If you find that fascinating already... did you know that all cellphones use mechanical filters in the GHz range? They combine very good performance with very low energy consumption.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Surface_acoustic_wave" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Surface_acoustic_wave</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Akustische-Oberfl%C3%A4chenwellen-Filter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Akustische-Oberfl%C3%A4chenwel...</a> (pictures)

Very little uses crystal oscillators, they’re gigantic compared with electronics today and have very wonky performance over temperature and shock.

Fascinating. I suppose they can be smaller than quartz crystals?

FBAR is cool, but what can Claude come up with?

&gt;Broadcom will produce advanced radio frequency components — including FBAR filtersThin-film bulk acoustic resonator<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thin-film_bulk_acoustic_resonator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thin-film_bulk_acoustic_resona...</a>&gt;Trends to utilize RF spectrum more efficiently with higher frequencies than roughly 1.5–2.5 GHz and in some cases also simultaneously with increasing RF output power have supported FBAR technology to become one of the key enabling technologies in telecommunication realisations. FBAR technology complements and in some cases competes with surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology and FBAR resonators can replace crystals in crystal oscillators and crystal filters at frequencies more than 100 MHz.

Any company should definitely be planning for the inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and&#x2F;or trading partner.If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.

That isn&#x27;t 100% true, maybe 99% though. Anyone paying attention to politics for the last 40 years would have seen that there has always been an undercurrent of people unhappy with imports. This is the most power those people have had, but they have always been there and got significant political attention. There have thus been signs to be aware of, and those signs are things a smart company will take into consideration - they may or may not act, but they should know and consider them.

Apple invested 3x the Marshall Plan into China. Imagine if they&#x27;d spent that on the US instead.

&gt; No company can plan based on the tariffs. There is zero guarantee that then next government won&#x27;t revoked them or that the current one won&#x27;t flip-flop. Local manufacturing doesn&#x27;t swing on a 2-4 (or 6 or 8) year timescale. There needs to be consistency.Indeed, but the role of a government is to steer&#x2F;push private initiative in a certain direction.Tariffs and stuff are steering private companies towards building stuff in-house (as in: &quot;in the us&quot;).Future initiative inconsistent with this directions will essentially be a sabotage of the US economy.

No company can plan based on the tariffs. There is zero guarantee that then next government won&#x27;t revoked them or that the current one won&#x27;t flip-flop. Local manufacturing doesn&#x27;t swing on a 2-4 (or 6 or 8) year timescale. There needs to be consistency.The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when&#x2F;if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go. Heck, the factory might not even open before the winds shift.No one can accurately plan with the uncertainty.All the big names like Apple are just paying lip service to this. They are throwing, quite literally, pocket change or funds from the government (like CHIPS, which was less ham-fisted than the tariffs IMHO but still not something that&#x27;s going to change the landscape overnight) at these endeavours to appease the current admin in favor of reduced&#x2F;removed tariffs on _their_ products and good PR.If congress wanted to actually do their jobs instead of both them and the judiciary abdicating their responsibility to the executive branch then _maybe_ we&#x27;d have a chance in hell. Until then you can look forward to more flip-flopping as the government changes and the smaller companies continuing to be ground under the heel of large corporations who can weather (or bribe) their way out of the tariffs.

Also, by definition, if dollars left the country then stuff came in. We literally traded bit flips in a database for tangible stuff.

&gt; We literally can&#x27;t loseWho is &quot;we&quot;? Trade deficit dollars are recycled into assets, which compete with exports in the balance of payments. If you have a big house and fat brokerage account, you win big. If you have a job building shit, you lose big. If you have a job building tradeable shit and a low net worth, may god have mercy on your soul.If you want the full economist version, &quot;Trade Wars are Class Wars&quot; by Klein and Pettis

The tariffs have been highly destructive to local manufacturing because in the US we mostly build complex things made out of simpler parts which we import. The cost of everything we build simply increased and as a result many businesses selling relatively higher margin, higher complexity products had to scale back or shut down.More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.

Putting aside the lack of evidence that tariffs meaningfully reduced the US trade deficit as other posts here remarked, reduction of the deficit would be catastrophic for the USD based global financial system anyway so it&#x27;s bad for the US and bad for the world.Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and &#x27;give away&#x27; these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it&#x27;d first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as &#x27;hard money that everyone accepts&#x27;. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR&#x2F;CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods &#x27;for free&#x27; in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.

The turmoil comes not only from the fact of tariffs but from the manner in which the US operates tariff policy if you can call it that. It&#x27;s the equivalent of button mashing your game controller. There is a low upper bound to the effectiveness, and this approach isn&#x27;t just applied to tariffs. Firing scientists, blocking aid to children at random, musing aloud about invading NATO allies all adds up to wanton destruction of US soft power and reputation. The specific policies hardly matter in a shit storm of incompetence.

