I work at Intel(Hillsboro D1X) and watch everyone of these videos, plus I share them pretty often. Whenever someone asks me what I do at work I usually share one or five of the videos from the semiconductor playlist on here. These videos are pretty unmatched in terms of how much information there is, plus how digestible they are.
@CRneu That's great! I'm a marine engineer, and love how much I can learn from these. My equivalent channel is Chief Makoi. He shows a lot of big ship engine room stuff.
I’m not in the IT industry but I find it interesting anyway. Currently in customer support but I’m studying to become a coolant technician. I’m interested in history, economics and politics as hobbies so most of the videos fit those categories.
@@marsultor6131Silicon Saxony is quite an old slogan for the Dresden chip industry. It sort of originated in the GDR when the first microelectronic research facilities, projects and fabrication plants were built there. ZMD, the orignal GDR microelectronic firm in Dresden, still exists today. After the unification, these industries were maintained and after AMD (later Global Foundries) and infineon build big plants there, the slogan was used way more often again and with much more pride.
Spoken, it is "Frankfurt an der Oder" (at the Oder) and "Frankfurt am Main" (at the Main), relating to the Rivers "Oder" and "Main" to tell the cities apart.
As someone who was born in Frankfurt (Oder) and has lived there for 14 years, we usually just say "Frankfurt Oder" (or "Frankfurt", if there's no room for confusion). If you say "an der Oder", you are either very formal or immediately outed as an outsider.
Wikipedia claims that only outsiders use the scheme that was established for Frankfurt am Main. In the region (of Berlin-Brandenburg) it's just Frankfurt Oder. As it is easy to confuse the town with the west-german Frankfurt the particle Oder is included even in colloquial speech. So taking a train from Berlin to Frankfurt goes west, but a train to Fankfurt-Oder goes east.
I worked in electronics manufacturing for my entire career (retired now). Semiconductor fabrication really has 3 tiers. The top tier is cutting edge processors for the computing and communications industry (Intel,Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm etc.). The cost of entry is extremely large (startup investment is in the billions) and there are other very high barriers to entry. In the second tier we have DSPs, less advanced CPUs, ASICs, etc. To win here you need large customers that order in significant quantities and high yield is essential. Competition is fierce here. The lowest is the glue chips, timers, PLLs, logic circuits, switches etc. This is entirely southeast Asia and highly sensitive to labor/operational costs. One thing that is a massive hurdle across all tiers is the IP required. There are many patents and many players that you will need to have onboard, this is not trivial. I remember one event where we had a competitor that was coming out with a product and they were almost ready for mass production when they discovered they needed to license a patent from motorola. To their surprise we had an exclusive licensing deal on the patent and they had to write off everything they spent on that project. This is the nature of the game, mistakes are costly.
@@whohan779 Well... they're still alive. Their financial reports looks like polished turds. But they're still alive. Anybody else would have gone tits up.
Well done review. Regarding Infineon moving Corporate HQ to Switzerland - This was due to the corporate tax advantage that Switzerland was offering at the time. Many German tech companies made this move at that time. You didn't have to really move anything more than the corporate address and just a few dozen employees to Switzerland to get the tax advantage.
My guy how do you manage to get these vídeos out so fast, there's so much information in them and it looks like you do a fair bit (really a lot actually) of researching and studying before hand on the topics, and yet you pump these out with outstanding quality and their are always so insightful... I truly don't understand how you do it but cheers mate! Just know your job is not unappreciated though, I'm always here for them!
One reason is that he seemingly puts most of that time into actual research and much less into fancy video editing and animation, unlike much else on UA-cam. Most UA-camrs, including educational ones, seem to think presentation matters more than content.
I was born in Frankfurt/Oder, raised there. This is a story of my youth, yes there were big hopes since locals were proud on their knowledge in chip industry / research from better years. I had understood roughly what happened back then, but not to the extend presented here. Never thought the story would be big enough to be explained by YOU…wow ! Subbed you for 2 - 3 years now. Learned a lot about global economics here.
The saddest thing is that taking maybe 100th the funds and starting up a little 3-inch fab line doing SiGe power transistors and other low-integration products would likely have been actually profitable and would have been a great step toward setting up a leading-edge fab later on. Why does everyone want to eat the whole elephant at once instead of one bite at a time?
@@Rubensteezy It is relative. You might not appreciate it but me residing in a corrupt shithole would like to inform you that Canada is a dreamland for me. Safe, economically prosperous, very high levels of freedoms and the ability to pursue enterprise. If you shut off the cultural wars nonsense on social media you will realize you live in one of the best countries on the planet.
@@hydrolifetech7911 Unfortunately, I thought my Canadian inside joke would get my Canadian bros to show up. It was Thanksgiving long weekend, so we had the Monday off. Which furthers your point. I do personally believe I am in one of the best places to be and have a lot to be grateful for. We have our own issues and problems brewing, but I do agree it's one of the best places to live.
A bit of nomenclature on german city naming. If you see something like "Frankfure/Main" or Frankfurt/Oder" it means that the city is located at/on a river, like the english nomenclature of "upon" and "on" depending on age. The correct pronunciation would be "Frankfurt an der Oder" or Frankfurt by the Oder" translated into English. This is very hard for non-german/germanic speakers to know, so don't worry about it.
@@Max24871 If you're transcribing the correct pronunciation according to English spelling rules, yes. I was transcribing the pronunciation he used according to German spelling rules.
"Luftschlösser"/"Castle in the Sky" has no direct translation. But the possible meanings include "delusion", "wish" (without having a magical genie), "fantasy" and "cloud cuckoo land". And of those, to "live in cloud cuckoo land" is probably the closest.
Once again in awe of how well researched your videos are. Especially seeing all those original news articles from the time give great context to the surrounding situation.
We all needed TSMC to do this. Philips needed to outsource ASML, and outsource all semiconductor production to Taipei. in 1989 we already outsourced it all, AMD in East Germany too them over, outsourced too now, Global partners now. Not getting new EUV fabs now.
At that time, Abu Dhabi had just bought the AMD fab in Dresden and Chartered Semiconductor of Singapore to form Globalfoundries, with the promise to build a Fab in the desert... Dubai was jealous!
True, they invested heavy in AMD outsourcing it's Fabs to TSMC. A good thing that Global Foundries was outsourced in the late 2010 years. The Dubai markets are not needing chips i guess, why build a fab there, just invest in TSMC only !
