Comment by KK7NIL

I’ve seen this attitude in other fields and while it is conceptually true, the more complex the field, the more workers have to „walk away“ with their knowledge to have enough knowledge to be of any use

Arizona has enforceable non-compete contracts, so they may walk away with the knowledge but they might not be allowed to use it.

Long walk back to Taiwan.

These workers didn't create the fab equipment and don't know how to design or create the machinery used there. They also don't have access to the software source code. Most US workers hold maintenance or managerial positions, while those with the deep technical expertise come from Taiwan. There will be no knowledge transfer, aside from how to operate the fab, which is something Intel US employees already know.

Walk away to where? And what transferable knowledge?

The US workers are almost certainly limited to people who are low to mid level techs who don't know anything useful. Everyone with actual cutting edge knowledge is from Taiwan and almost certainly under the tightest of NDAs and NCAs.

Even high level people in the plant still aren't that useful. What's useful are the insanely expensive, insanely complicated extreme-ultraviolet lithography equipment from ASML. Nobody in the world makes the stuff they do. At least, that we know of. It wouldn't surprise me if the NSA has funded designing and building an EUV lithography system, or just stole the designs from ASML. We know they do a lot of their own ultra-miniature silicon, so they have a strong interest in this sort of tech.

Semiconductor R&D is very multi-dimensional (despite the media only talking about the one dimensional made up measurement of node size), there are many things Intel could learn from TSMC, and the other way around too.

TSMC is ahead because it adopted ASML's EUV tech earlier than Intel (huge blunder by Intel). The real tech breakthroughs came from ASML, and Intel now has that technology too (and is trying to leapfrog TSMC by being the first to get the new High-NA EUV from ASML, though it won't actually producing sub-3nm chips with it until 2025 or maybe 2026).

> Aren’t Philips and ASML both effectively under American control anyway?

IDK about Philips but ASML follows US export restrictions due to a deal it agreed to when it bought a US company a few decades ago, yes.

> Is the TSMC part of the stack that special in terms of actual IP (versus more squishy organizational know-how)?

I don't want to go into too many details as I work in the Intel Foundry but it's certainly both. We'd be very happy to know how TSMC does some specific things, let me put it that way. At the same time, our execution has been dubious since 10 nm.

Their competitors have access to the same tech. If TSMC’s process wasn’t special, they wouldn’t be years ahead of the competition.

Philips as far as im aware doesnt contribute that much anymore. NXP split off forever ago. Philips may have build TSMC together with the taiwanese government but its hardly relevant nowadays.