EU Carmakers 'Days Away' From Halting Work as Chip War With China Escalates (theguardian.com) 116
Carmakers in the EU are "days away" from closing production lines, the industry has warned, as a crisis over computer chip supplies from China escalates. From a report: The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) issued an urgent warning on Wednesday saying its members, which include BMW, Fiat, Peugeot and Volkswagen, were now working on "reserve stocks but supplies are dwindling."
"Assembly line stoppages might only be days away. We urge all involved to redouble their efforts to find a diplomatic way out of this critical situation," said its director general, Sigrid de Vries. Another ACEA member, Mercedes, is now searching globally for alternative sources of the crucial semiconductors, according to its chief executive, Ola Kallenius. The chip shortage is also causing problems in Japan, where Nissan's chief performance officer, Guillaume Cartier, told reporters at a car show in Tokyo that the company was only "OK to the first week of November" in terms of supply.
"Assembly line stoppages might only be days away. We urge all involved to redouble their efforts to find a diplomatic way out of this critical situation," said its director general, Sigrid de Vries. Another ACEA member, Mercedes, is now searching globally for alternative sources of the crucial semiconductors, according to its chief executive, Ola Kallenius. The chip shortage is also causing problems in Japan, where Nissan's chief performance officer, Guillaume Cartier, told reporters at a car show in Tokyo that the company was only "OK to the first week of November" in terms of supply.
I have an idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Our ancient ancestors had a means of building cars without computer chips. I wonder if this lost technology can be re-discovered, and greatly alleviate these economic woes.
Re:I have an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Our ancestors also built cars without anti-lock brakes and air bags.
I know. I drive several of them. The trick is just not to drive like a jackass with my nose in my phone.
Re:I have an idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't really solve the problem where the OTHER driver drives like a jackass, though.
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
Can I choose my own level of risk? Or do you get to decide for me because I committed the crime of being born into your society where you get to define risk for everyone based on some abstraction that says a lot about you and little about me?
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Can I choose my own level of risk?
No. You will have a car with the requisite number of air bags, automatic seat belts, overly wide A pillars for roll protection (and shit visibility) and crumple zones too expensive to justify body repair should you get into a fender-bender.
Now pardon me while I jump on my E-bike with the hacked controller and join the unlicensed 15 year olds on the highway.
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Re: I have an idea... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't need chips for antilock brakes or airbags, but i get what you mean.
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While there are mechanical airbags, they would not pass a modern crash test.
And mechanical antilock brakes existed for the railway, but I don't think they were ever popular on cars.
ESP is now a requirement, which would really stretch the capability of a mechanical gyro.
And then there is eCall - surely that needs electronics?
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Jensen used mechanical ABS in the 1960s. It wasn't as good as modern electronic systems (I think it was limited to cycling about 3 times a second) but car reviewers seemed to love it.
The car wasn't allowed in the US for "safety reasons". AFAIR it was either because there were protruding switches on the dash or the headlights were "too low".
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
Do you know that Toyota puts a shutter on headlights that blocks light just at the spot where testers test? Are your tests doing what you think or are car companies gaming them?
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
I would implement eCall with carrier pigeons and Extra Sensory Perception predates electronics.
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Many of them didn't survive using them.
But most of us did
Re: I have an idea... (Score:3)
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
So, did Big Chip kill the 100mpg carburetor?
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Many of them didn't survive using them.
Has to be said: those of us alive to read this are the descendants of those who _did_ survive.
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Ford Pintos for all!
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
Why all or nothing? Can we choose for ourselves?
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Our ancient ancestors had a means of building cars without computer chips. I wonder if this lost technology can be re-discovered, and greatly alleviate these economic woes.
Cars, like everything else now, are mostly made to be data collection devices. You can't collect data on every possible thing without lots of chips, man. Get with the program. How is the AI going to simulate us once it wipes us out if it doesn't collect every possible datapoint it can now? Come on. It's like you don't even WANT humanity to sacrifice itself for the betterment of the universe!
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You should show them the way by example. Mail in your opinion on the subject to a newspaper editorial column, instead of using the newfangled computer on the internet. The way our ancient ancestors used to.
Cars without computer chips suck. That means no infotainment system, but more importantly, it means a *really shitty unreliable car* just like they used to be: what's wrong with it? No OBD to find out. Incredibly inefficient cars that waste fuel on every cycle because the fuel injection system isn't tuned
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Yay for your anecdotal evidence. Here's mine: I drove cars made in the 80s and 90s, when they had to live in the repair shop. But I haven't had any problems with my cars in 20 years. The only times I've upgraded was because I wanted new features, and after an accident. Which I got to walk away from, because they're also safer. If I had been in a 90s car, I'd have been dead.