@@lucasrem 1) The TSMC only strategy is bad. 2) Abu Dhabi and Dubai live on Silicon! They see, smell, walk on Silicon every day. With oil and gas, it's their only resource. That's how they got hooked to invest in Semiconductor.
I just wanted to interject that it's ambiguous with 🪜('ladder'), but that's a moot point as 'conductor' can also mean 'Schaffner', 'Zugführer', 'Dirigent' and probably more. 🤭
This happened during my school years. The economy was pretty uncertain in east germany and you could read stories of companies taking over sites and closing down again everywhere. However, almost no one understood the background. I think that the newspapers only described he current snapshot, leaving out the full story. So, the decisions seemed completely arbitrary to me. But this video was really eye-opening, because I now see how a such project/company starts out, how investors behave and how politics drag a dead project on for longer.
The Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide also in the German state Brandenburg is 70 km to the west from Frankfurt(Oder). It may be noted that Frankfurt (Oder) is directly at the Border to Poland. As wages are lower in Poland why should someone invest there?
Praise for the succinct video on this failure. I had almost forgotten there was an attempt. In Brandenburg of all places.. there's more video potential with the others too! ;-) Just nitpicking, the Potsdam City Palace as seen in 4:33 was only rebuilt by the year 2014; back in the early 2000s the old academy building on a hill nearby was the place the government convened.
Some minor explanation: VEB means VolksEigener Betrieb. Public Owned Company. Frankfurt (Oder) and in West Germany Frankfurt which is also called Frankfurt(Main).
I well remember driving out there to discuss process chemicals and gases supply. There was always something overly ambitious and aggressive on their approach, that very different to the behaviour of any of the other Fab personnel on the globe. Every supplier and tool OEM somehow held back with their euphoria about this project and - strangely, nobody was really surprised when the whole project went down the drain. We all also knew it will be a failure again, when they tried to convert it to a PV fab... 🤯😱🤦🏻
Very informative! Thank you very much! We are still doing 130nm SiGe:C technology research, and much more, in a different fab across the autobahn. Greetings from Frankfurt(Oder) / IHP
Germanium is principally used in optical fibre manufacturing to raise the Refractive Index (R.I. optical density) of the silica glass core to aid Total Internal Reflection (TIR). The typically 9um silica glass core is doped with germanium. The 125um cladding is pure silica deposited from pure silicon chloride. Germanium is the preferred dopant as it does not cause clouding of the silica glass.
The translation to "Lord Mayor" gave me a good chuckle. It sounds really old-timey for such a modern role. A more correct translation would be main or high mayor depending wether you prefer a more literal or functional translation. They are the leader of a larger city/provintal government, most often elected directly, or by a city council. Each city/provintial district has their own "normal" mayor and there is a higher rank for issues concerning issues effecting the entire area.
i learned a thing today (about frankfurt). it literally means 'ford of the franks', so the two frankfurts are named after the river they ford (oder and main)
Brandenburg is sort of known for failing big time on high profile projects. Many of the state's most iconic industries formed out of the aftermath of a failed high profile project like this. Brandenburg (along with Berlin) is something of a joke in Germany.
@@erlorielfunny thing is, berlin doesnt just have a significantly higher than average GDP in the country and one of the highest HDIs, but its also what keeps all the shitholes like the one you live in relevant. Berlin is the sole reason germany is in the position it is and historically has been in for the last 150 years.
@@lucasrem XLR has been around for decades. Just new to amateur grade equipment that's all. Nothing high tech in a pedal box - even digital types. Germanium diodes go back to the 1940's. High voltage from the 1950's.
you have one of the most relaxing videos on youtube. It'd be cool if you sometimes added a map of the country and just make a shitty paint scribble of where we are at right now or so.
so in summary iresspective of socio-economic systems, managment structure or techology/ model, semi conductures are the cryptonite of the german economy
Doesn't surprise me. Germans precision when it comes to engineering is unmatched. But electronics seems to be their Achilles heel. I don't trust them to wire a toothbrush lmao
Anything new is the cryptonite of the german economy, that's why it's falling rapidly behind. The last couple of years there has been no german company in the top ten companies in the world.
Semi conductors are the cryptonite of the whole world, TSMC also depends on European and US companies. You need a gigantic infrastructure to manufacture chips. Billions of man-hours to produce your first CPU.
@Asianometry, Do you think canon can catch up with nanoimprint technology, litterally stamping the resin on and using inkjet to create resin droplets molded by the stamp.
I think my dude here is a researcher of some sort. You epitomize the example of knowledge dissemination through internet. I am lucky to benefit from your work for free.
1:46 furt means a spot where you can easily cross the river. So I guess there were these spots first at the river Oder and at the River Main, and they build Cities around it because of the rich traffic there
Anyone wondering: "Frankfurt (Oder)" is officially "Frankfurt an der Oder" or "Frankfurt on the Oder" in English. The "Oder" is the name of the river the city sits on.
the other day I was planning a semiconductor setup in satisfactory but i got hung up on a weird mental exercise. -what biome would be the the most efficient for a fab to be located. I know its not relevant for the game but I IF it were... Does humidity dictate more robust atmospheric scrubbing for the clean room environment? And thus more energy to run? Do the dust and heat from desert areas require hardware that costs more or less to use? is it a wash? google was not useful.
Would be nice to see some digestable video of how german production industrial methods landed from junkers via mitsubishi aero and from there to toyota motor company to become "lean" etc.
1:56 Frankfurt does exist 2 times here cause FURT is a description of a more shallow river where you can cross the river. And like in other cases seddlers left a city to move to a new spot and calling it with the same name, hence the addition of the river for the differentiation if you mean that on the Oder in the east or on the Main which is in the middle of germany. Easier then to explain Hannover and Hannover now called Hanover where the first is in lower saxony and the other in the USA or Braunschweig and Brunswick.
@@Rafael-vi4todon't forget that if the banks go bankrupt is the taxpayers who will lose the most It's better paying some billions than people losing all they money
Interesting video and topic, but you missed the significance of Frankfurt (along the) Oder (river). In the photos you have you can see the Oder river, on the left is Germany and right side is Poland. Significance here with the current EU laws, it's possible to live in the cheaper Poland city and then slap on "Made in Germany" stickers on your exports.
