, it’s hard to see how China can effectively retaliate against America over these moves. American companies are already leaving, and China has built up so much ill will in various international trade organizations that it’s difficult to see how they could lodge a complaint with one of those and prevail.
Higher inflation, widespread corruption in the federal government, the Bank of England makes Liz Truss blink, and Muslims take exception to Dearborn Public School’s gay agenda. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees. Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”
“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”
The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”
That’s sus.
To get an understanding of how shady this behavior is, consider examples from a few specific agencies. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, the Journal found that “more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.”
Similar corruption plagues the Department of Defense, where, per the investigation, “officials in the office of the secretary or their family members collectively owned between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies, on average, during years the Journal examined. Some owned stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. considered blacklisting the companies.”
Sometimes there’s a major story out there you don’t have time to really pay attention to, and such is the case with the UK “mini-budget”/Bank of England story. Basically, new UK PM Liz Truss and her Chancellor of the Treasury Kwasi Kwarteng went “We’re going to cut taxes despite soaring inflation” and the Bank of England (which evidently said that UK pension funds were hours from collapse last week) went “No you’re not.” Well, Truss just blinked, Kwarteng is out, and now the UK government is going to raise taxes.
Here’s a video explainer of the complexities of the Bank of England intervention in the bond market.
I’ll still trying to wrap my mind around the phrases “pension fund margin call” and “unlimited quantity” of short term repo liquidity reserves.
The Biden administration’s new technology restrictions are already causing disruptions in China as US semiconductor equipment suppliers are telling staff based in the country’s top memory chip maker to leave, according to WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter.
State-owned Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. has seen US chip semiconductor equipment companies, including KLA Corp. and Lam Research Corp., halt business activities at the facility. This includes installing new equipment to make advanced chips and overseeing highly technical chip production.
The US suppliers have paused support of already installed equipment at YMTC in recent days and temporarily halted installation of new tools, the people said. The suppliers are also temporarily pulling out their staff based at YMTC, the people said. –WSJ
It’s hard to overemphasize how badly screwed China’s chip industry is with this latest move. Semiconductor equipment not only needs regular maintenance, but extremely specialized expertise when something goes wrong and your yields crash, wizards who can look at a wafer defect chart and determine by experience what’s gone wrong with which tool. Without support and spare parts from the western semiconductor equipment giants, expect yields to start crashing in a matter of months, if not weeks, especially if Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron join the pullout.
The IRGC may be mobilizing retired servicemembers and other affiliated officers to suppress protests in Tehran on October 15.
Protesters have killed more Iranian security personnel in the current protest wave than in any previous wave in the regime’s history according to regime statistics.
Anti-regime protests occurred in at least 11 cities in seven provinces.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15.
Snip.
Social media accounts that are representing themselves as youth groups organizing and coordinating protests called for countrywide unrest on October 15. Dozens of social media accounts are presenting themselves as provincial components of a broader youth movement aimed at overthrowing the regime. The movement does not appear to have a central headquarters or hierarchy—at least on social media—and some of these groups’ rhetoric is notably disjointed from the others. These accounts claim to have a presence in multiple Iranian cities, including Tehran, Karaj, Neyshabour, Hamedan, Shiraz, and Ahvaz. Some of these accounts called for protests in Khuzestan on October 14, which did materialize in three different cities across the province on that date. Another account claimed that it had activated “sabotage groups” to destabilize the regime on October 14. The Tehran Neighborhood Youth group currently has the most followers and has posted for the longest period of time, possibly suggesting that it inspired copycat accounts based in other cities.
Some of these groups are presenting themselves as having moved from protest organization to coordinating phase one insurgency attacks.
In private, Democratic party officeholders are super racist.
But they’ll arrest parents and take their children if you fail to bow to their transexual madness. “Virginia Democrat Bill Would Criminally Prosecute Parents Who Don’t Affirm Their Kids As Transgender. Previous attempt at the bill was co-sponsored by a senator who served jail time for having sex with a teenager.”
A Virginia Democrat lawmaker says she will introduce legislation to have parents criminally prosecuted if they do not “affirm” their child as transgender. Teachers and social workers would report parents to Child Protective Services under the bill envisioned by state Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D-Fauquier).
Guzman told WJLA that “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”
Guzman, a social worker, went public with her plans to introduce the bill a week after The Daily Wire reported that a National Association Of School Psychologists official named Amy Cannava boasted that she was working with an unnamed state delegate matching Guzman’s description to craft such legislation. “I want to see a kid in a home with food and shelter and insurance and support, but I also don’t want to lose kids to death,” Cannava said, adding that “I will not deny the fact that I have put parents in their place in my office or at school.”
Cannava is also affiliated with a group called the Pride Liberation Project that said it would pick up trans and gay teens who didn’t like their parents, and “work with other supportive adult organizations in the region to find you someone who can provide you a kind and affirming home.”
A similar bill was quietly introduced in 2020 by Guzman and four other Democrats immediately after they took control of the legislature in the 2019 elections. It redefined the term “abused or neglected child” to include one whose parent “inflicts, threatens to create or inflict, or allows to be created or inflicted upon such child a physical or mental injury on the basis of the child’s gender identity or sexual orientation.”
The sole Senate sponsor of the 2020 bill was Joe Morrissey, who served prison time for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after sleeping with his teenage secretary. He accepted a plea deal after initially being indicted on possession of child pornography and other charges.
You know who else hates rolling out the gay agenda to public schools? Muslims.
The only religious people the left is truly scared to offend are Muslims. Criticizing Muslims is completely off the table according to the left’s rules of engagement, so if Muslims are upset about something, the amount of twisting, back-bending, and acrobatics the left will perform in order not to offend them will be something to see.
