semi_guy

i heard that same NPR interview yesterday with Munchkin CEO. His points are comments were identical as those expressed with other small and medium size businesses. They have spent significant capital setting molds and equipment in China. That equipment, tools, and molds cannot be exported, and the current administration is not even addressing the simple problem of visa/license/export issues. In addition to those simple issues, there greater problem is that there are no equivalent factories, trained workforce, or supply chain. Those take years to create, debug, and train. In the meantime, those businesses stopped ordering and there will be a shortage of items in 60 days. The lead time once orders start is 45 days, with the waffling of red light/green light on tariff, no company is going to start orders. The lack of material will even drive prices much higher than the tariff, and worse than in COVID. Those companies without revenue will laid off people, close, or go bankrupt.

Rare earth mining is not that minerals are rare, they are abundant on earth's crust. It is very difficult to separate them and requires an open pit mining. Open pit mining is a large scale destruction of the environment and pollution of land, water, and air. Finding an isolated place with the minerals to mine that you do not mind polluting is very difficult. Rare earth metals has been a priority in Biden's administration, as well. In fact, Mountain Pass in the US was sending its mining to China to be separated. Mountain Pass acquired the bankrupt mine in 2017. The original mine was on operation in 2010-2015.

hexclock said:

foregoneconclusion said:

The 2017 tax cuts that CEOs used for stock buybacks are due to expire. These are the same tax cuts that the Fed predicted would increase inflation. Go figure…

Reducing the corporate tax rate to compete with other countries allowed  US companies to repatriate billions of dollars back to the United States. 

According to the CBO those tax cuts increased federal tax revenue because the economy grew. Inflation came from all the crazy spending congress has done over the last few years, starting during the pandemic. 

I was part of a big semiconductor company. For the past decade, we told upper management they needed to increase semiconductor factories since semiconductor content was increasing at exponential rates. They denied saying it was risky, even though data showed semiconductor content was not decreasing even in a recession. Then big tax breaks, we repeated the need that semiconductors are increasing and we were at capacity. Upper management invested the tax saving in buying back stock to prop up stock prices. Not in increasing salaries, nor expanding factories. Many of those VPs retired recently with large stock sells.  Then COVID hit when semiconductor plants were at capacity. Upper management saw a great opportunity to increase prices since all companies were desperate to acquire devices. In fact, we were told that the most profitable devices would be allocated production, so it became a race to increase prices to maintain customers and product lines. Researching other semiconductor competitors, we found the whole industry was doing the same.

Disabling and limiting for price points is to save test time and improve yields. Not testing a part of the CPU can save precious test time which leads into a cheaper part. Also portions of the chip might not be as fast as the rest due to longer paths to memory, main busses, power rails, etc. Thus, it is faster to test and produce higher yields leading to savings in manufacturing costs. Moreover, a portion of the chip might add too much power consumption or noise to the system, so it is better to shut it off. There could be a bug with a portion of the chip where timing closure was tight and a subsequent version addresses this issue or reduces the power consumption. Given that Apple is the only customer for their own parts, disabling a portion is probably one of these concerns rather than pricing for additional features or speed.