@@Asianometry It's a dirty little secret. According to rumors, a good portion of the workers in Tesla's Berlin factory live in Poland. The border is only 50km away.
@MagnusM. Maybe, you won't. But a significant number of people (4.5% according official 2019's stats) do commute 50+km (single way!) on a daily basis. 13 % commute between 25-50 km. E.g., I commuted over 70 km so for 7.5 years. And for another 6 months I even commuted over 220 km (single way; by train) daily as alternative to moving, and expensive&crappy hotels. And a large percentage of my former colleagues continue to commute over 50-120 km, twice per day. The point is: Rents in economical prospering places are often very high, appartements are hard to get, people have a social background, and they often won't force your family to move (often, they just built a house, and are high indents). And since commutimg is somewhat tax deducible, people bear it, until they find a job closer to their homes - if possible, that is (i.e. not too old, too unfashionable experience, etc.).
Great video, just for future references - the city is called Frankfurt (Oder) which means “Frankfurt an der Oder”, which translates to “Frankfurt on the (river) Oder”, with Oder being pronounced pretty much as it’s written - o d e r 😃
The startup costs for these big manufacturers is enormous. No wonder there aren't more big successful players in the market. Thank you for another interesting episode! God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
"Franken" was how German merchants were named during the 13th century. Frankfurt Oder became a city in 1253 under the name Vrankenforde, which later on became Frankenforde and then Franckfurde. A "Furt" is an old name for a shoal in a river where you can cross that river on foot, on horseback or by vehicle. The Oder is a river. So Frankfurt is basically the "cross-able shoal near the market settlement" and that was used as a name when the settlement was officially declared to be a town. And as all of this is generic, you can imagine that there was probably more than one cross-able shoal near a market settlement in Germany. E.g. there was also one near the river Main. So these two cities can be distinguished by adding their rivers, making them Frankfurt am Main (aka Frankfurt a.M.) and Frankfurt an der Oder (Frankfurt a.d.O.), with "am" and "an der" meaning near by or next to. Yet as the one at the Main is way more popular, it's usually shortened to just Frankfurt and the other one is shortened to Frankfurt Oder. Their official administration names however are "Frankfurt am Main" and "Frankfurt (Oder)", those are the names used in all official government papers.
You basically just translated a section of the German Wikipedia while making it way more complicated than it has to be and adding mistakes. A "Furt" is a ford and I don't know why you wrote "an old name" because that's literally the word for it today in German. Frankfurt on the Main was founded at a ford (where its famous old bridge was also built) and was named after the Franks. It's unclear where Frankfurt on the Oder got its name from because it's not actually situated at a ford, nor in an area inhabited by Frankish tribes.
@@DerMef The German Wikipedia article is twice the size of my entire post in the first paragraph and I added information from multiple paragraphs and nobody is using the word Furt anymore; I asked everyone in my family, several friends a dozen co-workers today, nobody has ever even heard that term, yet they all know what a "Untiefe" oder ein "Überfahrtsstelle" is. Also confirmed by Duden, saying this word is barely used in practice und suggests using "Überfahrtsstelle" instead. Also comment adds no worth whatsoever. If you have nothing better to do that criticizing people who provide valuable information, please keep your critics to yourself in the future, as I doubt anyone cares for your comment here.
@@xcoder1122 You must be joking. Furt is a normal word that is in use today. "Untiefe" is mostly a nautical term used to describe shallow water which is dangerous for ships, but it's not as precise as Furt, which specifically refers to a shallow section of a river that can be used for crossing, just like the English term "ford". I could not imagine that anyone would refer to such a shallow section that many cities, such as Frankfurt or my hometown of Fürth, were built on as anything other than a "Furt". That's just the word for it and that word hasn't changed. It's also very confusing to me that you're suggesting you asked around 20 people and nobody knew the word "Furt", that does not sound realistic to me, especially since you replied to my comment right away - you really asked that many people within a few minutes? It's your comment that adds little value because it is riddled with errors. If you try to explain something, you should actually know what you're talking about.
I want to imagine that in a world, in which the iPhone was released just a few years earlier, eastern Germany got its long awaited high-tech-industry revival...
Name of the River Oder is pronounced just like the English word, and in German means "or". Frankfurt am Main (pronounced mine) contains an abbreviation or contraction for "an dem" (on the) which is different from the article used with Oder because they're a different gender, though that's unknown to me.
I'm an electronics engineer who is curious about the progress of chip technology. Semiconductor courses were among the hardest topics in college for me so I didn't and couldn't go into that field of work but I remain just curious about it as it relates to what we engineers do.
Even if funding was simple and secure, I doubt that this venture would have succeeded. By the time that they would have gotten their clean room built, most Motorolans were already done with Padmasree Warrior's nonsense regarding SiGe as the technology of the seamless mobility future, and the lack of practical MOSFET production yields was clear to everyone in the field. East Germany has some very excellent tech workers (look at the AMD history of what is now GloFo's Fab 1, etc.), but SiGe was always likely to be a bad bet.
Why are there two cities called Frankurt in Germany? or even more? Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder. Furt means "shallow part of a river that allows crossing". The Franks, who were a group of Germanic people who lived in western and central Europe during the Early Middle Ages. (Their name survives in today's France, the German region Franconia (Franken), the EU's financial hub Frankfurt, and several other places.) Therefor we have several cities called Frankfurt because it names the place where the franks crossed the different rivers and settled, Oder, Main.
Regarding the two 'Frankfurts'- in German 'am' is a contraction for 'an dem' or "on the"- and German cities sometimes include the co-located river name so 'Frankfurt am Main' is 'Frankfurt on the Main river', and 'Frankfurt an der Oder' is just 'Frankfurt on the Oder', but I can not explain the masculine naming for Oder and not for the Main river!
huh, i knew about IHP in its current name (innovation for high performance microelectronics), never knew its origins, great video once again! though they don't mass produce circuits afaik, they still do SiGe research (their 130nm process is open source now) and they also perform prototype tapeouts for customers. reportedly a pretty nice place to work too.
It doesn't sound like it was necessarily done from the start, and since their issue was securing funding, being quiet before securing funding woul of just doomed it to fail before it even had a chance.