So when hundreds of Muslim parents, upset at gay porn in the school libraries, showed up to a school board meeting in Dearborn, Mich., and it devolved into shouting and chaos with board members running away and gay protesters being chased to their cars, the fallout was absolutely hilarious. The headline in the Detroit Free Press after the event went haywire was “LGBTQ and Faith Communities Struggle for Unity.” BAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Can you imagine what the headline would have been if it were a Baptist church chasing gay protesters to their cars? “Fascist White Supremacist Book Burners Bash Gay Man in Parking Lot,” or “Rabid Religious Zealots Terrorize Gay Man Defending Right to Read,” or something equally terrible. I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying this disaster.
Enjoy this thread and all the videos in it. I know I did.
Shouting between various factions as groups take over Dearborn public schools board meeting. Board members have left. Unclear if they are coming back or if meeting will restart. Heavy police presence. pic.twitter.com/XIMEqIRR1X
Problem: Too many Germans are voting for a rightwing party the left disapproves of. Solution: Ban it. Thank God banning other political parties in Germany has never had any negative consequences…
Speaking of things that could never possibly have any negative consequences, Balarus dictator and Putin toady Alexander Lukashenko decrees that all price increases are forbidden. Enjoys those coming goods shortages, Belarussians. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Florida Surgeon General releases study showing heightened cardiac death rates for men ages 18-39 after taking the Flu Manchu mRNA vaccine. So Twitter banned him. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The Narrative. (They later reinstated him.)
Ukrainian troops shoot down a cruise missile with a MANPADS.
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families. As I noted last week, Alex Jones is an unreliable loon, but that judgment seems excessive and punitive merely for running his mouth.
The administration of US President Joe Biden next month is to broaden curbs on US exports to China of semiconductors used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools, several people familiar with the matter said.
The US Department of Commerce intends to publish new regulations based on restrictions communicated in letters earlier this year to three US companies — KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Every wafer fabrication plant in the world uses equipment from one of those three companies. Applied Materials and LAM Research (along with Tokyo Electron) have their fingers in almost all areas of chipmaking equipment (PVD, CVD, Etch, etc.), while KLA (formerly KLA-Tencor) dominates the wafer inspection equipment segment. Add ASML in the Netherlands, and those five absolutely dominate the semiconductor equipment market.
The letters, which the companies publicly acknowledged, forbade them from exporting chipmaking equipment to Chinese factories that produce advanced semiconductors with sub-14 nanometer processes unless the sellers obtain commerce department licenses.
This is where things get tricky. SMIC claims they can do 7nm, but everyone outside China doubts they can do it reliably, repeatably and profitably. SMIC announced they’re about to start manufacturing 14nm, and that they can probably do. Practically, they’re the only semiconductor manufacturer in China that can do sub-14nm, as just about everyone at the top of the next biggest semiconductor manufacturer, Tsinghua Unigroup, just got arrested in July.
Without a continued stream of machines, spare parts and technical know-how from those five semiconductor giants, China’s semiconductor industry is doomed. China’s domestic semiconductor equipment industry is essentially garbage, and they’re so far behind in so many areas that they can’t even steal their way to parity. The knowledge gulf is just too vast.
According to World Trade Organization statistics, China’s trade deficit in integrated circuits and electronic components (including Hong Kong’s trade deficit) has almost doubled from the equivalent of $135 billion in 2010 to $240 billion in 2020.
The growing trade deficit in integrated circuits reveals one crucial fact: Achieving technological self-reliance is still a faraway Chinese dream. To keep its exports growing, China has no other way but to keep importing advanced chips to assemble into consumer goods with high-tech intensity (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and the like).
Although China (including Hong Kong) is also the largest exporter of semiconductor chips in the world, less than 7% of chips produced in China were made by Chinese semiconductor companies in 2021.
More than 90% of chips produced in China are made by foreign firms. In other words, China’s exports of semiconductor chips are overwhelmingly dominated by foreign companies.
Its inferior level of technology is the main reason for China’s chip reliance on foreign firms. While Chinese firms are stuck with advancing toward 7nm chips, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung are progressing towards mass production of 3nm chips this year. Intel plans to take over TSMC’s leading role in semiconductor technology by 2025.
The competition among a few tech giants in the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea is clear, and the Chinese firms are not likely to jump into the global technology competition in the semiconductor industry anytime soon.
The U.S. restrictions on exporting chipmaking equipment to China’s largest semiconductor firm, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., have not only deterred China’s technological advancement, but also exposed the fundamental mismanagement problems inside China’s semiconductor industry.
Xi might not have noticed his industry’s poor performance had China been able to continue to produce chips with foreign equipment.
Some parts about the Tsinghua scandal snipped.
Several Taiwanese executives leaving China’s semiconductor industry last year is another major setback in the development of China’s semiconductor industry.
China not only spent tremendously on building chip plants and purchasing expansive equipment, but also on recruiting talent from overseas. Over the past few years, China recruited more than 3,000 skilled workers from Taiwan to work in China’s semiconductor industry.
China amassed enormous capital, talent, and foreign equipment, but the problem is with governance. Xi’s absolute authority encouraged a rush into China’s semiconductor industry. Moreover, the extraordinary integration of the public and private sectors in China has twisted industrial development toward short-term profit-making, instead of long-term accumulation of manufacturing strength and technological improvement.
Xi’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy has further overshadowed the outlook of its semiconductor industry. China’s success relies on close partnerships with various suppliers and customers in different countries across the globe. Alienating them on the geopolitical front only undermines those relationships.
The U.S. ban on exporting chipmaking machines to China was the straw that broke the Chinese semiconductor industry’s back.
On top of that, the CHIPS and Science Act just signed into law bans semiconductor companies receiving U.S. government subsidies from investing in China for the next 10 years. There are major loopholes in that prohibition, but if Congress can manage to keep the administration’s feet to the fire—including by tightening the legal restrictions—it could have a major impact on China’s tech development.
