On the other hand, I stand with Larry Summers in opposition to Senator Sanders on the semiconductor manufacturing bill.
I was deeply involved in these issues both supplying the semi industry and as a customer. I designed, manufactured, and marketed Total Organic Carbon Analyzers (essential semiconductor manufacturing instruments); and also designed and marketed trick PC memory boards that broke the 640K boundary.
At that time, semi-conductor companies designed and manufactured their products, but typically in separate facilities. The staff were likewise divided into design engineers who were computer aided desk jockies manipulating digital models and testing prototypes with oscilloscopes; and process engineers who tended to be hands-on chemists, mechanical engineers, metallurgists, roboticists, and technician worker bees.
This labor division turned into separate specialized companies, with the brand names sticking with the design facilities and the wafer fabrication turning into contract manufacturing foundries. This was driven by the escalating scale of investment for the quantum leaps in miniaturization, integration, performance and scale of the products in numbers of transistors, now over 100 billion transistors on one chip.
The extreme was reached in the last decade, when only one foundry in the world advanced to the latest peak of 'process shrink' - TSMC. There simply was not enough global business to justify the capital investment in a competing duplicate facility. (Side note this is the biggest issue over Taiwan - TSMC is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
So now all the latest chips for computers, phones, internet infrastructure, precision missiles and radar, satellites, rockets, military aircraft, et. are only available from the Republic of China (ROC).
This is an obvious security threat, even without a bristling, shouting aggressor 110 miles away. The US needs domestic current technology wafer fabs, and the US semiconductor design companies can't afford the capital outlay by themselves because they have all been sharing the one wafer fab in the ROC.
"$76 billion to subsidize a profitablem industry" is therefore an ignorant mis-characterization of reality.
