Speaking to Bloomberg News at MWC Barcelona, Ekholm compared Europe’s sluggish move to 5G unfavourably to China
“China has already built out a 5G standalone network,” he said.
“Europe has elected to be a museum,” he added. “That’s a choice European citizens have to live with.”
Being behind on high tech innovation is an European insecurity. Whenever a new American tech fad comes along - blockchain or AI - Europe seems to jump on it as an opportunity to catch up. Fundamentally though, to get on the fad train you’ll need to buy USA hardware (nVidia, Intel, AMD etc.). It feels like this insecurity is being weaponized so that more US hardware gets sold.
IIRC the lithography machines TSMC etc. use are made in Europe. One wonders why they don’t build fabs locally instead of selling them all to Taiwan.
There’s a lot more to semiconductor manufacturing than just the lithography, and there’s a whole supply chain required to support it. To replicate the kind of process nodes that TSMC is manufacturing you would need a lot of institutional expertise in:
That’s just off the top of my head as someone who is a spectator of the industry but not involved. There’s probably a lot more you’d need to perfect in order to produce cutting edge silicon.
If this were done in the EU it would likely involve multiple companies specialising in one area each, as we don’t have an Intel or AMD with the budget to pour into developing an in-house foundry. I can’t imagine how much investment it would take though. China has been working on this for decades and is still at least a decade behind in their own silicon process.