In addition, the U.S. has extended the export restriction to 14 nm chipmaking machines to the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. and other foreign chipmakers in China. A specific electronics design automation software for making advanced chips is also banned from exportation to China.
Without foreign investment and inputs, China is only likely to deepen its reliance on importing advanced chips from overseas.
Peter Zeihan notes (correctly) that China’s semiconductor industry has been singularly unable to fab advanced chips on their own.
Not to mention that fraud still abounds. Chinese CPU semiconductor startup Quillion Technology closed up shop three months after raising $89 million.
$89 million is probably enough to get you to tape-out for a fabless semiconductor house designing a smaller chip (or maybe even a low-power ARM-based CPUs for embedded markets), but it’s a woefully small sum for a real cutting-edge CPU company, and laughable if they intended to be an integrated design manufacturer fabbing their own chips, where building even a trailing edge fab starts in the billions.
More on that topic:
Takeaways:
“Money seems to have a strong corruptive power over CCP officials that they can’t resist. Like China’s real estate industry, China’s semiconductor industry is also plagued with corruption, over-construction, and highly leveraged capital maneuvers.”
She goes over the history of the Chinese “Big Fund” for semiconductors I covered here, and later talks about the indictments.
“The state-run Semiconductor Investment Fund was used more as an instrument to speculate in stocks than an institution for conducting basic R&D. The government-backed fund, aka the “Big Fund,” has investments in 2,793 entities within three layers of ownership.” Very few of them have the word “semiconductor” in their names. (Like I said before, shell games all the way down.)
From 1984 to 1990, the Ministry of Electronics Industry delegated the management of the vast majority of state-owned electronics enterprises to local provincial and municipal governments. While these state-owned enterprises (SOEs) obtained more autonomy, something strange happened. These companies imported outdated integrated circuit production lines that had no commercial value. The wasteful projects cost money, but people used the opportunities to take foreign trips, receive kickbacks, and send their children abroad. And this happened on a large scale.
Pretty much classic ChiCom behavior.
China’s high-tech industry, like its financial industry, is dominated by powerful CCP families, and the Jiang Zemin family is one of them. In 1999, Jiang Zemin gave his oldest son, Jiang Mianheng, the reins of China’s “autonomous chip development.” As vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and president of the Shanghai branch for many years, the junior Jiang has long held the turf of China’s science and technology sector. He is also personally involved in the semiconductor business. His Shanghai Lianhe investment has holdings of Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Company.
Classic story:
Chen Jin, a former junior test engineer at Motorola, joined Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2001 after returning to China.
He was given the responsibility to develop the “Hanxin” chip, an important part of the state-run high-tech development program known as the “863 Program.” In just three years, Chen obtained 100 million in R&D funding and applied for 12 national patents. On Feb. 26, 2003, Chen’s team officially released the “Hanxin 1” chip. The Shanghai Municipal Government, the Ministry of Information Industry, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences all backed his work. The expert panel declared the “Hanxin 1” and its related design and application development platform as being the first of its kind in China and achieving an important milestone in the history of China’s chip development. Subsequently, Hanxin 2, 3, 4 and 5 chips were launched, all of which were claimed to have reached an advanced level globally. The Hanxin series of chips even entered the General Equipment Procurement Department of the Chinese military. However, 3 years later, on Jan. 17, 2006, “Hanxin 1” was revealed to be completely fake. Chen downloaded a Motorola chip source code through a former Motorola colleague. Then he secretly bought a batch of Motorola dsp56800 series chips, paid a peasant to scrape the original Motorola logo with sandpaper, and asked a local Shanghai print shop to print the “Hanxin” logo on it.
China correctly identified semiconductors and semiconductor equipment as key technologies for truly becoming the world’s preeminent technological manufacturing giant. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us), the CCP’s endemic culture of corruption and their top-down command economy are antithetical to the onrush of capitalist technological innovation that powers Moore’s Law.
Greetings, and welcome to a special Monday LinkSwarm! Still getting over a bad cold, but both the wet cough and fatigue have improved thanks to lets of bed rest.
Also on the mend: Salman Rushdie, who is reportedly off the ventilator and able to talk and joke.
Stories of unparalleled depravity: “Metro Atlanta couple charged with using adopted kids to make child porn.” I see they left out the word “gay” before couple.
Walton County couple has been arrested and are facing child sex crime charges for acts deputies say they committed against their adopted children.
Last month, the Walton County Sheriff’s Office raided a home in unincorporated Loganville where they believed a man was downloading child pornography. When interviewing him, the suspect admitted to collecting child porn and identified a second suspect in Oxford.
The suspect told deputies that the other suspect was making the child porn with at least one child who lived in his home. The first suspect’s identity has not been released.
Deputies were able to get arrest warrants for both adult men living in the home, William Dale Zulock, 32, and Zachary Jacoby Zulock, 35.
Walton County’s Division of Family and Child Services joined deputies in responding to the home to help protect the two children in the home.
After making sure the children were safe, investigators found evidence that the couple, who were the adoptive fathers of the pair of brothers living there, were recording themselves committing sexually abusive acts against the children.
"Waiting for pizza"
Zachary J. Zulock, accused of sexually abusing his adopted boys for child porn, has a long social media history of support for liberal causes. He was a big fan of #BLM, radical trans pride & the Democrat Party. One of his most used hashtags was "love is love" pic.twitter.com/Mz6cS36LOp
Speaking of the Democratic Media Complex doing it’s best to try to avoid the existence of pedophiles among its ranks, they really don’t like you using the word groomer. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
At the end of July, the Tavistock gender clinic in the United Kingdom was closed down by the National Health Service after a review of the clinic’s practices found that its “clinical approach and overall service design has not been subject to some of the normal quality controls that are typically applied when new or innovative treatments are introduced.”