Early 2000 was for sure a naive failure, but since then Germany did heavily invest and build fabs for 60nm and bigger chips for specialized applications, there is still a need for (cheaper) non bleeding edge fabs
The name Frankfurt does not refer to the franks. A furt is a shallow water river crossing and frank means free. So obviously there are multiple places that would be named so.
It seems U.A.E( Abu Dhabi Investment Group) ended up buying AMD Fabs and Chartered Semiconductor Mfg. To become GlobalFoundries. And later on bought IBM Microelectronics Fab.
It's Frankfurt an der Oder. "on dare OHdur." (Sometimes just "Frankfurt/Oder". The Oder is a river. The other Frankfurt is on the Main (river) (pronounced "mine"), so it's Frankfurt am Main. But since it is a much larger city and Germany's financial capital, it's usually just called Frankfurt. English does the same thing. It's "Stratford on Avon," because there are other Stratfords.
Within Brandenburg it does not take the definitive article - just say "Frankfurt Oder". Wikipedia claims that only outsiders use the scheme established for Frankfurt am Main.
@@guidodraheim7123 Of course if you're local you don't need to be specific. Just like there's Las Vegas (Nevada) and Las Vegas (New Mexico). Same idea. Same city, different state.
A sad end result, which is not surprising with hindsight: Schröder was - to say it nicely - "a good friend" of big companies like Infenion (One of his nick names in Germany was "Genosse der Bosse", roughly translated "comrade of company leaders"). Less nicely: If they said "jump", he asked "how high, my liege and is this all I can do for you at the moment?" -- reports from companies like Gartner are well known for providing the results that the client tells them to provide and so, the puzzle fits nicely together: Infenion didn't want a competitor and made that clear to the federal government, the federal government obliged by getting an "independent" report, which allowed them to cancel the loan, which killed the project. That the EU commission with their far more thorough examination (no, the myth that the EU is less transparent than national governments is not true) came to another result and gave the 320 million says all there is to say. Anyway: Thanks for the thorough video! Was really interesting to see this sad saga rolled out in all of its ugliness and thinking about what could have been.
Now they are paying billions to Tmsc to make chips in Germany. If you do not support your tech - you will support somebody else's sooner rather than later.
1500 vacancy with 6000 applicants are rookie number. I read somewhere In india 50000 apply for a bank sweeper and it even include people who hold master degree.
I have a brother in law who works at Intel. He told me everyone in the industry watches your videos. Great work 👏👏
Seriously! That is a privilege.
I work at Intel(Hillsboro D1X) and watch everyone of these videos, plus I share them pretty often. Whenever someone asks me what I do at work I usually share one or five of the videos from the semiconductor playlist on here. These videos are pretty unmatched in terms of how much information there is, plus how digestible they are.
@CRneu That's great! I'm a marine engineer, and love how much I can learn from these. My equivalent channel is Chief Makoi. He shows a lot of big ship engine room stuff.
Hello snitches
I’m not in the IT industry but I find it interesting anyway. Currently in customer support but I’m studying to become a coolant technician. I’m interested in history, economics and politics as hobbies so most of the videos fit those categories.
Their big mistake is they should have named it Communicould instead of Communicant.
Communiwill
Or simply Communican. The name jinxed them
Communiwant! 😢
Underrated comment!
Communiass
Fun fact: in Dresden there are now 4 chip plants and Tsmc is builing the 5. one. Infinion, Bosch, Globel foundries, Tsmc and a small one.
Yeah, what a debacle xD
Yeah Saxony is really stepping up lately in that regard. Read the term „silicon Saxony“ somewhere recently.
@@marsultor6131Silicon Saxony is quite an old slogan for the Dresden chip industry. It sort of originated in the GDR when the first microelectronic research facilities, projects and fabrication plants were built there. ZMD, the orignal GDR microelectronic firm in Dresden, still exists today. After the unification, these industries were maintained and after AMD (later Global Foundries) and infineon build big plants there, the slogan was used way more often again and with much more pride.
Better Sachsen declare independence asap.
Are they building chips for fax machines???
Spoken, it is "Frankfurt an der Oder" (at the Oder) and "Frankfurt am Main" (at the Main), relating to the Rivers "Oder" and "Main" to tell the cities apart.
As someone who was born in Frankfurt (Oder) and has lived there for 14 years, we usually just say "Frankfurt Oder" (or "Frankfurt", if there's no room for confusion). If you say "an der Oder", you are either very formal or immediately outed as an outsider.
Wikipedia claims that only outsiders use the scheme that was established for Frankfurt am Main. In the region (of Berlin-Brandenburg) it's just Frankfurt Oder. As it is easy to confuse the town with the west-german Frankfurt the particle Oder is included even in colloquial speech. So taking a train from Berlin to Frankfurt goes west, but a train to Fankfurt-Oder goes east.
@@guidodraheim7123OK, now for the advanced level question: do the same for Tripoli. (Which one? Who knows?)
@@klopferator The "Other" Frankfurt, as I was reminded a long time ago...
I worked in electronics manufacturing for my entire career (retired now). Semiconductor fabrication really has 3 tiers. The top tier is cutting edge processors for the computing and communications industry (Intel,Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm etc.). The cost of entry is extremely large (startup investment is in the billions) and there are other very high barriers to entry. In the second tier we have DSPs, less advanced CPUs, ASICs, etc. To win here you need large customers that order in significant quantities and high yield is essential. Competition is fierce here. The lowest is the glue chips, timers, PLLs, logic circuits, switches etc. This is entirely southeast Asia and highly sensitive to labor/operational costs. One thing that is a massive hurdle across all tiers is the IP required. There are many patents and many players that you will need to have onboard, this is not trivial. I remember one event where we had a competitor that was coming out with a product and they were almost ready for mass production when they discovered they needed to license a patent from motorola. To their surprise we had an exclusive licensing deal on the patent and they had to write off everything they spent on that project. This is the nature of the game, mistakes are costly.
IP is disease in capitalism
Asianometry not only covering East Germany in general but my federal state as well? Awesome! Thanks!
The semiconductor space offers little room for failure unless you're already one of the very biggest who can stomach a few years of faltering revenue.
Zactly.... Well put.
Its an industry it would be impossible to catch up to the greats now. The gap is too big.