Now for the non-anecdotal data. Cost of car maintenance has fallen [independent.co.uk], which is making public transport less competitve. And in the US, ave
Re: I have an idea... (Score:2)
I wonder how good my dad's ear-based tuning was? Remember how bands used to self-equalize?
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
Microcontrollers are used to reduce weight. Instead of a thick bundle of wires going to the door locks and power windows and power mirrors and door open switch and any lights that happen to be there - you have a couple of data and power wires going into the microcontroller unit that controls all the door stuff.
This goes for everything electronic, and there is a *lot* of this stuff in modern cars. Tail lights, rear climate and entertainment controls, radar parking aids, tire pressure monitors, heated seats, cabin lights, cabin temperature sensors, microphones, etc... Overall weight savings are in the dozens of pounds.
This is all done to drop weight to make CAFE standards. You could standardize on a different microcontroller, but these things are purpose-built and a full environmental TA soak can take years. You don't want one of these things to fail and have to tear doors apart to replace them in a recall.
Re:I have an idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
I seriously doubt that it is technologically possible to build a car without computer chips that would meet the various legal, emission and safety requirements to sell in the US.
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You can just scrap those requirements.
It will happen before long because we won't be able to build cars full of computers for much longer.
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You can just scrap those requirements.
Congress could, but right now, they can't even agree on who is paying for lunch. So yeah, hold your breath on that, blue is your color.
It will happen before long because we won't be able to build cars full of computers for much longer.
Nice revenge fantasy you're masturbating to there, Skippy. Be sure to use lots of lotion. Wouldn't want to chafe.
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We still make them for vintage/hobbyist things.
They're awful. You need to actually manually tune them every time you start, and change the setting as engine warms up to ensure approximately correct mix is fed to the engine and so it can generate power appropriately. Ever heard of a "choke"? As someone who had a car with manual choke, let me tell you about amazing adventures of starting it in the winter.
And by amazing adventures, I mean utter shit show.
Those engines are really easy to make. No one but classi
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We still make them for vintage/hobbyist things.
They're awful. You need to actually manually tune them every time you start, and change the setting as engine warms up to ensure approximately correct mix is fed to the engine and so it can generate power appropriately. Ever heard of a "choke"? As someone who had a car with manual choke, let me tell you about amazing adventures of starting it in the winter.
And by amazing adventures, I mean utter shit show.
Those engines are really easy to make. No one but classic collectors want them, because they're horrible from driver's perspective. You want an engine with proper ECM, that just makes it run for you, instead of having to manually adjust choke, being really careful with throttle depending on the current oil temperature, and not having a clue what's going on with the engine until it blows up.
There was a whole bunch of cars between manual choke and computer controlled fuel injection systems. I owned two in my early driving days. Step on the gas before turning the starter, it sets the choke itself, and self-adjusts as the car warms up. Oh, the horror.
It's like people have whatever the opposite of rose colored glasses is when it comes to looking at the past these days. Everything *HAD* to be awful, and there could *NEVER* have been anything good about it. Except, uh, not really.
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Automatic chokes remain a thing on motorcycles and such. Modern are all ECM based (solenoid).
One you describe didn't work off a pedal. It worked off a thermocouple in the flow, that tried to determine what temperature of the engine was and open or close the choke accordingly. It's essentially a very simple analogue computer. They're generally avoided because they have severe issues in extreme cold compared to both manually choked cars and ECM driven solenoid chokes in modern carburetors.
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The other thing that bugs me is that none of the pollution politics consider the environmental
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Have you ever head of an "automatic choke?" All but the very first car I owned had one.
Pre-computer cars were higher maintenance, but nowhere near as bad as you make out. And, unlike my current car, a failed transmission didn't cost $13,000 to replace because it's full of complicated computer-controlled parts and can't really be repaired.
I've been looking at new cars lately and it appears I now have to pay for the car to send data to the manufacturer all the time and for a camera which watches me while I'm
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Hint: automatic chokes between manual and ECM were fucking awful in cold weather, because they had poor edge case adaptation. They were better than manual at getting choke valve angle mostly right once you get the car actually started. Essentially, those are a really small analogue computer that switches the angle of the choke based on temperature return from a powered thermocouple. That's why they needed outside power to work, and needed tuning to work properly in the first place.
This is why everyone switc
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Truck engines are built to much higher reliability standard since they have to survive driving for very long times. And they cannot fail, because that costs fleet operator a lot more than just repairs.
Also diesel, has to be overbuilt due to compression ratio involved.
