Hacker News: bgnn

New comment by bgnn in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

bgnn — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:03:46 +0000

No comment on the second part, but the first part is wrong. EU doesn't have a moat in process technology anymore (since 2010s). They have a bunch of legacy fabs, like 350, 180 and 130 nm but Taiwan, US, and China (and others like Israel, or Singapore) have these too. EU is severely lacking behind chip design, production and packaging capabilities for industrial, automotive, and space kind of niche applications since the heavy divestment from semiconductors after 2008 financial crisis and 2015 Euro crisis.

On top of this, once European giants like NXP (formerly Philips semiconductors), Infineon (formerly Siemens semiconductors), and ST are actively reducing their footprint in Europe and moving to India or SE Asia.

In short: No, EU has no future in those markets as designer or producer of chips.

New comment by bgnn in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

bgnn — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:29:10 +0000

It's a poor take to be honest.

I'm an EE with main expertise in IC design but I design a lot of the chip packages, PCBs, mechanical stuff like custom made sockets etc and write a ton of SW, be it tools for myself for development and testing, be it the firmware of the chip I'm designing or another chip I use on the board. For me it never felt like SW was the hard bit, because you can write and test it pretty immediately and pretty much for free. HW felt harder because of the tooling costs, lack of documentation and examples, things that aren't obvious at the beginning (EMI/EMC) etc etc but these are very minor compared to the actual issue: long and expensive development cycles. Now, that doesn't apply if your HW is extremely simple and just a glorified uC and rhe development time is mostly the code running on it. This is why this is such a poor take. One can argue for anything at extremes. SW can be very very complex and much harder than HW, and vice versa at different extremes.

New comment by bgnn in "Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself"

bgnn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:27:11 +0000

Neato used to have a straight edge with 90 degree corners on both front edges. My Neato D7 is thr best robot vacuum I had. Unfortunately they shut down their cloud services, so it's useless now.

New comment by bgnn in "Why jet engines aren't made in China"

bgnn — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:56:43 +0000

As an engineer in semiconductors in the Netherlands, I hear from a lot of my friends working at ASML the typical red flags of the rot. They have a very thick middle management layer. Nobody feels like they are working at a high tech company with cutting edge solutions. I believe the customer support roles are very dynamic and satisfying.

New comment by bgnn in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

bgnn — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:36:54 +0000

It is actually a type of cypress, not a cedar.

New comment by bgnn in "Apple is going to raise device prices, but when?"

bgnn — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:50:13 +0000

I have been buying an Asus laptop with Intel for our employees in the last 1.5 years, an ASUS ExpertBook P5 90NX0861-M007X0 to be precise, and it did not see even a cent of price increase.

I suspect this is because of its CPU, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB RAM directly soldered on the CPU package, being overstock or something, or Intel secured the RAM supply upfront. I don't know but it's wild that this laptop is still early 2025 prices.

New comment by bgnn in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

bgnn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:50:33 +0000

You can and this is absolutely done for GPUs. It's often more feasible to jump to the next gen GPU at this point while the old part goes into the refurbished market. I believe China buys a lit of parts like these. You will never know how much lifetime is left in them though, as there's no history of the chip.

New comment by bgnn in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

bgnn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:25:09 +0000

Chips age and fail with age. You can check hot-carrier injection, bias-temperature instability and electromigration as they are the main aging mechanisms. All if these are a linear function of time but exponentieal of temperature. 90-100C these chips are running at are really tough, so they are likely to fail at couple of percent to 10% range in 2-3 years depending on the margins they have in the design.

The solder joints are notorious to fail at a high rate too.

New comment by bgnn in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

bgnn — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:32:06 +0000

Similar to an HFT company I know, using the money spent on tokens per developer as their efficiency metric. Insane.

New comment by bgnn in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

bgnn — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:25:30 +0000

Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.

New comment by bgnn in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"

bgnn — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:11:22 +0000

Even in late 90's the IP wasn't waponized. Most start-ups were just a bunch of employees leaving a company to compete with them while improving upon the previous IP.

Nowadays even start-ups are paranoid and starting a semicon company is orders of magnitude harder..

New comment by bgnn in "How Semiconductors Were Made in America"

bgnn — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:42:44 +0000

This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:54:22 +0000

This is plainly wrong. I'm a chip designer. There's no way to implement a DFF operating at 12 GHz in 180nm, period. This isn't an optimization problem, it is physics.

New comment by bgnn in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

bgnn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:49:35 +0000

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?

I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:19:25 +0000

12 GHz on 180nm? Sorry, that's not possible. What's the actual clock speed?

New comment by bgnn in "Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon"

bgnn — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:19 +0000

Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.

It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.

Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.

New comment by bgnn in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

bgnn — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:17:13 +0000

That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.

New comment by bgnn in "Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water"

bgnn — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:27:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by bgnn in "Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft"

bgnn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:50:32 +0000

Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.

New comment by bgnn in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

bgnn — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:18:40 +0000

14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.