In a letter addressed to the NHS, Dr. Hillary Cass, who conducted the review, wrote that other providers had “not developed the skills and competencies” necessary to provide the right amount of support to children “with lesser degrees of gender incongruence who may not wish to pursue specialist medical intervention.” Cass acknowledged that there are unanswered questions about the use of puberty blockers as a treatment for children questioning their own gender identity and suggested that much more evidence will need to be collected before she draws a conclusion on their value in these contexts.
Puberty blockers were initially developed as a treatment for precocious puberty in young children, but have since been repurposed and advertised by transgender activists as a way to hit the “pause” button and buy time for kids who think they may have been born in the “wrong body.” A sizable-but-marginalized group of doctors has long warned that the consequences of puberty-blocker use as a part of the transition process are unclear, and amount to an affirmative and significant step toward transitioning, rather than a “pause.”
The closure of Tavistock in July came as welcome news to those of us worried about the skyrocketing number of children suffering from gender dysphoria and being treated as though it were a physical malady. Then, yesterday, it was reported that a group of families in the U.K. is suing the NHS arm affiliated with Tavistock for the effects that its dogmatic approach to the treatment of youth — described by Cass as “an unquestioning affirmative approach” — had on their own lives.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs told Sky News that he believes that misdiagnoses have affected “potentially hundreds of young adults who have been affected by failings in care over the past decade at the Tavistock Centre.” It is, first and foremost, a tragedy that this has happened, but it is undoubtedly encouraging to see the mistreated join together not just to collect damages, but to tell their stories.
Moreover, the politicians in the country’s Conservative Party are showing signs that they may be willing to push back on the madness. Attorney General Suella Braverman said earlier this week that transgender theory should not be taught in schools. Penny Mordaunt, a near-finalist in the Tory leadership contest, was sunk in part because of her lack of spine on the issue.
Across the U.K., then, politicians, doctors, and activists are all beginning to recognize that the unquestioningly affirmative model of care for gender-dysphoric children is scientifically unsound, morally dangerous, and the result of, more than anything else, social and political dogma.
And the U.K. is not the first European country to begin to recognize its past mistakes. In Sweden, the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones have been almost entirely ruled out for minors as of this year. Finland, meanwhile, has determined that “the initiation of hormonal interventions that alter sex characteristics may be considered before the person is 18 years of age only if it can be ascertained that their identity as the other sex is of a permanent nature and causes severe dysphoria” and “the young person is able to understand the significance of irreversible treatments and the benefits and disadvantages associated with lifelong hormone therapy, and that no contraindications are present.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s son has apparently joined the list of political offspring who magically keep landing jobs as “consultants” overseas. The Daily Mail reports:
Nancy Pelosi’s son is the second largest investor in a $22 million Chinese company whose senior executive was arrested in a fraud investigation, DailyMail.com can reveal, raising questions about his secretive visit to Taiwan with his mother.
As well as investing, Paul Pelosi Jr, 53, also worked for the telecoms company, Borqs Technologies, in a board or consultancy role, Securities and Exchange Commission documents show.
Wow, this feels like déjà vu all over again. Just substitute the name “Hunter Biden” for “Paul Pelosi Jr.” and the story would still sound credible.
For his “consultancy,” Pelosi was given 700,000 shares of stock in the company. At one time he was the second-largest shareholder in the Beijing-based firm, although it’s unclear if that’s still the case today. Either way, it must be nice. Borqs is a telecoms company specializing in the “Internet of Things” products and is “listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange with a current market capitalization of $22 million,” according to the Mail.
Hunter Biden seems to have a better nose for profitable graft corridors than Pelosi’s get, since a $22 market cap is essentially nothing in the IoT space…
The poll from the Democratic-aligned Winning Jobs Narrative Project, which surveyed 60,000 voters across 17 states, found that “making villains of corporations” and embracing “culture war topics like abortion” are ineffective strategies for Democrats. Liberals would attract more voters, in fact, if they sounded like conservatives—talking about “respect for work” and placing “government in a supporting rather than primary role.”
Voters prefer Republicans’ handling of the economy, which remains “the top issue of the coming election,” the poll found. Americans don’t believe President Joe Biden’s claims that “this has been the fastest recovery in 40 years,” instead “looking at the worst inflation in the same period and record gas prices.”
Another day, another Democratic politician refusing to pay his tax bill. “Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman Matthew Cartwright is once again in trouble for being delinquent on his property taxes. Cartwright and his wife share a condo in Washington and tax records indicate that they owed penalties and interest from 2021 due to being late in paying their taxes.”(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Remember Tsinghua Unigroup, a wholly owned business unit of Tsinghua University and itself owner of Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) (Previously mentioned here.) Well, it turns out that a bunch of their top executives just got arrested:
The video shows a picture of six semiconductor executives, all of whom have reportedly been arrested:
Dia Shijing, co-president of Tsinghua Unigroup
Lu Jun, president of Huaxin Investment
Zhao Weiguo, chairman of Tsinghua Unigroup
Ding Wenwu, president of National IC Industry Investment Fund,
Zhang Yadong, president of Tsinghua Unigroup
Qi Lian, another co-president of Tsinghua Unigroup
How a company runs with three presidents I couldn’t tell you. Must be a Chinese thing.
“In the past few days, several senior executives of the organization behind the semiconductor industry in Mainland china have been taken away by the CCP Central Commission for Discipline, Inspection and Investigation.” Given my knowledge of communist nomenclature, I strongly suspect that this is not the sort of organization you want to enfold you in their tender mercies.
“In 2014, the General Office of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the official establishment of the National Integrated Circuit industry investment Fund Company Limited [ICF], also known as the National Big Fund or big fund.” Probably best to think of them like USA’s SMEATECH, but with a whole lot more opportunities for graft.
