Hey Trump, my advice is: in order to save semiconductor manufacturing in the USA, end all patent protection for semiconductor manufacturing as of Jan 1st 2030, trust me it is the only way !
Young people don’t know this, but back in 1970s the best stereo equipment and the best televisions were made here in the USA. By 1990 all electronics was made in Japan and now all flat-panel TVs and 80% of DRAM is made in South Korea. Biden passed the Chips Act giving $50 Billion to semiconductor companies to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to the USA but the Chips Act just throws money at a problem which cannot be solved by free government loans !
See the chart above from Statista.com showing semiconductor manufacturing by location all over the world. This manufacturing chart shows a trend that you also see in the award of patents in the field of semiconductor manufacturing, see my post on this subject. The most important thing to note is the red portion showing China increased from almost nothing in 2000 to about 20% in 2024. When you think of the “One China” policy of the USA as applied to semiconductors, all you need to understand is that over the last two decades, Taiwan has given China access to inspect and copy all the semiconductor manufacturing equipment and all the semiconductor design software and that China is quietly using (everybody knows this) all this knowledge when designing the chips used in China !
To understand how we got here, look at the graphic above from Statista, and look at the left-most column showing that almost 50% of all chip design is done here in the USA. You know why ? Because chip design is closely tied to the consumer, and the USA consumes more electronics than anywhere else in the world, and designing chips and selling the end product is the most profitable part of the semiconductor industry. Over the last two decades, most companies in the USA off-shored the chip manufacturing to save cost and maximize profit.
The worst of all is that the older larger feature fabs here in the USA were closed because they are not profitable, and the government let this happen even though the larger feature chips are the most used in our national defense (think missiles) and in our car industry, which is why during Covid there were cars filling the lots of General Motors and Ford which were complete, except for the dashboard and control electronics because there were no chips coming in from Asia. So in case of a war with China, we have to ask them to make the chips that we use in our missiles that we then use to fight China with, does this make any sense ? All this above may seem obvious to all, but here is the part that many people don’t consider :
Chip manufacturing generates more patents than chip design !
Did you know that ? Most people think it is the design that is important, but actually although the design makes more profit today, it does not generate patents whereas chip manufacturing which is less profitable does generate lots of patents, so if the current trend continues, then tomorrow China can stop us from manufacturing chips here in the USA by using our own US patent law against us, because China/Taiwan has been using all their profits from chip manufacturing to build a large portfolio of patents to use against us!