It&#x27;s adding a huge amount of economic turmoil, businesses are not investing because there&#x27;s no certainty, and there&#x27;s no more &quot;local investment&quot; except in newspaper articles.

The tariffs haven&#x27;t made any difference in the trade deficit. There was a large peak just before the tariffs went into effect but since then the deficit has been largely the same as it was before the tariffs.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bea.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;us-international-trade-goods-and-services-may-2026" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bea.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;us-international-trade-goods-a...</a>

If Trump sat on his hands for four years, he&#x27;d have been the best President ever.

This is more about the CHIPS act than the tariffs.

It is useful for the president to have emergency powers. However he should have been impeached for abusing emergency powers in a non-emergency. Same for his invasion of Iran - Iran has been building long enough that he had plenty of time to go to Congress for permission if he thought attacks were needed.

Exactly — this is CHIPS Act logic, not tariff logic. But the uncomfortable reality is that even with massive subsidies, reshoring mid-node RF components is very different from leading-edge fabs. Broadcom&#x27;s FBAR filters are important but they&#x27;re not the bottleneck. The real choke point remains leading-edge lithography equipment and the talent pipeline. Having watched Asia&#x27;s semiconductor ecosystem up close, the US can throw money at fabs but replicating the dense supplier networks around Hsinchu or Suzhou takes decades, not election cycles. Apple&#x27;s announcement is smart PR, but it&#x27;s incremental capacity, not a structural shift.

The biggest problem with the tariff policy is not the cost or even the uncertainty, it&#x27;s the corruption. A single person should not have the power to dictate the terms of trade, because the rational play in such a system is for businesses that rely on trade to pander to that person, and that&#x27;s corrupt.

If you onshore production via tariffs while having low unemployment, you are basically forcing your population to build basic stuff despite them having better things to do.This is somewhat justifiable with vital sectors like agriculture, but if you do this in an arbitrary way just for the sake of it you just make stuff more expensive and your workforce less productive for no gain.Those dollars are not just vanishing abroad, you are getting actual stuff for them, and your citizens then don&#x27;t have to spend their own time building it and can do something more productive instead.

&gt; they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in importsHave you accounted for the dollars that are no longer re-entering the country due to boycotts or retaliatory trade policies?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piie.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;realtime-economics&#x2F;2025&#x2F;trumps-tariffs-enrich-steel-barons-high-cost-us-manufacturers-and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.piie.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;realtime-economics&#x2F;2025&#x2F;trumps-ta...</a>Steel tariffs are calculated to cost ~$900k per job saved. It also makes all other industries in the US that use steel less competitive in the global market.

We are losing a lot more manufacturing due to the new tariffs on industrial parts than we are gaining from tariffs on finished products

If it had been done with coordinated investment&#x2F;lending from the government to spur domestic production it’d be a very good move. The economy is stalling (outside of tech) because there is no money for increased production domestically.

Chips are specifically excluded from the tarrifs.

Tariffs are in every way inferior to the prior administration&#x27;s CHIPS act and IRA, which are in the process of being destroyed merely because they had bipartisan support.

&gt; causing fewer dollars to leave the countryMight cause fewer dollars to enter the country too. Closed doors block both directions. Other countries are watching and responding in kind. Maybe not that much at first out of fear of retaliation but builds up momentum.

The tariffs have done nothing to improve the budget deficit (not even worth mentioning the debt) and consumer prices are higher than ever. We’ve seen no benefits.

It&#x27;s just from articles like this and what I read on the DIY solar forums, so it&#x27;s interesting to see the real numbers, thanks.

Please provide sources for your feelings, as the facts all seem to indicate that the deficit is rising. As well as inflation. And the national debt.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;balance-of-trade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;united-states&#x2F;balance-of-trade</a>None of his promises ever come to fruition. Stop hoping.

