Through its Minister of Commerce Gina Raimondo, the US government is pressuring semiconductor manufacturers and their customers to open their order books, in order to identify some of the causes of the current component shortage. Cross-country skiers don’t really want to, for many reasons. Such transparency would be likely to reveal the production yields of each process (therefore the technological advancement of the founder), secret supply contracts in first or second source, preferential tariffs obtained in one way or another …
The American authorities do not care, since most of the foundry is now located in Asia: they defend above all the interests of the American companies which are its clients. In addition, such information could be useful, for example, to Intel, which has recently moved closer to Washington and intends to become a major founder in the years to come. What to feed a little more the protests of TSMC, Samsung and others.
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