Why Europe Lost Semiconductors

Correction:

Links:

[grizwoldphantasia]

I worked at a company around 1990 with a guy whose entire job was researching alternative components from around the world; if he could save a penny per product for something which sold a million units, that's $10, 000, and he did that several times a week. He said the only data books he routinely ignored were the French ones, because they insisted on making up artificial French words for all the parameters, and he couldn't pick them out of the descriptions. He couldn't read any of the foreign languages, but he didn't need to just for skimming ... except the French data books.

[timschulz]

Siemens is similar to Xerox. They have great patents and ideas, they sell the stuff or lose interest, some years later other companies make billions with the knowledge.

[michael-j-harrison]

European semiconductor companies have managed to carve out some niche areas of technology that they are very competitive in. Infineon and STMicroelectronics are arguably the leaders in power semiconductor devices.

[Omegaman]

In England in the late 50s my Father was working at G.E.C with 2 friends he had met through his apprenticeship with them. They were producing germanium transistors, he said so many failed that they had oil drums on the production line filled with duff transistors. My Father stayed at GEC and went on to work with Polaris and Trident guidance systems. His Friend John Carey moved to Canada then to California where he was one of the founders of AMD.

[alivepenmods]

I was a student in Electronics in France in 2010. All my professors told us to go and pursue Software engineering instead, due to the state of the local electronics job market.

The year after, the state reformed the degree, changing it to a more software oriented one, getting rid of labs, electronics professors and all forms of handcrafts.

Pretty sure this knowledge has almost vanished in the country, due to a mix of people retiring and not having trained enough youngsters. We'll never be able to reclaim the ground we've lost in the last 20 years.

[LiamDennehy]

I can't imagine how much research goes into the videos. Thank you so much for recording these histories.

[tookitogo]

23:14 No. It means “a bank with an attached *electrical* division”, which is a very different thing. Throughout this video you’ve referred to Siemens as a consumer electronics company, but that is not at all what they were, then or now. Siemens was an early pioneer in _electrical_ equipment, not consumer electronics: telecom, power generation and distribution, motors, locomotives, etc. While their history did take them through various areas of electronics, consumer electronics was never a large part, and even electronics as a whole was dwarfed by their electrical products. Today, their main business is industrial automation, followed by healthcare (MRI machines, etc.), building automation (HVAC, etc) and so on.

[paulmercier]

Entered semiconductors in the early 1960's as a Manufacturing Process Development Engineer. Began with Sprague Electric producing germanium, then silicon, silicon epitaxial transistors and our first integrated circuits, all within a three year tenure. Next to IBM's SLT Logic Module Program supporting the IBM360 System introduction and liaison to its Essonnes, France Operations. As an insider I can attest to to the frantic pace of development during this period and my choice to subsequently move into computer systems hardware and software manufacturing. This in retrospect was not much better excepting that the end product applications were very exciting!

[someguy]

Love your videos!
As a german i feel like a similar thing happened / is happening in the space of Software engineering / information technology, where different automotive companys are striking deals with us-chips and software companies like google/nvidia right now.
I think your assessment that there is an underinvestment towards disruptive technology is absolutely on point.
This also seems to be happening with the chips act, where companies like Infineon will get a lot of money just for building new fabs based on established processes.

[shaunoen]

The angel food cake metaphor is suggesting the best ideas come from unlikely places and putting out something ordinary might come back as extraordinary.

[cogoid]

There is still some nice stuff in the 10% which Europe holds in the semiconductor market. Even beyond ARM and ASML tools, which everybody is talking about. STMicro has a nice niche in the micro-controllers and also in some specialty photonic devices -- like single chip laser rangefinders. They also fab RF, digital beam-forming and modem chips for Starlink user terminals. AMS in Austria has nice magnetic sensors. Nordic is fabless, but their chips go into lots of wireless devices. There are lots of companies with nice products, though of course nothing like Nvidia or Intel.

[JohnnieHougaardNielsen]

As a student in what is now called IT, I saw a mainframe computer from Siemens being installed there (around 1975), and became what I used while learning about programming. Technical manuals were in German, but the computer was basically a "compatible clone" of IBM System/360. While it was manufactured in Germany, not much in even trying to be "leading edge", and it became another dead end, and likely not something making Siemens a lot of money.

[segarallychampionship]

23:43 Some part of AEG survived until the 1990s, at which point it bought the East German LEW Hennigsdorf plant for manufacturing electric locomotives (that plant belonged to AEG before the Cold War). And in the same decade, that same part of AEG was absorbed into ADTranz, which was several years later bought by Bombardier, whose former rail vehicles division is now owned by Alstom. The Hennigsdorf plant still operates today.

[segarallychampionship]

For the record: The building on the picture at 24:36 is Palast der Republik, which was in eastern Berlin.

[simonreij]

i should comment more, I'm not on your patreon so it's the least I can do. when I see you've posted a new one i wait til i have a good moment to really settle in to watch it. it's hard to believe that you can make such exquisite stuff and for it to be worthwhile for you, hence the patreon I guess. i am unemployed, i don't have much spending money, it is such a pleasure to watch these videos for free thankyou

[wizzardofwizzards]

Once again, superb compilation of meaningful historical tech content. Upon seeing the "Beckman Instruments" on the Shockley building, I wondered about the possibility of historical content on electronic test equipment like Fluke, Hewett Packard, Tektronix, Rohde & Schwarz, and Simpson. Any chance in the future?

[grizwoldphantasia]

The pattern I see at 25:50 is that companies which rely on government for leadership and research end up losing their way and eventually going broke. Somehow reminds me of Airbus's A380, seemingly built only to be bigger than the 747, when all market research said midsize airliners were the future.

[rollinwithunclepete]

Jon, this video was super informative. It certainly whetted my appetite for that other video you teased us with.

[richardrisner]

"Difficult to do semiconductor research here" - things like this are why yours are the best technology history videos.

[ΣτελιοςΠεππας]

All the reasons you mentioned are valid but I believe it all comes down to one thing, money.
In the 50s and 60s American (both the government and the civilians) had more money than they knew what to do with. In such an environment it's no surprise that even smaller companies that are "riskier" can easily secure funds.
As for Japan... Well it was a single large nation with incredibly low labor costs and a government that had a strong hand in the private sector. Europe is made of multiple countries and as mentioned the governments of those countries were never as aggressive as the Japanese government was.