Procurement

My comment about Ali Baba VS US equivalent is that there ISN'T any US system that does what Ali Baba does. Nada. 0. pants down. grass skirts against suits. nothing. get it?

And saying Jack Ma is winning is based on the IPO and valuation of a B2B high tech enterprise. And above all, comparison to US companies. What US companies are big valuations in the investment market? -

Apple - a totally frou-frou enterprise, catering to selfies and the clueless Google- business model of spying for marketing surveillance. Corrupt anti-empowerment model. Microsoft + Intel - Biz as usual 1985. About as clever as a donut maker.

So my point is that Ali Baba functions as a B2B exchange for people who want to work hard and succeed. The U.S. has nothing like that, only stuff to make people passive and unemployed.

There's lots of semiconductor design, and process development, done in the USA. And a lot of process equipment is fabricated here. The actual fabs are all over the world, which makes sense.

USA manufacturing in general seems to be picking up some lately. Maybe the outsourcing craziness has peaked.

-John Larkin

The way I heard it, The US drove Intel out of California and the U.S. As th e head of Intel put it, it cost him a billion $ more to open a plant in Cal ifornia. (Craig Barrett)

The "US manufacturing picking up" is a comment seen in the lame stream medi a. It's a peculiar comment, and it is there primarily as a political election slogan. It is used for unemployment, housing, and inflation.

The unfortunate truth is that all those situations are crappy, but a politi cian can always say things are "picking up." Like, "I was in a car accident and now in wheel chair, by dog got run over, I was diagnosed with Hepatiti s C, I lost all my money in gambling, I have Lou Gehrig's disease. But I go t a refund check for $100 on my taxes."

Things are "picking up." Look on the positive side.

I feel better already.

I do agree that the situation with stodgy manufacturer's representatives and such like could use some shaking up, and perhaps there is a business opportunity there for Alibaba or somone else.

Could you raise, say, $10m to get it off the ground?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Good question. Yes, I could. Got any good SW programmers?

Big companies from GE to Boeing to Starbucks have extensive oversight of their contractors, often to absurd extents. We have customers who want to review all our processes and financials, costs and profit margins, try to force us to take their courses and use their systems, subject us to massive quality and process audits, want us to SPC everything. Our semiconductor customers are by far the most demanding and most intrusive. The CE! thing gets pushed down from Intel to their suppliers to *their* suppliers, namely us; we're not suposed to move a workbench without approval. I don't think that Xilinx just emails tapeout files to TSMC and waits for chips.

(The range of oversight varies wildly, sort of at random. Some companies are crazy about it, others never mention it.)

Yeah, somewhat involved.

But you make it sound like the

I said no such thing.

Many semi companies are now fabless; they are really selling intellectual property more than silicon. They go to the best, and most economical, fabs anywhere in the world. Nothing remarkable about that.

IC design and architecture is still dominated by US companies. The various Japanese initiatives (TRON and such) didn't work. ARM is the outstanding non-US design house. DRAM and flash are well represented in asia. GaN is dominated by US companies, many university spinouts. The US invented transistors and ICs, and it's a *big* country.

Lots of big semi companies, and Internet companies, are headquartered, or have big development groups, in California. Intel, Apple, Google, Dolby, Cisco, LTC, Maxim, on and on. But manufacturing is not generally competitive here; too much regulation and taxes, high energy cost, high land and labor costs.

Fracking is keeping energy costs down (at least in rational states) and that's helping a lot. Electricity in parts of the US costs a third of what it costs in Germany.

Yes, companies do all sorts of things that aren't as useful as they might think. If they are working with a small outfit of unknown pedigree then it makes perfect sense to do everything but hold their hand. I'm sure that if TSMC didn't have Xilinx to watch over them with loving grace they would just foul it all up and never be able to get a chip out the door.

You can be very silly when you can't think of anything reasonable to say.

Go back and read what you wrote. You made it sound like the only reason TSMC can ship a quality product is because they had Xilinx monitoring their every move. I'll save you the effort, here it is...

Clearly this is implying that the Taiwanese fabs can't handle quality without Xilinx. *They taught US about quality*!!!

Exactly. Because many large fabs have extremely high levels of quality.

You are too funny sometimes. I see why the rest of the crowd here laughs at you about your debating techniques.

Parts are more like an eighth to maybe a quarter of Germany. Outside of Hawaii, the highest is about half of what the Germans pay.

If you've got the money, finding programmers is the easy part.

I'm sure that Xilinx is critically and constantly involved in the semiconductor processes used to make their chips. They have to be, because they have competition. They care about performance and yield as much as anyone. They have to design their next-gen products around what will be possible two years from now.

Cyclone 6 is way behind schedule. Spartan 2E was discontinued because of fab issues. This stuff matters.

Taiwan taught us about quality? When?

The German green thing has backfired. They are now heavy into coal, and building Volkswagens in Mexico and Mercedes Benzes in Alabama.

Yes, clearly Xilinx never makes a misstep. lol

The Asians were all about quality when we were pumping out crap cars. That is where it showed up first. The rest of manufacturing followed suit. We have poor management techniques for any sort of large scale production and have learned from the Asian successes. The name Deming comes to mind.

You said that the Taiwanese fabs taught us about quality. Just above.

Or maybe all Asians look alike to you.

Yes; the Japanese had a reputation for poor quality until Denning introduced them to the quality procedures originally developed at Bell Telephone in the USA.

So it sounds like we taught them about quality.

Not "we", Deming. Deming attempted to teach his ideas here and was ignored until he went to Japan. It was only after the Japanese started eating our lunch that we even gave lip service to the issue. The problem is well known. The US goods still have a reputation for being over priced and not the highest quality. Even here in the US generally we buy foreign if we want the best quality.

And shutting down their nukes. Things in Germany will get tough shortly.

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They were willing to learn. For a picture of the Japanese spirit, compare pictures of Nagasaki and Detroit.

We don't hear much about Fukushima these days. Last I heard they were cooli ng it with sea water sprayed on, then that made the ground soggy, which made t he reactor sink into it, which opened cracks in the containment vessel. Last I heard, they were trying to freeze the ground to stop the sinking.

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jb

From this vantage, it's because you interpolate things John neither said nor meant.

That's a common problem communicating person-to-person, hard to beat.

Nope, that would be Charles Deming. The Japanese listened first, true.

He's discussing "USA manufacturing" now, not semiconductors.

"It is just the way it is" isn't exactly a theory or an explanation.

I think John's just assuming as obvious things that totally fly over some. I get his point easily, generally without translation.

E.g., several examples here. Or, when discussing topologies, I don't (usually) need component values--the intentions and connections are usually more than enough.

Cheers, James Arthur

We did. But thanks for the link--I thought his name was Chuck, not "Ed".

Cheers, James