@@jasonosunkoya Wonder when those Taiwanese will start moving stuff over to Germany - or elsewhere in Euroop - or the USA
Can't help but read this as "unless you're Intel and can keep iterating 14nm++++ until Zen matures into a threat and Apple is fed up".
@@whohan779 Well... they're still alive. Their financial reports looks like polished turds. But they're still alive. Anybody else would have gone tits up.
Well done review. Regarding Infineon moving Corporate HQ to Switzerland - This was due to the corporate tax advantage that Switzerland was offering at the time. Many German tech companies made this move at that time. You didn't have to really move anything more than the corporate address and just a few dozen employees to Switzerland to get the tax advantage.
And you do not pay that tax, if you are forced to indirectly (via german cross state transfers) support the competition.
My guy how do you manage to get these vídeos out so fast, there's so much information in them and it looks like you do a fair bit (really a lot actually) of researching and studying before hand on the topics, and yet you pump these out with outstanding quality and their are always so insightful...
I truly don't understand how you do it but cheers mate!
Just know your job is not unappreciated though, I'm always here for them!
Same here
SAme here! As always, good stuff!
One reason is that he seemingly puts most of that time into actual research and much less into fancy video editing and animation, unlike much else on UA-cam. Most UA-camrs, including educational ones, seem to think presentation matters more than content.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn content > visuals !! 100% agree
He has an army of little yellow guys in goggles and boiler suits helping him out!
I was born in Frankfurt/Oder, raised there.
This is a story of my youth, yes there were big hopes since locals were proud on their knowledge in chip industry / research from better years.
I had understood roughly what happened back then, but not to the extend presented here. Never thought the story would be big enough to be explained by YOU…wow !
Subbed you for 2 - 3 years now. Learned a lot about global economics here.
The saddest thing is that taking maybe 100th the funds and starting up a little 3-inch fab line doing SiGe power transistors and other low-integration products would likely have been actually profitable and would have been a great step toward setting up a leading-edge fab later on. Why does everyone want to eat the whole elephant at once instead of one bite at a time?
You are wise and right, but that's not how tiktok-politicians works nowadays!
@@vornamenachname906Politicians wouldn't know Tik Tok from Snap unless someone else told them.
Because their goal was to create jobs, not products. This was basically the (local) government operating in communist mode.
Communicant! Haha! He could have named it Communicat with a logo featuring a kitty donning a communications headset. That may have fared better.
These videos always make the death of my weekend less depressing
You obviously don’t live in Canada 😋
Hang in there bud. There’s always next weekend 😁
@@Rubensteezy It is relative. You might not appreciate it but me residing in a corrupt shithole would like to inform you that Canada is a dreamland for me. Safe, economically prosperous, very high levels of freedoms and the ability to pursue enterprise. If you shut off the cultural wars nonsense on social media you will realize you live in one of the best countries on the planet.
@@hydrolifetech7911 Where you at
@@hydrolifetech7911 Unfortunately, I thought my Canadian inside joke would get my Canadian bros to show up. It was Thanksgiving long weekend, so we had the Monday off. Which furthers your point.
I do personally believe I am in one of the best places to be and have a lot to be grateful for. We have our own issues and problems brewing, but I do agree it's one of the best places to live.
A bit of nomenclature on german city naming. If you see something like "Frankfure/Main" or Frankfurt/Oder" it means that the city is located at/on a river, like the english nomenclature of "upon" and "on" depending on age. The correct pronunciation would be "Frankfurt an der Oder" or Frankfurt by the Oder" translated into English. This is very hard for non-german/germanic speakers to know, so don't worry about it.
When you say ODER, all communist bells do ring !
there is only one Frankfurt, LOL !
Native English speakers all understand ODER is communist East !
Also, a bit of an acCent on the wrong sylLable problem here. "Oder" ends up sounding like "Oh dehr".
In English it is also done in cities like Stratford-upon-Avon.
@@JonBrase I think O-duh would be closer in pronunciation
@@Max24871 If you're transcribing the correct pronunciation according to English spelling rules, yes. I was transcribing the pronunciation he used according to German spelling rules.
I'm a simple man. I see my country, I click
"Luftschlösser"/"Castle in the Sky" has no direct translation.
But the possible meanings include "delusion", "wish" (without having a magical genie), "fantasy" and "cloud cuckoo land". And of those, to "live in cloud cuckoo land" is probably the closest.
The American equivalent is 'pie in the sky'
Why are there 67 Springfields in the United States? Ask the springs.
Once again in awe of how well researched your videos are. Especially seeing all those original news articles from the time give great context to the surrounding situation.
TSMC is like a phoenix miraculously raising from the ashes of infinite crisis.
We all needed TSMC to do this.
Philips needed to outsource ASML, and outsource all semiconductor production to Taipei.
in 1989 we already outsourced it all, AMD in East Germany too them over, outsourced too now, Global partners now. Not getting new EUV fabs now.
At that time, Abu Dhabi had just bought the AMD fab in Dresden and Chartered Semiconductor of Singapore to form Globalfoundries, with the promise to build a Fab in the desert... Dubai was jealous!
And it ended up that it's not feasible to build a fab in the desert. Even the GF Chengdu fab was abandoned.
@@ntabile Everybody knew it at the time and was making fun of the idea..
True,
they invested heavy in AMD outsourcing it's Fabs to TSMC. A good thing that Global Foundries was outsourced in the late 2010 years.
The Dubai markets are not needing chips i guess, why build a fab there, just invest in TSMC only !
@@lucasrem 1) The TSMC only strategy is bad.
2) Abu Dhabi and Dubai live on Silicon! They see, smell, walk on Silicon every day. With oil and gas, it's their only resource. That's how they got hooked to invest in Semiconductor.
@@ardechirpakfar6823Not every sand is good for semiconductors :)
To be fair, the German word "Halb-leiter" is actually simpler than "semi-conductor".
I just wanted to interject that it's ambiguous with 🪜('ladder'), but that's a moot point as 'conductor' can also mean 'Schaffner', 'Zugführer', 'Dirigent' and probably more. 🤭
This happened during my school years. The economy was pretty uncertain in east germany and you could read stories of companies taking over sites and closing down again everywhere. However, almost no one understood the background. I think that the newspapers only described he current snapshot, leaving out the full story. So, the decisions seemed completely arbitrary to me. But this video was really eye-opening, because I now see how a such project/company starts out, how investors behave and how politics drag a dead project on for longer.