Together two rounds of government funding added up to 320RMB, or about $47.4 billion, which should have driven additional public/private capital investment of some $240 billion divided up between China’s Ministry of Finance and large central Chinese enterprises, most of which are also owned by the state. Even for the semiconductor industry, that’s a lot of cheddar.
By some estimates, $100 billion of that had already been spent by 2021.
“The two phases of investment cover all aspects of integrated circuits (ICs), including IC manufacturing IC design, packaging and testing semiconductor materials and equipment, and industry ecological construction.”
ICF provides overall direction and management, while Huaxin Investment provides management of the second phase of fund investment.
“Eight years have passed, but high-end Chinese chips haven’t yet been produced, and the management of the state level chip industry has collapsed.” Reading between the lines, this means TSMC is still kicking their ass. If that’s the standard, then it’s a bit unfair because every other semiconductor manufacturer in the world is in the same boat.
On July 28, Xiao Yaqing, head of MIIT, fell from power. “Xiao was the spearhead of the Chinese communist party’s attempt to build a world-class chip industry, and eliminate its dependence on the US.” He supposedly tried to slit his wrists.
“The very next day, Xi Jinping immediately appointed a replacement a longtime aerospace official to take over MIIT.” Yeah, that’s really going to help your semiconductor goals.
“On July 15, Lu Jun, former deputy director of the China Development Bank Development Fund Management Department, was investigated Lu Jun was involved in many investment operations of the Big Fund, of which he was the sole manager. He was also former president of Huaxin.
Yang Zhengfan, another Huaxin executive, was also taken away.
Also arrested: Wang Wenzhong of Hongtai Fund and Gao Songtao, both involved with Huaxin and the Big Fund. And that’s probably not all. Evidently a whole network of semiconductor executives are being rounded up.
Dia Shijing of Tsinghua Unigroup was among those reported arrested, but Tsinghua Unigroup is saying “Nah, everything’s good here! Go about your business, citizens!”
In July 2021, Tsinghua Unigroup announced that it was overwhelmed by 200 billion RMB of debt and filed for bankruptcy because it couldn’t pay its bonds at maturity. Keep in mind that Tsinghua Unigroup, partially owned by Tsinghua University, is itself owner of YMTC, which is (I think) China’s biggest domestic memory chip manufacturer. Tsinghua/YMTC was previously one of China’s biggest semiconductor manufacturing success stories, second only to SMIC, and supposedly “the largest integrated circuit company in China.” They have actual working fabs up and running. And they’re still evidently a money-losing failure.
Tsinghua Unigroup has grown through mergers and acquisitions, buying up over 20 companies. This strategy is not unknown among western companies, as GlobalFoundries and NXP are both the results of a similar strategy. But neither of those companies is on the cutting edge.
“Tsinghua Unigroup has been using short-term loans rolling over to create long-term loans. These made the group’s cumulative liabilities too large and its financing structure unbalanced.” Yeah, I bet. “Get big quick” worked for a few doctcom era mega-success stories, but I don’t think it works in semiconductors.
Zhao Weiguo once boasted he was going to buy TSMC. Also, I’m going to kick Shaq’s butt in the slam dunk contest just as soon as I take time off from dating all these supermodels.
China Development Bank extended Tsinghua Unigroup 100 RMB credit between 2016 and 2020. Still a lot of cheddar.
I’m skipping over a whole lot of blow-by-blow “who owns what” in the corporate structure. Imagine if Spectre, the Gotti Family, and the Bank of England all had shares in Amway.
“Due to debt, Tsinghua Unigroup abandoned its plan to build DRAM memory chip manufacturing plants in Chongqing and Chengdu in southwest China earlier this year.” I bet that left a lot of pissed-off local commissars holding the bag.
“When the chip industry becomes a national strategy, but with no real oversight, it becomes a disaster zone of corruption, and a big cake for those in the circle to get rich for themselves.” True of any industry anywhere, but especially true of China, and especially true of semiconductors, where “fake it until you make it” isn’t an option if you’re actually building fabs.
“China cannot make high-end chips to this day.” True.
“American chip technology is far ahead of the world.” Also true, though with caveats. For semiconductor manufacturing, TSMC is on the cutting edge, with Intel and Samsung within striking distance. For semiconductor leaders, two American companies (Applied Materials and Lam Research) dominate a fair number of technologies, but Tokyo Electron is competitive in many of them, and ASML dominates the stepper market.
Skipping over the bits where China stole US (and other) tech, which should be familiar by now.
Enter the Trump Administration, “blacklisting and embargoing more than 600 Chinese high-tech companies and high-end manufacturing companies, as well as universities and research institutions.” Pissing off your biggest trade partner is generally not a great plan.
Result: Bottlenecks in China’s supply chains.
EDA makes software to design chips, and China has no real substitute.
Semiconductors are still a big item in China most recent Five-Year Plan (and yes, the Chicoms still use Five Year Plans, just like Mama Stalin used to make).
“The outside world has not seen the investment of the Big Fund break any bottleneck. However, the earthquake happening in the industry has directly shown people that there is a deep corruption in the Chinese chip industry.” Why should it be different than any other Chinese industry?
And just who is going to step up to those jobs running China’s increasingly-unlikely-to-succeed semiconductor moonshot, given that the last batch got rounded up by the Chinese Inquisition?
Interesting bit of history: Previous CCP head Jiang Zemin put his own son Jiang Mianheng in charge of developing China’s semiconductor industry, and also managed to make the country even more corrupt than it already was. And here we are.
It’s ironic that just as Washington was passing a giant graft bucket of semiconductor subsidies because China was supposedly kicking our ass, China itself was sacking the very people presiding over China’s own bucket of graft for not catching up to the west. The truth is somewhere between.