Gasoline from same time period still had the OG "magic smoke" moment when seals finally blow due to wear and tear. And then car loses most of its power, and drives with that hilarious amount of burning oil smoke until you rebuild the engine. If
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In the US, (the more expensive) ECM systems took over because they were mandated by our pollution laws.
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Yes, there's indeed a reason why manual choke lasted a century, analogue automatic choke didn't even last a decade, and ECM controlled chokes have lasted until today.
It's almost like it's telling you something. But believe what you want.
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We seem to be talking about different things then, because I can find images of new cars sold in US, and they clearly have manual chokes in late 1980s.
If this was banned by regulation, these shouldn't exist.
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If you're living in a warm area, thermostatics work fine.
If you live in a place where it actually gets cold, thermostatics are utterly awful. "Engine won't start to go to work after a cold night" level of awful. Their purpose was to make a gradual choke closing mechanism as engine warms up to level off the curve of the choke closing rather than manual which was usually "on/off" in spite of it being a full analogue push stick in most cases. And so they had a nasty tendency to get ice crystals form after engi
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When cold, the carburetor's air intake should be closed, which usually happened after the person stomped the accelerator pedal during starting. Then the choke is supposed to gradually open the intake as the engine warms.
Either way, if the pollution laws demanded better, then I don't see how the manufa
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I live in a place that is really cold in winters, so we have oil heating/battery charging/interior heating outlets for cars to make them start better in winter (and be more comfortable to get into in the first place). Those with money even get remote coolant heaters that burn fuel for a few minutes pre-ignition to heat the engine coolant up.
Early automatic chokes were a very common point of failure. To the point where those cars were just shipped out to warmer climates when sold as used, because no one want
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So I tried and apparently I enshittified my own google search, since it's now feeding me diagrams and conversion kit images and there's maybe one image of an actual car in total.
FML.
Latest I recall was of some kind of a Korean car from the late 1980s. Most were from 1970s and 1980s.
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Decided to try if mainline (not image) search would do better, and it got me results like this:
https://www.pistonheads.com/ga... [pistonheads.com]
Seems to mostly confirm automatic chokes being very temperamental and needing adjustments/maintenance even in 1990s with general recommendation being "just switch to manual to eliminate problems". But that could be from a European or Japanese model.
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I asked my father and he said manual chokes disappeared in (US) cars around the 1950s.
For every sufficiently complex problem (Score:1)
Our ancestors cars polluted to the point where you couldn't see the city skyline and were only affordable to drive because of oil and gas prices that are unimaginable today. Computers don't just make your phone play music through your car radio dude. They make your car do what you wanted to do and what you needed to do.
This is before the reams of safety functions built into the computer especially for big honking SUVs that tend to tip over
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As you usual ignorant and wrong about everything. In inflation adjusted terms gas prices are not significantly higher if higher at all now than at any previous point.
So no fuel efficiency has not been the driver in terms of making driving affordable. However the cost of car big enough for the entire family on the other hand has increased a lot. Inflation adjusted you could have had a 55 Bel air for something like 25k.
Find a 25k car that you can five people in today, with any degree of comfort.
So no 'chip
Math is hard (Score:2)
In today's money that's around $2 to $2.50 a gallon. The average right now is about $3 a gallon and it is unusually low at the moment due to a variety of factors. That's the average in many places it's over $4 a gallon.
So yeah gas was cheaper when I was a kid. Just the facts.
A large part of what makes gas cheaper is that we have been pushing higher fuel econo
Re: For every sufficiently complex problem (Score:2)
How come they took away CD players? Is it so they can sell me Sirius XM?
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If you ignore the complications of global safety regulations and just looked at what it would take to make a practical BEV it could be done with common interchange parts using open source des
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This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The ironic part is that ASML is a dutch company. The most advanced lithography process is created in the Netherlands, but its just not economical to *make the chips* there.
Re: This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:2)
This is only partly true, you need several other machines to actually make the chip then and tuning all these machines to work together is such an effort that Taiwan is pretty much the single bottleneck for actually producing the most advanced chips. And THEY have outsourced the crappy old ones to China.
So asml matters a lot in this equation, but not nearly as much as you might think.
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This is only partly true, you need several other machines to actually make the chip then and tuning all these machines to work together is such an effort that Taiwan is pretty much the single bottleneck for actually producing the most advanced chips. And THEY have outsourced the crappy old ones to China.
So asml matters a lot in this equation, but not nearly as much as you might think.
