A long article, but an interesting one. The three companies which make the bulk of the world’s memory chips are doing very nicely thank you … but financial analysts are missing the implications. It goes without saying that those three companies are all Asian. Sigh!
Is DRAM at a Permanently Higher Plateau? | GenInnov
“… The binding constraint is not capital but accumulated knowledge: twenty years of yield learning, defect libraries, recipes co-developed with tool vendors, access to export-controlled equipment, and a thicket of cross-licensed patents without which it is not legal to ship a competitive part. Capital builds a fab in three years. It cannot build the two decades of process knowledge that make the fab yield, and a fab that does not yield converts billions into scrap. …”
Generalizing, this illustrates the issue facing the de-industrialized West – the problem cannot be solved by voting in an election; it will take at least a generation of hard work, likely longer, to rebuild the process knowledge. Or the West accepts its new role in which the “nice parts” become destinations for Asian tourists and the rest descends into Third World squalor.