China was never going to catch up to western semiconductors because the gap was too large and you need a crazy swarm of free market capitalist entrepreneurs risking private money to eek out important incremental process tweeks to keep Moore’s Law going. China was never going to have that as long as they suffered under Communist rule. And a huge percentage the government money that was sloshed into semiconductors was indeed swallowed up by graft and diversion of funds. But all that money does appear to have helped China close the gap some. Granted, a lot of that was via systematic IP property theft, but it got them into the game.
The House on Thursday passed the bipartisan Chips and Science Act, which aims to increase domestic production of computer chips to allow the U.S. to become more competitive against China in the global technology market.
The bill passed the House in a 243-187 vote one day after passing the Senate in a 64-33 vote. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Joe Biden.
Biden called the passage of the bill on Thursday “exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now.”
“Today, the House passed a bill that will make cars cheaper, appliances cheaper, and computers cheaper,” Biden said. “It will lower the costs of every day goods. And, it will create high-paying manufacturing jobs across the country and strengthen U.S. leadership in the industries of the future at the same time.”
Twenty-four Republicans voted to pass the measure, despite Republican leadership making a last minute push to discourage GOP lawmakers from supporting the bill. GOP leaders sought to keep the bill from passing after news broke on Wednesday that Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) had reached a deal with Democratic leaders on a nearly half-a-trillion dollar spending package targeting energy and climate, health care, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
Snip.
The measure includes $39 billion to “build, expand, or modernize domestic facilities and equipment” for semiconductors, $2 billion to specifically manufacture semiconductors and $11 billion for Department of Commerce research and development.
“Research and development” is no doubt going to be a rich conduit of graft to Democratic Party cronies having nothing to do with semiconductors.
For reference, $29 billion is probably just enough to build two state-of-the-art 300mm chip fabrication plants.
As I’ve argued before, the reasoning behind the bill is specious and it won’t result in a single new chip being fabbed in the next two years.
The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. We (and Taiwan, and South Korea) are kicking China’s ass in semiconductors.
The chips China make are generally either: A.) Cheap, or B.) intended for their internal market. No one sends cutting edge chips to be fabbed in China because they don’t have the tech to do it and everyone know they’ll steal your designs and crank out knock-offs on the sly whenever possible. China’s semiconductor industry is mostly smoke and mirrors all the way down.
Semiconductor subsidies have all the hallmarks of a classic Washington boondoggle: The wrong action at the wrong time for the wrong problem.
Second, the shortage wasn’t the result of a “chip shortage,” it was the result of “a lack of available foundry wafer starts.” Automakers cancelled their orders for display drivers when it looked like Flu Manchu lockdowns were going to depress the economy for a while, and were caught off-guard by the V-shaped recovery under Trump, and got sent to the back of the line to get their product fabbed after they changed their mind. Remember, just about all foundries are running flat-out 24/7/365, pausing only to switch to different chips for different customers. There’s no slack in the system, and those wafer starts are already spoken for (and possibly paid for) by other customers well in advance. Just as nine woman can’t give birth to a fully grown baby in one month, you can’t just “make chips quicker” in an existing fab.
Third, remember that cutting edge semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. Samsung’s planned fab in Taylor, Texas is going to cost $17 billion.
Fourth, nothing about these subsidies will address the real problem with American semiconductors, which is that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
Could these subsidies boost American semiconductor manufacturing 2-3 years from now? Possibly. Knowing the cycling nature of the industry and the tendency of government subsidies to backfire, new/upgraded fab lines might come online just as the industry is experiencing a glut.
But the real key to restoring America to the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing is the already-in-progress inshoring of cutting edge foreign owned fabs from Samsung and TSMC, and having American semiconductor manufacturers like Intel and GlobalFoundries master sub-10nm chip fabrication processes, something they have heretofore been unable to do. (Intel is closer, having been on the cutting edge until they lost their way, while GlobalFoundries stopped all development on their 7nm node because they couldn’t find a way to make the investment pay off.)
Throwing buckets of budget-busting borrowed taxpayer money around isn’t going to make any of those things happen any faster.
Enough links have filtered into the semiconductor bucket to be worth doing a roundup. This one touches on China and the corruption of our political elites.
The congressional Democrats’ attempt to throw money at the problem is going nowhere fast.
The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.
Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.
In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.
Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.
“This investment that they’re making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.
Notes:
IBM doesn’t own any fabs any more, having sold them all to GlobalFoundries.
Intel runs a huge number of very profitable fabs (troubles with their sub-10nm process yields notwithstanding) and doesn’t need federal subsidies.
Microsoft doesn’t own any fabs and is deeply unlikely to build any; their flagship Xbox Series X uses a custom AMD Zen 2 fabbed by TSMC as its CPU.
Analog Devices is an Integrated Device Manufacturer that owns several fabs with pretty old technology; they don’t have any 300mm fabs. They closed a small fab in Milpitas they got from their acquisition of Linear Technology last year. Designing analog chips is its own black art, and not everything that applies to shrinking digital circuits applies to the analog realm.
Amazon has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, but they do have a chip design division to support Amazon Web Services, and recently designed a cloud computing chip. They work closely with AMD (fabbed at TSMC), Intel (own their own fabs) and Nvidia (another fabless design house that also gets their chips fabbed at TSMC).
Alphabet AKA Google has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, though they do have a lot of AI chip design work going on.
GlobalWafers isn’t a semiconductor manufacturer, it’s a silicon wafer manufacturer. Making such wafers (the substrates upon which semiconductor fabrication depends) has its own challenges, but they are several orders less difficult than cutting edge chip fabrication. Maybe I’m quite far out of the loop, but I’m deeply suspicious that GlobalWafers planned wafer plant in Sherman, Texas will cost $5 billion. That’s a relatively piddling sum for a new semiconductor fab, but extremely expensive for a wafer factory. This makes me suspect a subsidy grab is afoot.