Actually ASML arguably matters more than TSMC. China and SMIC have already waved huge sums of money to lure away top TSMC executives and specialists. What they don't have is the semiconductor manufacturing equipment. China throws around claims of already finding domestic replacements for ASML, but they also claim to have domestic replacements for Nvidia. Of course, none of these claims are credible. If the claims were true, then not only would China be producing and making their own chips, they would h
Re:This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:4)
The ironic part is that ASML is a dutch company. The most advanced lithography process is created in the Netherlands, but its just not economical to *make the chips* there.
ASML has zero impact on the car chip industry except maybe the vision computers in Teslas. Car chips are made on processes 2 orders of magnitude larger.
This does however have a lot to do with another Dutch manufacturer, Nexperia which is the actual centre of the current chip crisis (and no they don't use ASML gear).
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Most automotive modules aren't using cutting-edge nodes anyway. There are still plenty of chips being made on 40-90nm processes.
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I think what people are referring to is Second Sourcing of parts. Part of the reason that AMD got access to the x86 instruction set is that IBM insisted that there be a second source for all the intel chips in in their PCs, particularly the CPU
For the long term, if the EU doesn't have the ability to create and build chips within their own borders, they'll always be in a position where their economies are at risk.
Re:This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:5, Interesting)
For the long term, if the EU doesn't have the ability to create and build chips within their own borders...
There are a number of fabs in the EU (and UK, for that matter) and have been for many years. However, they use very old/large "nodes" compared to TSMC, Samsung and Intel, or even the fabs in China, and so are unsuitable for the products auto-makers need.
It doesn't help that these same auto-makers cancelled pretty much all of their wafer-start contracts at the beginning of COVID, so Apple bought them up for their in-house CPUs and also took multi-year options on future production, which left the car-makers floundering for second- and third-tiers fabs when post-COVID production ramped up again...
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China was rather boring until someone learned the definition of tariff. Remember a year ago when things were boring and running smoothly? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Re: This is what DEI is meant for.... (Score:2)
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It's interesting that China is purportedly able to turn the US-led embargo of high-end processors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment into a strength that encourages it to speed along the inevitable domestic production of products that will eliminate any dependence on Western goods. However, the reverse logic somehow doesn't work for rare earths or car chips outside of China.
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Rare earth mining is messy business. There are plenty of sources of rare earths outside of China, but nobody really wants to go through the process of digging up and refining all those minerals.
Simple! (Score:2, Interesting)
Retrieve all the money paid as bonuses to the people who got rid of the warehouses and installed just-in-time systems and use that cash to buy alternate chips.
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They're mostly retired and rich now. They sold us out.
Re: Simple! (Score:2)
If they are retired and rich, it would still be possible to retrieve the money.
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Retrieve all the money paid as bonuses to the people who got rid of the warehouses and installed just-in-time systems and use that cash to buy alternate chips.
They literally aren't running JIT systems. That's why they have reserves, that's why they were able to continue producing vehicles for months despite chip shipments being halted thanks to the Nexperia fight. The fact they don't use JIT is right there in the summary. There's only so many warehouses you can store stuff in.
Those who do not learn from history... (Score:1, Insightful)
This happened five years ago.
Car manufacturer CEOs who let this happen again should be resigning en masse.
From the 3rd International Conference on Electronic Engineering and Informatics (EEI 2021) June 18-20, 2021 in Dali, China:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1971/1/012100/meta
So what's the problem? (Score:2)
I thought Europe was just one walk-able metro that didn't need cars anyway? They can just ride their bicycles, right? How about just repair those used cars instead, it's better for the environment. /s
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What Americans who have never been to the EU need to understand about it is this: It is mostly like the US except everything is not as good, but the entire population pretends real hard they don't have problems and has a sense of superiority that makes American exceptionalism seem understated.
Basically if you have never been, don't bother it isn't worth it. The entire Eurozone has nothing to offer you can't get here better, cheaper, faster, and pick all three!
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But I really do want to go visit Ireland one day. It looks like such a scenic country. Scotland as well. A lot of the other places seem like tourist traps. I'll just do the locals a favor and not visit, there by not making things even worse there. Living in San Diego, I already have enough tourist to deal with, so I by and large don't want to go to some super popular, overwhelmed area. Sounds bad for me and the locals.
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Eh?
There's plenty of car brained idiots in Europe, let assure you. It's just that for a variety of interesting reasons, they didn't get to win completely, bulldoze cities to make them car dependent hellscapes and then cement that with the force of law to prevent you building anything nice.
But you know instead of just being randomly angry at Europe for not completely prostrating themselves at the altar of the automobile you could just get on a plane from America and visit. You might even learn why some peopl
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Sorry mate Slashdot didn't speak Unicode and neither do I, so those hex strings mean little to me.