They really put the "I can't" in Communicant.
so much effort going into researching these stories. great work!
Releasing one of these every 3 days is insanity
Your videos and tech stories best in internet, thank you Asionometry ;)
When I read the title my heart skipped a beat: "OH NO! NOT MAGDEBURG!"
Let's wait and see how that goes.
The Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide also in the German state Brandenburg is 70 km to the west from Frankfurt(Oder).
It may be noted that Frankfurt (Oder) is directly at the Border to Poland. As wages are lower in Poland why should someone invest there?
And poland, as eastern europe in general, is better at software.
communicant truly is peak naming boldness 😂
Just love your video's , accurate , to the point , the humor. Keep going Please.
Praise for the succinct video on this failure. I had almost forgotten there was an attempt. In Brandenburg of all places.. there's more video potential with the others too! ;-)
Just nitpicking, the Potsdam City Palace as seen in 4:33 was only rebuilt by the year 2014; back in the early 2000s the old academy building on a hill nearby was the place the government convened.
Ge is heavily used in leading edge semiconductor processing, it increases the "strain" in strain silicon that is used in the small nm scale ICs.
Another factual and informative video! Great job as always 👍
Some minor explanation:
VEB means VolksEigener Betrieb. Public Owned Company.
Frankfurt (Oder) and in West Germany Frankfurt which is also called Frankfurt(Main).
That 18:20 WHOO 😂😂😂😂.. I felt it too
Great vid❤ the german names went hard in this one 😂
I well remember driving out there to discuss process chemicals and gases supply. There was always something overly ambitious and aggressive on their approach, that very different to the behaviour of any of the other Fab personnel on the globe. Every supplier and tool OEM somehow held back with their euphoria about this project and - strangely, nobody was really surprised when the whole project went down the drain.
We all also knew it will be a failure again, when they tried to convert it to a PV fab... 🤯😱🤦🏻
Very informative! Thank you very much! We are still doing 130nm SiGe:C technology research, and much more, in a different fab across the autobahn. Greetings from Frankfurt(Oder) / IHP
Germanium is principally used in optical fibre manufacturing to raise the Refractive Index (R.I. optical density) of the silica glass core to aid Total Internal Reflection (TIR). The typically 9um silica glass core is doped with germanium. The 125um cladding is pure silica deposited from pure silicon chloride. Germanium is the preferred dopant as it does not cause clouding of the silica glass.
As my German professor would say, "Its a Kerfluffle"
20:35 That's the Commerzbank in Dresden. I recognize it the Weinachtsmarkt is right outside.
The translation to "Lord Mayor" gave me a good chuckle. It sounds really old-timey for such a modern role. A more correct translation would be main or high mayor depending wether you prefer a more literal or functional translation. They are the leader of a larger city/provintal government, most often elected directly, or by a city council. Each city/provintial district has their own "normal" mayor and there is a higher rank for issues concerning issues effecting the entire area.
i learned a thing today (about frankfurt). it literally means 'ford of the franks', so the two frankfurts are named after the river they ford (oder and main)
Brandenburg is sort of known for failing big time on high profile projects. Many of the state's most iconic industries formed out of the aftermath of a failed high profile project like this. Brandenburg (along with Berlin) is something of a joke in Germany.
How do you raise Germany's GDP by 10%?
You transfer Berlin to Poland.
Berlin doesn't have space for these projects
@@erlorielfunny thing is, berlin doesnt just have a significantly higher than average GDP in the country and one of the highest HDIs, but its also what keeps all the shitholes like the one you live in relevant. Berlin is the sole reason germany is in the position it is and historically has been in for the last 150 years.
Berlin is essentially a tourist attraction surrounded by a slump.
You mean, like the Tesla Gigafab in Brandenburg?
Germanium diodes are also very popular for use in distortion pedals for electric guitars.
Not only is that market a completely different and primitive 1950's technology, it is a minute market - like a few hundred dollars a year at most.
XLR tech, high voltage Diodes, pedal boxes etc.
Digital analog conversion !
@@lucasrem XLR has been around for decades. Just new to amateur grade equipment that's all. Nothing high tech in a pedal box - even digital types. Germanium diodes go back to the 1940's. High voltage from the 1950's.
@@keithammleter3824A few hundred Dollars... 😂. That buys you about 5% of one vintage collector Tube Screamer... Hyped market... 🤦🏻
@@BigBoy4004 : that may be so, but the germanium diodes sell for only cents.
Well-researched and well produced.
you have one of the most relaxing videos on youtube.
It'd be cool if you sometimes added a map of the country and just make a shitty paint scribble of where we are at right now or so.
so in summary iresspective of socio-economic systems, managment structure or techology/ model, semi conductures are the cryptonite of the german economy
Doesn't surprise me. Germans precision when it comes to engineering is unmatched. But electronics seems to be their Achilles heel. I don't trust them to wire a toothbrush lmao
Anything new is the cryptonite of the german economy, that's why it's falling rapidly behind. The last couple of years there has been no german company in the top ten companies in the world.
Semi conductors are the cryptonite of the whole world, TSMC also depends on European and US companies. You need a gigantic infrastructure to manufacture chips. Billions of man-hours to produce your first CPU.
Excellent work as usual.
@Asianometry, Do you think canon can catch up with nanoimprint technology, litterally stamping the resin on and using inkjet to create resin droplets molded by the stamp.
I think my dude here is a researcher of some sort. You epitomize the example of knowledge dissemination through internet. I am lucky to benefit from your work for free.
He is an insider too, his father too.
He knows the market, and the history.
@@lucasrem good for us then :)
Could you give a bit more context or a link?@@lucasrem
1:46 furt means a spot where you can easily cross the river. So I guess there were these spots first at the river Oder and at the River Main, and they build Cities around it because of the rich traffic there
Anyone wondering: "Frankfurt (Oder)" is officially "Frankfurt an der Oder" or "Frankfurt on the Oder" in English. The "Oder" is the name of the river the city sits on.
I didn't expect this to be interesting, but then it was. Thanks!
"Frankfurt Ohdére" 😜 but jokes aside. Awesome videos. As always great video. Thanks for the context
the other day I was planning a semiconductor setup in satisfactory but i got hung up on a weird mental exercise. -what biome would be the the most efficient for a fab to be located. I know its not relevant for the game but I IF it were... Does humidity dictate more robust atmospheric scrubbing for the clean room environment? And thus more energy to run? Do the dust and heat from desert areas require hardware that costs more or less to use? is it a wash? google was not useful.