So of the companies mentioned, Intel could suck up government funding to build a fab they were going to build anyway, I’m sure Analog Devices would build a fab with government money, but chances of them running an under 10nm process in said theoretical fab is extremely slim, none of the other mentioned copies are going to build a fab, and none of that government money is going to alleviate the main problem that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
$250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.
So who expects to earn immediate gains from the taxpayers subsidizing semiconductors? Would you believe Nancy Pelosi?
I bet you would.
This past week it hit the terminal that House Speaker Pelosi was doing a little portfolio re-jiggering, including exercising $8 million of call options in Nvidia and selling Apple and Visa calls. The data was per CongressTrading.com and was reported on by Bloomberg.
The Nvidia LEAPS were bought June 3, 2021 with $100 strikes, set to expire June 17, 2022 and the position appeared to be disclosed on Thursday morning for the first time. $8 million trades seem a little odd for members of Congress to begin with, but who are we to judge?
But then, what did Speaker Pelosi do just hours after disclosing the trade, on Friday?
She threw her weight behind a stalled $50 billion CHIPS PLUS bill that “would provide $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing grants and investment tax credits for the chip industry.”
We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there’s a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built – and they won’t be building any more.
Not strictly true. Remember, Bosch just finished building a 65nm fab.
As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies.
Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC’s revenue come from outdated processes.
That’s because UMC has fallen woefully far behind TSMC, and no one trusts them because they let Chinese spies walk out the door with other company’s IP. SMIC is on Mainland China, sucks even more, and is trusted even less.
Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn’t the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.
This is why TSMC’s plan to expand production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by 50% is focused on 28nm-capable fabs. As the final (viable) generation of TSMC’s classic, pre-FinFET manufacturing processes, 28nm is being positioned as the new sweet spot for producing simple, low-cost chips. And, in an effort to consolidate production of these chips around fewer and more widely available/expandable production lines, TSMC would like to get customers using old nodes on to the 28nm generation.
“We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” said Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.”
This video asks whether China can produce their own chips:
Obviously, they already produce some of their own chips, but the video covers most of the issues China has with fabbing more complex chips that I’ve already discussed here and here. They’re still dependent on the same three leading fab companies (TSMC, Intel and Samsung) everyone else is for sub 10nm feature chips, and are overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign talent and foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML and Applied Materials.
Speaking of TSMC and Intel, India would really like them to build fabs there. The problem is, despite a whole lot of technical talent there, it doesn’t have a terribly large domestic electronics manufacturing base.
The economy is contracting (thanks Biden), attacks and counterattacks in eastern Ukraine, regulation madness, and something from the 1875 crime blotter in 2022. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Note: Today’s LinkSwarm will be a bit shorter than usual because: A.) I’m off Twitter for the time being, so I’m not grabbing links there, and B.) I took the day off from work and I’m just feeling lazy.
Sure, the Biden Administration sucks on basic competence when it comes to the American economy, but to balance that, they also suck on regulation.
The Biden Administration capped off its first full year in office with more than $201 billion in regulatory costs and 131 million hours in new annual paperwork, putting it far ahead of the two immediately preceding administrations’ respective first years by a wide margin.
Actions related to vehicle emissions and COVID-19 safety measures provided the vast majority of these administrative burdens.
Additionally, in terms of executive orders issued during the first year of an administration, the 77 put forth by President Biden represent the highest number since the Ford Administration.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, and Russian forces seem to be making a slow, grinding advance on the strategic city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. “Moscow has poured thousands of troops into its assault on Severodonetsk and its sister city of Lysychansk. The twin cities, straddling the Siverskyi Donets river, have been in Russian sights for months. They currently comprise the lone Ukrainian redoubt in the Luhansk oblast.” Taking Lysychansk will require Russians to cross the Donets, previous attempts at which have been disasterous for them.
Russia has succeeded in taking Lyman, but Ukraine has launched counterattacks against the Russian forces encircling Severodonetsk.
The Texas Association of School Boards is set to leave Its parent organization, the National School Board Association, according to records obtained by Texas Scorecard.
The National School Boards Association made headlines last year following their letter to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting federal intervention in local school board meetings and referring to concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.”
It has since been revealed that the NSBA leadership urged the Biden Administration to deploy military forces in an effort to prevent parents from attending school board meetings.
Since then, parents have been calling on the state organization—the Texas Association of School Boards—to leave the organization, as more than 20 states already have.
“Professor Fired Over Tweets Questioning BLM Movement Gets Reinstated, Awarded Back Pay After Arbitrator Finds In His Favor.” “An arbitrator has ruled that a University of Central Florida professor, Charles Negy, has to be reinstated.”
Who’s been funding the attacks on Elon Musk following his Twitter bid? Would you believe Bill Gates? Of course you would. “Would you believe what perfidy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is up to this week?” Why yes, I would. The biggest difference is that Blofeld has better fashion sense and never tried to inflict Microsoft Bob on the world…
I’ll take headlines from 1875 for $400: “Loving County judge arrested for cattle theft….Loving County Judge Skeet Jones is accused of livestock theft and organized criminal activity.”
Greetings, and welcome to Friday the 13th LinkSwarm! Inflation keeps soaring, diesel and baby formula shortages wrack the nation, and too many creepy transexual pedophiles pop up in the news.
The East Coast of the U.S. is reporting its lowest seasonal diesel inventory on record. And some trucking companies appear spooked.
The East Coast typically stores around 62 million barrels of diesel during the month of May, according to Department of Energy data. But as of last Friday, that region of the U.S. is reporting under 52 million barrels.
The sharp increase of diesel prices has been a major stressor in America’s $800 billion trucking industry since the beginning of 2022. According to DOE figures, the price per gallon of diesel has reached record highs — a whopping $5.62 per gallon. It’s even higher on the East Coast at $5.90, up 63% from the beginning of this year.