You have zero clue how hard it is to
And yet mixed use developments are illegal in most of America, which is what I was referring to.
Copium in spades, for not being able to get a driver's license
Got my license at 17, passed first time after 10 lessons in London. Yeah boi. That was around 30 years ago. I don't presently own a car because it seems to me to be a waste of money, but
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> Copium in spades, for not being able to get a driver's license (or maybe have the money to afford a car?). I bet you a chunk of cash you actually could afford one, but it's your fear of actually becoming independent on the bus (or some other equally poor*** dependent transit means) that renders you disabled to operate as a Western adult in a real sense.
What the fuck is wrong with you car nuts?
I've lived in both the UK and US. The UK is nicer to live in, period, because you don't have to drive everywhe
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Even older cars need microchips for repairs and replacement parts. Unless you mean old-old cars, like a model T :p
USA shooting EU in foot (Score:5, Informative)
This Nexperia takeover also covered on Slashdot: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
So in sum, actions taken in fear of China restricting a critical resource actually cause China to restrict that resource. The consequences were not well thought out.
Re:USA shooting EU in foot (Score:5, Interesting)
What actually happened is embodiment of the meme: "America designs, China builds, EU regulates".
Here EU's regulatory supremacy made bureaucrats at all levels believe that it's the bureaucrats within every organization that matter, not the people being managed by bureaucracy that actually produce things. So when confiscating Nexperia... they confiscated the HQ. The place with the company bureaucracy.
Chinese took one look at this idiotic confiscation of bureaucracy that never touched any productive parts of the company, did a "are you really this fucking retarded" double take, concluded that yes, European bureaucratized leadership is in fact fucking retarded, and simply ordered the production facilities in PRC to... stop taking instructions from HQ.
Because bureaucracy is utterly worthless without someone to actually do things they order. It's not a producer of anything. It's a necessary evil. A symbiote at best, and a parasite at worst. Which can in fact be simply cut out and replaced rapidly, as long as productive parts of the company remain, because there's plenty of comparable symbiotic systems out there. But there are very few if any producers.
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The consequences were not well thought out.
Actually it seems the consequences were every bit as everyone expected which is why there is a move to work to reverse it in the first place. By the way there was good reason to do what was done. Since the Nexperia takeover a *LOT* of shit has been uncovered about how China was undermining western chip production.
Re: USA shooting EU in foot (Score:2)
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If you ignored that Nexperia's CEO was instantly replaced by a Chinese puppet during the takeover, who then spilled trade secrets from all of Europe's manufacturing partners to China, who then purposefully shut down European manufacturing from Nexperia (which at the time did still exist), and that the Chinese government entrenched itself so deep into the business that they told the company to ignore its own instructions, then sure. It's the west's fault.
The west's war. They are the bad ones. Nothing to do w
Which chips? (Score:2, Troll)
I can't find which kind of chips... heavy duty chips like ECUs are certainly differently made than infotainment systems.
Europe has a few fabs around that definitely can do at least 90nm parts.
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Literally every piece of electronics in modern cars talks on the CAN bus. In the old days your headlight switch ran 12 volts directly to them. Today the LED drivers get their on signal from the CAN bus.
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Europe has a few fabs around that definitely can do at least 90nm parts.
While I wonder if that's actually true, it wouldn't help. Nexperia, the supplier at the heart of this debacle, makes power and analog stuff: GaN FETs, bipolar, power diodes, etc. These aren't ECU MCUs. They're big power devices, using specialized materials: silicon carbide and gallium nitride, for example. You can't make these in just any old 90nm processor fab.
It's great to see all this. Consequences of the the romper room mentality of EU technocrats and citizens dwelling under the umbrella of secur
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Thank you. That's the info I was after.
> While I wonder if that's actually true
Just checked.
GlobalFoundries' FAB1 was reportedly refitted to do 12nm. I remembered it at 45nm.
So yes, but no at the same time.
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So yes, but no at the same time.
GlobalFoundries' FAB1 is strictly silicon-based CMOS stuff: small audio amps, LED drivers, smartcard chips and other low power RF devices. No SiC or GaN production. So FAB1 can't help with the Nexperia embargo at all. GlobalFoundries does make such devices, but those foundries are in the US.
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and those are the details I was too lazy to search. thanks.
Use Zoho (Score:1)
FAFO (Score:2)
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You have it backwards. The lesson to China is: DO steal European companies (and their secrets). DO make the EU more dependent on Chinese industry.
payback (Score:2)
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No, that's what you have when you let critical infrastructure be sold to an extremely hostile foreign power.