Does that mean, though, that there will be fewer jobs in Silicon Valley in the long term — just very good ones? Or do you see the number of jobs actually increasing over time in the region?
The job opportunity profile will change over time as it has with every turn of the evolutionary wheel in technology. For example, in the IT world, it wasn't a few decades ago that the highest-paid technologists in software were writing Cobol. Now it's a global commodity that's dying out. Today the highest-paid technologists are writing C++ and playing with esoteric new languages that may or may not get attraction. But someday, that's going to be commoditised.
Can you make any kind of guess on the numbers, though?
It just depends on how things get organised and what else is here.
I was just reading a study put out by a former Department of Defense official named Michael Pillsbury. He described reports that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will open a design-service centre in China, and that the country just got the second edition of its Godson chip, designed in a home-grown fashion. (Godson II is said to be a 64-bit processor able to run at 500MHz.) I'm curious about whether or not these are signs that China is taking the reigns of the semiconductor industry — not just the manufacturing work, but its higher-level stuff.
No, I [view it as] an important milestone but not as a signal that China is taking the reins.
If you look at what TSMC is doing — and by the way, Fujitsu and NEC and Philips and LSI Logic and many, many other companies are doing the same thing — what they're doing is harnessing Chinese engineering talent to design devices in many cases for the Chinese market. [That] is one of the important reasons to put your design capability there, so that you're eligible to sell into that Chinese market opportunity but do the manufacturing in a TSMC or an NEC or an LSI manufacturing facility. Think of it as developing a funnel of business by offering design services to customers who happen to be in China.