Would be nice to see some digestable video of how german production industrial methods landed from junkers via mitsubishi aero and from there to toyota motor company to become "lean" etc.
Would love a sort of guide video on how to build a semiconductor industry from the 1940s forward
FYI, Frankfurt am Main vs Frankfurt an der Oder.
As a former yechie I love learning about these catastrophic failures . Very educational 😂
A closet in San Francisco. Interesting choice of words (I know he's referring to the prices of housing there but still).
Worked at the new IHP site for the summer, seen the Astroenergy FAB. Just sad...
1:56 Frankfurt does exist 2 times here cause FURT is a description of a more shallow river where you can cross the river. And like in other cases seddlers left a city to move to a new spot and calling it with the same name, hence the addition of the river for the differentiation if you mean that on the Oder in the east or on the Main which is in the middle of germany. Easier then to explain Hannover and Hannover now called Hanover where the first is in lower saxony and the other in the USA or Braunschweig and Brunswick.
Don't worry, it's just taxpayer money.
to be fair this is much better than bailing out big banks, which is what the government has done for a while
@@Rafael-vi4to True. But then again, there's also a bunch of bird shredders visible from my balcony.
@@Rafael-vi4toor pay vacation for corrupt politicians
@@Rafael-vi4todon't forget that if the banks go bankrupt is the taxpayers who will lose the most
It's better paying some billions than people losing all they money
@@hecktorrhyanm146 But this will make the bank take unreasonably high risks if they can count on being bailed out. Let them crash.
Interesting video and topic, but you missed the significance of Frankfurt (along the) Oder (river). In the photos you have you can see the Oder river, on the left is Germany and right side is Poland. Significance here with the current EU laws, it's possible to live in the cheaper Poland city and then slap on "Made in Germany" stickers on your exports.
The significance of the effort has always been to revitalize the city’s East German semiconductor heritage. No mention of Poland was in the documents.
@@Asianometry It's a dirty little secret. According to rumors, a good portion of the workers in Tesla's Berlin factory live in Poland. The border is only 50km away.
@@the-quintessenz for germans 50km (one way) is a huge distance. Almost noone travels such distances on a day to day basis to work.
@@Magnus0891Hahaha thats more like the avg in my area we're a suburb 1 hr away from nyc.
@MagnusM. Maybe, you won't. But a significant number of people (4.5% according official 2019's stats) do commute 50+km (single way!) on a daily basis. 13 % commute between 25-50 km.
E.g., I commuted over 70 km so for 7.5 years. And for another 6 months I even commuted over 220 km (single way; by train) daily as alternative to moving, and expensive&crappy hotels. And a large percentage of my former colleagues continue to commute over 50-120 km, twice per day.
The point is: Rents in economical prospering places are often very high, appartements are hard to get, people have a social background, and they often won't force your family to move (often, they just built a house, and are high indents). And since commutimg is somewhat tax deducible, people bear it, until they find a job closer to their homes - if possible, that is (i.e. not too old, too unfashionable experience, etc.).
Great video, just for future references - the city is called Frankfurt (Oder) which means “Frankfurt an der Oder”, which translates to “Frankfurt on the (river) Oder”, with Oder being pronounced pretty much as it’s written - o d e r 😃
Thanks!
The startup costs for these big manufacturers is enormous. No wonder there aren't more big successful players in the market. Thank you for another interesting episode!
God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
The greatest thing about having two Frankfurts is neither of them being situated in Franconia.
"Franken" was how German merchants were named during the 13th century. Frankfurt Oder became a city in 1253 under the name Vrankenforde, which later on became Frankenforde and then Franckfurde. A "Furt" is an old name for a shoal in a river where you can cross that river on foot, on horseback or by vehicle. The Oder is a river. So Frankfurt is basically the "cross-able shoal near the market settlement" and that was used as a name when the settlement was officially declared to be a town. And as all of this is generic, you can imagine that there was probably more than one cross-able shoal near a market settlement in Germany. E.g. there was also one near the river Main. So these two cities can be distinguished by adding their rivers, making them Frankfurt am Main (aka Frankfurt a.M.) and Frankfurt an der Oder (Frankfurt a.d.O.), with "am" and "an der" meaning near by or next to. Yet as the one at the Main is way more popular, it's usually shortened to just Frankfurt and the other one is shortened to Frankfurt Oder. Their official administration names however are "Frankfurt am Main" and "Frankfurt (Oder)", those are the names used in all official government papers.
And the funny thing about 1:48 "Ask the Franks" is: the region Franconia contains neither of the cities (though it is close to the big one)
You basically just translated a section of the German Wikipedia while making it way more complicated than it has to be and adding mistakes. A "Furt" is a ford and I don't know why you wrote "an old name" because that's literally the word for it today in German. Frankfurt on the Main was founded at a ford (where its famous old bridge was also built) and was named after the Franks. It's unclear where Frankfurt on the Oder got its name from because it's not actually situated at a ford, nor in an area inhabited by Frankish tribes.
@@DerMef The German Wikipedia article is twice the size of my entire post in the first paragraph and I added information from multiple paragraphs and nobody is using the word Furt anymore; I asked everyone in my family, several friends a dozen co-workers today, nobody has ever even heard that term, yet they all know what a "Untiefe" oder ein "Überfahrtsstelle" is. Also confirmed by Duden, saying this word is barely used in practice und suggests using "Überfahrtsstelle" instead. Also comment adds no worth whatsoever. If you have nothing better to do that criticizing people who provide valuable information, please keep your critics to yourself in the future, as I doubt anyone cares for your comment here.
@@xcoder1122 You must be joking. Furt is a normal word that is in use today. "Untiefe" is mostly a nautical term used to describe shallow water which is dangerous for ships, but it's not as precise as Furt, which specifically refers to a shallow section of a river that can be used for crossing, just like the English term "ford".
I could not imagine that anyone would refer to such a shallow section that many cities, such as Frankfurt or my hometown of Fürth, were built on as anything other than a "Furt". That's just the word for it and that word hasn't changed. It's also very confusing to me that you're suggesting you asked around 20 people and nobody knew the word "Furt", that does not sound realistic to me, especially since you replied to my comment right away - you really asked that many people within a few minutes?
