Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
Oh and you think one sentence taken out of context from a research paper makes your argument.
You read highly generalized reports, typical of RAND. Why don't you break down how much of weapons and systems are R/D cost and software development cost.
Anyone with some basic understanding of IT understands that software represents the greatest cost of all.
Go to the 052C/D thread and look at the numbers. Please have some understanding how volumes matter in production costs. And its basic accounting. If you have a 100 dollars of research cost, making only two items means you have to have pay off your research cost by only selling these two. This means your R/D cost each is $50. Make 10, and the R/D cost per unit is $10. Make a hundred and the R/D cost is $1. That's also how the chip industry works.
Brumby
Major
Taking your example it actually undermine your argument. If you want to go by economies of scale and as I pointed out from the CSIS report, China's local manufactures only produce 8% of the world wide capacity. When it comes to GaN the US currently has the biggest market share. China might eventually catch up but it is no help with your argument
That's labor for the shipbuilding itself. There is a labor cost in the development, coding, assembly and integration of weapons and electronics, that's already part of the those systems themselves. It will only cost you $90 for an FPGA chip, but what is the manhours required and the cost for the developers doing the microcode on it for a particular application?
This is how you mislead in argument. By modifying the language.
The keyword is DEVICES. These firms buy the GaN wafers then put them on the fabs to make devices. They design and make GaN devices. They are not however, the source of the substrates, anymore than a book publisher is the paper factory. Military however, uses boutique fabs, meaning companies like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman does not rely on these companies but fab devices on their own fabs. They only need to acquire the wafers from somewhere else.
An example is this company, which happens to be a world leader in making GaN wafers but isn't mentioned in the above.
Want to buy bulk GaN wafers in China? Just a few.
This particular page even shows links for GaN wafer substrates for RF use.
A lot of GaN wafers goes into lighting. China is pushing GaN based LED lighting nationwide to replace other forms of lighting in order to greatly reduce the power bills.
Sells to the US too.
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