Thanks. I wasn’t planning to go there anyway…
It’s annoying how the title throws such a general open question and then they don’t clarify this at all… there isn’t even a single match for “USA” or “America” in the whole article, you have to sort of guess.
Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don’t think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.
China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I’m not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.
But we’ll see, maybe I’m wrong.
Silicon is like $3/kg (and that’s the higher price, it’s actually cheaper outside USA). I’m not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it’s the second most abundant element in Earth’s lithosphere (the first being oxygen)… I don’t think the “line must go up” attitude around pushing for Moore’s law is a worthy effort. I’d rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don’t feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.
I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I’m not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don’t think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.
Would using bismuth in chip production affect the price of medicaments?
Can you point to a specific law that the EU has passed in this direction?
Cos according to the article all attempts to pass something like this that have been presented in the EU have been blocked. By the EU.
An alternative title could have been: “EU Possibly The Only One Who Has Been Explicitly Rejecting Backdoor Mandates Until Now”
Sure, proposals keep being presented… but I feel it’s kind of a bit early to call the EU “greatest threat” just because yet another attempt has been made. Specially when you compare it with many other places where they apply things like this without batting an eye.
I’m not saying we (Europeans) shouldn’t push (yet again) to make sure this also fails… but the title of the article is a bit misplaced, and after a history of successful rejections I feel a lot more optimistic.