It's your comment that adds little value because it is riddled with errors. If you try to explain something, you should actually know what you're talking about.
Very interesting video and good job at pronouncing the german names!
I want to imagine that in a world, in which the iPhone was released just a few years earlier, eastern Germany got its long awaited high-tech-industry revival...
Name of the River Oder is pronounced just like the English word, and in German means "or". Frankfurt am Main (pronounced mine) contains an abbreviation or contraction for "an dem" (on the) which is different from the article used with Oder because they're a different gender, though that's unknown to me.
That money is peanut for the government. Our government spends $100 million a year just for one of the president's jumbo jets.
3 years is such a joke, i still cant believe it
@24:25 touché. Nothing was done with it and it has been defunct for a very long time now. 😂😅
I'm an electronics engineer who is curious about the progress of chip technology. Semiconductor courses were among the hardest topics in college for me so I didn't and couldn't go into that field of work but I remain just curious about it as it relates to what we engineers do.
Even if funding was simple and secure, I doubt that this venture would have succeeded. By the time that they would have gotten their clean room built, most Motorolans were already done with Padmasree Warrior's nonsense regarding SiGe as the technology of the seamless mobility future, and the lack of practical MOSFET production yields was clear to everyone in the field. East Germany has some very excellent tech workers (look at the AMD history of what is now GloFo's Fab 1, etc.), but SiGe was always likely to be a bad bet.
Why are there two cities called Frankurt in Germany? or even more? Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder. Furt means "shallow part of a river that allows crossing". The Franks, who were a group of Germanic people who lived in western and central Europe during the Early Middle Ages. (Their name survives in today's France, the German region Franconia (Franken), the EU's financial hub Frankfurt, and several other places.) Therefor we have several cities called Frankfurt because it names the place where the franks crossed the different rivers and settled, Oder, Main.
Really great episode, stories like this make me sad for my country though 😢
'rest in power doctor'
i never thought i would hear that black panther meme in a different context.
Regarding the two 'Frankfurts'- in German 'am' is a contraction for 'an dem' or "on the"- and German cities sometimes include the co-located river name so 'Frankfurt am Main' is 'Frankfurt on the Main river', and 'Frankfurt an der Oder' is just 'Frankfurt on the Oder', but I can not explain the masculine naming for Oder and not for the Main river!
Oder: female, Main: male. die Oder -- an der Oder (Where?), der Main -- an dem Mein (Where?).
huh, i knew about IHP in its current name (innovation for high performance microelectronics), never knew its origins, great video once again! though they don't mass produce circuits afaik, they still do SiGe research (their 130nm process is open source now) and they also perform prototype tapeouts for customers. reportedly a pretty nice place to work too.
It doesn't sound like it was necessarily done from the start, and since their issue was securing funding, being quiet before securing funding woul of just doomed it to fail before it even had a chance.
Early 2000 was for sure a naive failure, but since then Germany did heavily invest and build fabs for 60nm and bigger chips for specialized applications, there is still a need for (cheaper) non bleeding edge fabs
The name Frankfurt does not refer to the franks. A furt is a shallow water river crossing and frank means free. So obviously there are multiple places that would be named so.
It seems U.A.E( Abu Dhabi Investment Group) ended up buying AMD Fabs and Chartered Semiconductor Mfg. To become GlobalFoundries. And later on bought IBM Microelectronics Fab.
they cancelled 7nm and it seems they are doing pretty well stuck at 12nm
It's Frankfurt an der Oder. "on dare OHdur." (Sometimes just "Frankfurt/Oder". The Oder is a river. The other Frankfurt is on the Main (river) (pronounced "mine"), so it's Frankfurt am Main. But since it is a much larger city and Germany's financial capital, it's usually just called Frankfurt. English does the same thing. It's "Stratford on Avon," because there are other Stratfords.
It's "Frankfurt an der Oder" vs "Frankfurt am Main". Names after their river they're on.
True. Also, it’s prounced OO-der (oo as in book) rather than o-DARE.
Within Brandenburg it does not take the definitive article - just say "Frankfurt Oder". Wikipedia claims that only outsiders use the scheme established for Frankfurt am Main.
@@guidodraheim7123 Of course if you're local you don't need to be specific.
Just like there's Las Vegas (Nevada) and Las Vegas (New Mexico). Same idea. Same city, different state.
It die Oder, not der Oder. So its an der Oder, not am Oder.
@@python_l5367 And this is why alcohol helps to learn German.
“It’s not der it’s die so an der…”
LOL WUT?
Frankfurt am Oder is on the river Oder. Frankfurt am Main is located on the river Main.
I didn't know about this as a German. Thank You for telling the story!
A sad end result, which is not surprising with hindsight: Schröder was - to say it nicely - "a good friend" of big companies like Infenion (One of his nick names in Germany was "Genosse der Bosse", roughly translated "comrade of company leaders"). Less nicely: If they said "jump", he asked "how high, my liege and is this all I can do for you at the moment?" -- reports from companies like Gartner are well known for providing the results that the client tells them to provide and so, the puzzle fits nicely together:
Infenion didn't want a competitor and made that clear to the federal government, the federal government obliged by getting an "independent" report, which allowed them to cancel the loan, which killed the project. That the EU commission with their far more thorough examination (no, the myth that the EU is less transparent than national governments is not true) came to another result and gave the 320 million says all there is to say.
Anyway: Thanks for the thorough video! Was really interesting to see this sad saga rolled out in all of its ugliness and thinking about what could have been.
Very well done.👍
The usual situation, in order to earn commissions or powertrains for the political Carrera, devastating actions are carried out
Dubai isn't capital of the UAE, and there isn't much oil in Dubai. A lot of errors there in the video
Now they are paying billions to Tmsc to make chips in Germany. If you do not support your tech - you will support somebody else's sooner rather than later.
1500 vacancy with 6000 applicants are rookie number.
I read somewhere In india 50000 apply for a bank sweeper and it even include people who hold master degree.
Already thought you're going to shred the new fabs in Germany, lol
would it have made a difference if they held out till 2010? I think by then smartphones were starting to explode in popularity....?
1:50 Frankfurt means frank’s (tribe) river passage.... so thee are some in Germany...