For some recent data, see the diagram &quot;Semiconductor foundry capacity 8&quot; &amp; 12&quot; - by foundry location (in %)&quot; at [1] for a rough idea of kWpm (thousand 300mm equivalent wafer starts per month) for key countries&#x2F;regions for 2024, 2025 and prediction for 2031. China and ROK are predicted in this report to have the largest overall market share increases to 2031.For some more detailed data (hard to find it publicly available), also see the OECD report at [2], particularly pages 18 and 20 (as numbered). This report provides a breakdown of ~2024-2025 per-country&#x2F;per-region capacity by chip type (power, analog, speciality memory, commodity memory, advanced logic, mature logic) and a prediction for pre-country&#x2F;per-region upcoming capacity increases by chip type.There are markets within markets of course. China dominates in power electronics which makes senses when you consider even just their domestic demand for electric vehicles and renewable generators. Taiwan dominates in advanced logic and exports pretty much all of it. ROK dominates in commodity memory and also exports pretty much all of it. When you compare populations of China vs. USA, the USA are&#x2F;will be punching above their weight for analog and advanced logic chips, which is also where the focus of their investment is.In categories such as power electronics and mature logic which China dominates, labour cost is much more important than categories such as advanced logic where equipment is the overwhelming cost. For this reason you&#x27;ll find China (and maybe even India if they bother to get into the market) dominate these categories due to lower costs of labour. Traditional competitors in these categories such as Onsemi and STMicroelectronics have been hurting.[3]It&#x27;s hard to predict which announced&#x2F;planned investments will go ahead and be impactful, for various reasons such as utilisation rates of fabs once built. But it&#x27;ll be particularly and increasingly difficult to predict the future of semiconductor fabrication due to what is happening in China. China has expanded their domestic chip making equipment industry enough to mandate Chinese fabs use at least 50% Chinese equipment.[4] Over 2024 and 2025 the investment from China into chip making equipment was estimated to be 37-42% of global spend, so we&#x27;re talking about 20% (or maybe higher up to 40%) of global chip making equipment spending not being readily observable.[5][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yolegroup.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;report&#x2F;status-of-the-semiconductor-foundry-industry-2026&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yolegroup.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;report&#x2F;status-of-the-semic...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;dam&#x2F;oecd&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;reports&#x2F;2025&#x2F;12&#x2F;the-chip-landscape_27ef5d87&#x2F;02dbd028-en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.oecd.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;dam&#x2F;oecd&#x2F;en&#x2F;publications&#x2F;report...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendforce.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;news-power-chipmakers-stmicroelectronics-and-onsemi-struggle-amid-market-downturn-cutting-thousands-of-jobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trendforce.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;26&#x2F;news-power-chipma...</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;china-mandates-50-domestic-equipment-rule-chipmakers-sources-say-2025-12-30&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;china&#x2F;china-mandates-50-domest...</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semi.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;SEMI-Reports-Global-Semiconductor-Equipment-Billings-Reached-135-Billion-in-2025" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.semi.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;SEMI-Reports-Global-Semiconductor-Eq...</a>

$30 billion for “hundreds of jobs.”Theater to keep Mad King Trump off their back.

&gt; As much as I hate the source of the tariff policies, from an uneducated outsider PoV, they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in imports.Much has simply been replaced by nothing at all, i.e. businesses shutter rather than deal with the mess, or ride out until the midterms to see if sanity and rule of law returns at least in Congress. The only ones who actually make an effort are the big companies like Apple that for one need to stay in Trump&#x27;s good graces lest he slaps them with foreign-asset crap like he did with Anthropic and OpenAI, but also need to divest from China and Taiwan for geopolitical reasons.

I&#x27;d encourage you to educate yourself.Analysis of previous tariffs have found they cost a ton, drive prices up, and increase corporate profits.The 2018 Trump washing machine tariff raised prices not just for washers but also dryers (12%), and cost $820,000 per job onshored.A 2012 chinese tire tariff cost $900,000 per job onshored.It&#x27;s terrible business.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.aeaweb.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdfplus&#x2F;10.1257&#x2F;aer.20190611" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.aeaweb.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdfplus&#x2F;10.1257&#x2F;aer.20190611</a>

Tariffs are only 10%. They&#x27;re not 20,30,40% anymore. Supreme court struck those down.So this is just a tax on imports for mostly the middle class.Furthermore, this is the results of the CHIPS Act, which gave incentives for TSMC to build the Arizona fabs.

As much as I hate the source of the tariff policies, from an uneducated outsider PoV, they do seem to be causing fewer dollars to leave the country in imports.How does it feel from an insider perspective? Are the increased costs on imported items and dependent services worth it for a bit more local investment?

I have 15 years experience working in high tech electronics manufacturing (for a global firm with factories around the world, including in the US and China) and can tell you the most difficult thing to manage is the supply chain. For time as much as cost, but if you have to ship a $.10 component 6000 miles to get it to a factory, it&#x27;s pretty dang inefficient.That said, you&#x27;re right about cultivating new experience in younger generations. It&#x27;s probably not surprising to hear that the majority of factory workers in the US are GenX or older.

Not just experienced staff but an entire ecosystem of supporting startups, industry, talent, and infrastructure around the main fabs.

I figure supply chain migration is an incremental process and any progress is a win. In my mind some of the tech needs genuinely experienced staff and that must be seeded somehow.Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)

This seems to be paying lip service to creating a supply chain in the USA. These are not anything like Apple Silicon ARM chips, they are not even Wifi chips?