When relief is coming isn’t yet clear, and experts say higher prices are the only way to attract more diesel into the Northeast.
There is a clear dividing line between American households with newborns and those without, and you can see it in which people have been talking about, and worrying about, a nationwide infant formula shortage for months and which people just heard about the problem recently. Target, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens are all limiting how much infant and toddler formula customers can purchase per visit. So how did the U.S. — the wealthiest, most advanced, and most prosperous nation on the planet — end up in a situation where so many parents are worrying about feeding their youngest children?
Most reporting on the infant-formula shortage points the finger at Abbott Laboratories, which instituted a February recall of powder formulas, including Similac, Alimentum, and EleCare, manufactured in its Sturgis, Mich., facility. The recall — which the company emphasizes was voluntary — came after four consumer complaints of Cronobacter sakazakii (a.k.a. Salmonella Newport) in infants who had consumed powdered formula manufactured in the Sturgis plant. Cronobacter germs can cause sepsis, a dangerous blood infection, or meningitis, which swells the protective linings surrounding the brain and spinal cord. Those infected with Salmonella bacteria develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps twelve to 72 hours after infection, and infants are more severely affected than adults.
Abbott Laboratories emphasized that no product it distributed to consumers has tested positive for the presence of either of these bacteria, but that during testing in the Sturgis facility, the company found evidence of Cronobacter sakazakii in areas of the plant where products would not come in contact with it. As a precaution, it recalled all formula manufactured in this facility with an expiration of April 1, 2022, or later. No Abbott liquid formulas are included in the recall, nor are powder formulas or nutrition products manufactured at other Abbott facilities.
Here, it’s worth noting that the supply chain for infant formula was strained well before Abbott’s recall. According to the data-research firm Datasembly, the percentage of stores nationwide at which formula was out of stock surpassed double digits way back in July 2021, and by January 2022, it had hit 23 percent.
According to Datasembly, infant formula is now out-of-stock in 40 percent of stores nationwide. Moreover, in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Texas, and Tennessee, more than half of baby formula was completely sold out during the week starting April 24. In another 26 states, between 40 and 50 percent of infant-formula supplies were sold out.
Unspeakable depravity: “Trans porn company owners sentenced for forcing 7-year-old girl into sexual exploitation…One of these members, Marina Volz, a biological male who identifies as a woman, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for forcing ‘her’ 7-year-old daughter to participate in sexual acts.”
Speaking of Democrats supporting child rapists: “Woke L.A. DA George Gascon’s Pet Transgender Child Rapist Is Now Facing a Murder Charge….child rapist, “Hannah” Tubbs, who gamed the system and magically became a ‘woman’ so he could serve his sentence in a female juvenile prison and do easier time with a chance of getting out early.”
Still more elite institutions parading their transexual pro-pedophilia positions: “Child sex abuse center hires professor who faced backlash over pedophile comments…[Allyn Walker], an academic who resigned from a Virginia university after saying it wasn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to kids has been hired by a Johns Hopkins University center aimed at preventing child sexual abuse.”
The NBA: Pulls All-Star Game out of Charlotte because it thinks a North Carolina bathroom bill discriminated against transsexuals. Also the NBA: To stage a game in the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is punishable by death.
“EV Automaker Hailed As The ‘Next Tesla’ Is Hemorrhaging Cash And Investors…Start-up electric vehicle (EV) maker Rivian Automotive’s stock [fell] 18.72% to $23.40 per share on Monday, a whopping 87% decline from its November peak of $179.47 a share.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Writer who checks all the proper boxes sells a first novel that turns out to be plagiarized. So she publishes an apology. Which turns out to also be plagiarized. The frogurt is also cursed. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
They’re making a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, perhaps the funniest movie ever made, featuring the original principles. My enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that chances are extremely high it will suck.
This is going to be pretty esoteric for many of my readers, but in previous semiconductor posts covering ASML, some commenters have suggested that fabs can do multi-patterning for smaller nodes rather than having to use ASML’s extreme ultraviolet stepper. The following video explains why, below a certain threshold, no, you really can’t.
I’m not going to summarize every point, but the largest takeaway is that multi-patterning is computationally prohibitive. Double-patterning splits a single mask into two masks, each of which only create half of the mask pattern on the die. Double-patterning was fine for a while, but triple patterning and self-aligned double-patterning start making finding optimal solutions to the mask splitting problem exponentially more difficult.
Take a square. A square has four nodes in it. With double patterning, each of the two masks handle opposing sides of the square. And with this four-node shape, there are two double patterning options available for coloring. The EDA software thus has to check through them for design rule violations and whatnot. With triple patterning, the number of variations explodes exponentially. For that same square four node structure, triple patterning has 18 variations rather than just two with double patterning. A five node structure, 30. And so on. A semiconductor design can have hundreds of different nodes and design variations. The software needs to check through at least a good portion of these. This problem is not solvable in polynomial time. In other words, for you computer science nerds out there, it is an NP complete problem.
And then there’s the cost. “Depending on whose cost model you consult, [10nm]’s triple patterning makes its lithography module 3.85x higher than [28nm].” And the non-EUV 7nm node required triple-patterning and something called “self-aligned quadruple patterning.” And on Intel: “Brian Krzanich has said that in certain cases the company needs to use quad (4x), penta (5x), or hexa (6x) patterning for select features, as they need to expose the wafer up to six times to “draw” one feature. I am not super surprised that it wouldn’t yield. No wonder GlobalFoundries ditched their 7nm node.”
And this summary glosses over big differences between different fab technologies on different companies. TSMC’s 7nm isn’t the same as Intel’s 7nm.
Anyway, all this goes a long way to explain: Multi-patterning is much more painful than simply ponying up the cost for an ASML EUV stepper. And if you want to do 6nm, you have to use EUV.
(@NOELreports) 
(@MrAndyNgo) 