Probably to highlight us investment and get authorization for buying Chinese memory

Apple is already purchasing these Broadcom analog components that is made in the US.This isn&#x27;t exactly new [1] ( Apple announces multibillion-dollar deal with Broadcom for components made in the USA ), and this was in 2023.I am not exactly sure what is the timing of this for. Why now?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;apple-announces-multibillion-dollar-deal-with-broadcom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;apple-announces-multi...</a>

That merely hundreds of people can make a $30B investment return Apple&#x2F;Broadcom-level profit margins is amazing.This is what technology does: More output for less labor input.

The jobs part of the announcement is just for political PR.This is still just making parts of an AI server rack at TSMC Arizona or Intel or Samsung fabs on US soil. Broadcom was likely going to do this anyway.

I mean its the same thing as the data center investments.Think whatever you want about them, whether they&#x27;re good or bad when it comes to environment, public health etc.But one thing cannot be ignored - that they are not built to employ some large swath of people. They can be run with very lean teams, much leaner than the average person thinks for something so large. Any claim that they are employing some measurable amount of people is a sham they try to push onto the public.

Downvoted for stating the obvious lmao

30B investment for &quot;hundreds&quot; of US jobs seems like a weird number to brag about

Probably around the same people started saying &quot;I have an ask&quot; and &quot;that&#x27;s a nice solve&quot;

&quot;created with&quot;, à la &quot;built with&quot;

Marketing departments everywhere have been letting internal corpspeak just leak out lately. OAI&#x27;s announcement shutting down Sora was similar:&gt; To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you&quot;built community&quot;?

When did we start using the wording &quot;increase spend&quot;?

This sounds like specialized analog components. Not the modem.

Apple now designs its own modems, and its TSMC that fabs them. OP is asking if Broadcom might start fabbing those modems. This is not the case here, but you seem to ignore the fact Apple is a modem designer now.

The modems are made by _Qual_comm, not Broadcom.Different company.

Could this simply be to provide chips for the products that still haven’t transitioned yet over to Apples in-house C chip.Like: Apple Watch, most models of iPads, Pro model of phones, etc.Because without this deal, Apple would have had to transition all products by end-of-year.

&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;english.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;336478&#x2F;is-it-really-ok-to-use-spend-as-a-noun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;english.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;336478&#x2F;is-it-rea...</a>I&#x27;ve mainly seen it used this way in business contexts

The same reason it&#x27;s &quot;ask&quot; and not &quot;request&quot;

Spending is also a noun. A gerund used to be the way you nounify a verb. “Ad spending” is perfectly grammatical, unlike “ad spend”.This seems to be part of a broader trend, not just business. One group of pastor-students would talk about giving a “preach”. Drove me nuts.

spend is a noun in this sentence. As a noun, spend refers to the amount of money spent for a particular purpose or over a specified length of time

Why is it &quot;spend&quot; and not &quot;spending&quot;?

Because as it’s written it specifically indicates it’s a financial move: give Broadcom more money for more chips.As you wrote it, it could be an IP partnership, Apple opening a fab, or something else.

This is specifically finance language for budgeting and one of the better ways to speak about this given the public disclosure of this information is substantial for their publicly traded stock.

It&#x27;s much more specific. &quot;Spend&quot; would increase Broadcom&#x27;s revenue. &quot;Partners with&quot; might be anything: investment, R&amp;D assistance, whatever.Both are public companies so they might be required to reveal these details

In English (is it worse in American English?) we frequently convert gerunds into simpler forms of the word. The spending turns into the spend. Related,the request turns into the ask (although this example turns out to have a strong anglo saxon linguistic bias).

It&#x27;s gramatically correct, spend is a noun here (but you expected a verb).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;spend#Noun" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;spend#Noun</a>

I hear this frequently in the US business community, as an alternative to &quot;spending&quot;.

It sounds off because “increase” can be a verb or a noun and “spend” can also be used as a verb or a noun (but is more often used as a verb) so you’re brain is trying to parse the sentence with dual meaning terms

It sounds better on the quarterly report than &quot;Apple will pay more money&quot;

Your proposed sentence contains less information.The initial headline also conveys both that there is current spend with Broadcom, and that the future spend is higher than current levels.

&quot;spend&quot; as a noun is a linguistic differentiator to indicate what a badass MBA program you attended.

Help pump AVGO by tipping sentiment and creating a visualization of billions getting dumped into Broadcom.

I think they were complaining about grammar. Shouldn&#x27;t it have been &#x27;spending&#x27; rather than &#x27;spend&#x27;?

&quot;increase investment with&quot; maybe?

I think it just means they had been partnering in the past and now they&#x27;re expanding it with more investment.

That&#x27;s an ask for Apple, not us ;)

What is with the phrase &quot;increase spend&quot;? It just seems gramatically .... off. Why not say &quot;Apple partners with Broadcom to produce billions more US chips&quot;.

Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips