It’s going to turn out that a nation of billions can, surprisingly, figure out how to make chips domestically once it is no longer possible obtain them efficiently from external markets. This might take a few years to ramp up but it will happen and the market will be flooded.
Most people I’ve talked to on forums like this believe it is impossible for various reasons that center around technical competence.
I am no lover of Chinese governmental policies but this attitude is both racist and risky. I am old enough to remember people saying Japam was only good at copying Western inventions, for example. I also remember a few years later when everyone wanted to learn to speak Japanese and The Book of Five Rings was the hot CEO book of the month.
China will figure this out.
and the market will be flooded.
China will figure this out.
Nope. China won’t figured it out and will only be able to do semiconductors that trail behind a lot for a very long time. The smallest node that actually works for them is 16 nm, SMIC’s 7 nm in the new Kirin 9000S Chip is not even close, especially compared to the Krin 9000 wich is made with TSMCs 5nm node. Performance and Efficiency are up to 45% behind TSMCs stuff (Which is not something that can be explained away with just because of the smaller node).
But that’s not all: The way SMIC manufactures these chips is extremely expensive, due to the fact that they have to use multi-patterning. This also effects yields significant. They have no chance to compete on the open market against Samsung, Intel and TSMC, even with the high subsidies from the Chinese government. Also, while the way they are being produced allows for 6 nm, the gate length and contact width are going to reduce yield even more.
So they simply can’t flood the market.
I feel like this is very short sighted. Yes, they can’t do it now. Yes, they are far behind…
But as a manager and a father, the textbook way you get someone to truly learn something and grow is to give them pointers, give them a reason to want to do it, and then let them figure it out on their own. This is how kids learn to walk, how people get good at games, how employees are pushed to learn and grow in their roles, and how countries develop their own tech.
China clearly has enough examples and pointers (legally or not), and now we have a given them a reason to do it (barring them from importing it, but still needing the tech). It will take a while, and their end goals and processes might be different than what ours were. I.e., Sometimes my kid thinks of doing something a different way and it still works. Time will tell. But in the end, they will have their own logistics, their own factories, and their own products. They might be worse, but they could definitely be better, that’s all up to them.
If you wanted China to stay dependent on us, then this was not the right move.
Eventually maybe. But it will be super tough to get to the leading edge, because by the the time they reach where the rest of the world currently is, the rest of the world will go a couple more steps ahead.
What companies like ASML have achieved are half a century of R&D that even if china just copy, paying no attention to IP, there are so many things to perfect. Things like the specialized mirrors and optics that are needed.
China can probably one day get to where the rest are currently in a few years, but to both manufacture and keep per unit costs down at the same time is not an easy hurdle to cross.
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I work with a few people from China. What do you think they will say if I ask them if they have a way to say yes to other people in the language they speak when they call their parents?
I would wager that if you asked that question to Chinese people, they’ll answer something like “we use 对, which means correct”, as I explained earlier.
Ask them if they like ice cream, but to answer in Chinese.
They are not going to say “对", they’ll say ”喜欢“（I like it), “不喜欢”,(I don’t like it) or some variation.
They won’t say 对 because “correct” doesn’t answer the question “do you like ice cream?”
You can get an approximate or what you can assimilate as a functional answer to your questions, but you’ll never get a “yes”.
That’s just how “yes” works in all Chinese languages and dialects.
And this is the tip of the iceberg.
Lacking a word for"yes" is one difference among thousands this culture has that determines their reactions to what you think are subtle influences, while you are assuming that culture will react in a way that you understand, even though you can’t understand it by virtue of your simple, practical differences and context.
How about “shi”…?
Bearing in mind that this is a fraction of a percent of the cultural differences, "是“ means “it is” and "不是“ means “it isn’t”. Neither of them mean yes or no, and would be an incorrect answer to “do you like ice cream?”
" Do you like ice cream?"
" It is."
You can understand what they’re going for, but you are not prompting the response you would expect to because that answer doesn’t exist in those languages or in those cultures.
The framing and context of a single word seems small, but when you’re asking a child “do you like ice cream” but you’re not allowed to ask it in anway that they can say yes or no to you and employ the complexities and implications of those words, the situation is different.
" You like ice cream, correct or incorrect?"
They’ll answer you, but you’ve taken away their independent facility to formulate an answer.
" Ice cream is good, is it or is it not?"
Again, they’ll answer you, within the strict confines of your question. There’s no gray area in your question, which is how you have to ask it in order to elicit any sort of response.
You give them two possible answers, they choose one.
That in turn shapes how you and they see questions in general. How questions and behavioral prompts like the types you’re suggesting are perceived, are asked and responded to.
You can imagine how linguistic formation can determine thought processes pretty quickly, layer upon each other and result in a consciousness you don’t quite recognize.
And that’s from one word among a couple dozen thousand, and those are all only words and ignoring all other parts of the culture.
what does this have to do with semiconductors?
It’s a response to an example from a commenter saying that if the US treated China like the comments are treats their own child, they’ll be able to manipulate and receive a desired response, and that the US is going about semiconductor sanctions wrong.
This is a terrible analogy, as the US and China do not have a paternal relationship, or share similar cultural or behavioral contexts or environments, and there’s no reason that the US should expect China to respond to its prompts how the US expects china too
theres nothing paternal about relationships between countries
in fact we are siblings.
Nothing paternal, that was the problem here. It’s a pretty insulting analogy
Maybe cousins, with the distance, equal standing and cultural differences.
7nm isn’t close to 5nm? There’s a difference of 45%? What! No way!
Fact is, the Huawei Mate 60 has moved over 30 million units. While that’s in no way comparable to Apple’s 200+ million units annually, it’s a significant scale representing a robust supply chain that’s capable of churning out functioning chips. If, by your claims, yields are low because of an immature process, then you’d only expect yields to go up as the process matures.
Yield is not a static factor, but one built on by process development and co-design. You can look at how Intel’s yields have increased over the years: they refrained from using EUV on their 10nm (Intel 7) process and, while they ran into a bunch of engineering challenges and delays, still ended up shipping Intel 7 at scale.
These aren’t unsolvable issues, but ones of engineering and manpower and skill. EUV still requires multi-patterning for 3nm, so it’s not like the problem has been eliminated.
That is the opposite conclusion of this article you didn’t read and it’s extremely unlikely for many reasons.
China will eventually be able to compete in the mass semiconductor commercial market fort non-essential chips, but are about as far away from today’s advanced chip manufacturing as your '99 iMac is from the Oculus Rift.
If the sanctions remain in place and are effective, the only way China will catch up is to develop an entirely new manufacturing process(which they are trying to do, blindly) as well as develop comparable physical fab technology to tsmc(which at their current tech is like trying to build a pixel 9 from scratch with hands tools).
Anecdotes from forum users can be entertaining but are not indicative of anyone who knows anything about the industry, and this article explains very clearly why the market will change but China is facing near to completely insurmountable challenges when it comes to competing in the advanced semiconductor market.
Taiwan, the only country that could help china with this, is strongly opposed to China on most fronts, direly opposed to helping China technologically since that would mitigate Taiwan’s leverage, and has allied themselves with the most powerful and technologically advanced country in the world(outside of semiconductors; smooth move Taiwan), another opponent of China based on their national security, on which the states spends obscenely more money and resources on then anyone else.
“Well china could take over taiwan our they did Hong Kong.”
In which case, tsmc would physically destroy their fabs and data, China would gain nothing and lose any goodwill they’ve been cultivating and spending billions on, with more sanctions than before and end up even further behind than they already are.
The distance China is late to the chip game and the extreme technological limits of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacture are not racist and it’s nonsensical of you to imply they are.
It’s not impossible that the Chinese could catch up eventually, and they have plenty of resources to try, but manufacturing advanced semiconductors without knowledge, resources and access is not an obstacle to be overcome like the Japanese refining manufacturing methods for mainstream global technologies and factory management strategies, this is more like trying to throw a dart without any hands or feet from your apartment to a dart board in another country, and then the dart changes into a butterfly, lands on a flower, pollinates it and the flower turns into a baboon that composes sonnets.
This is a very different take from “Chinese people just can’t do this no matter how much time, money, and talent they devote to it” which is what I’m taking about.
Yes, mine is a different, or accurately, a more comprehensive take.
I do address your quoted concern here briefly in the second paragraph of my earlier comment.
“China will eventually be able to compete in the mass semiconductor commercial market fort non-essential chips, but are about as far away from today’s advanced chip manufacturing as your '99 iMac is from the Oculus Rift.”
Maybe even as far away as a calculator is from the rift.
Chinese chutzpah isn’t as important here as the actual technological gaps and rarity of the software processes and absolutely globally unique fabs of tsmc.
It’s not a matter of wanting it, the practical, actual limitations of the endeavor mean something severely phenomenal, miraculous or devastating is going to have to happen for the Chinese to close any sort of chip gap in the “few years” you predict.
A lot can happen in ten years these days. For some reason I always have to state this every time this topic comes up: I never said it was going to be easy. It’s not going to be fast. It is going to happen, though.
Changing your assessment from “a few years” to “ten years” makes it more likely China could catch up, sure, and is very different from what you originally said.
I haven’t made the claim you think it’s easy, I said that the technical challenges the Chinese are facing developing new chip technologies are not at all the same challenges as your example of Japanese developing better methods for manufacturing common global products.
Reorganizing the company error-reporting structure, like Japan did with Toyota, is not going to help China develop advanced chips.
Modern chipmaking is a task orders of magnitude more difficult working with technologies orders of magnitude smaller, with a minute and unique knowledge and manufacturing base aware of Chinese corporate statecraft and committed to not leaking their newest processes. Those sources also have the best research teams and research development technology globally.
The technology is not linear. They cannot continue making smaller chips following an iterative, logical process and throwing more man hours at it. If the sanctions remain effective and China is unable to pull off a stunning degree of corporate statecraft, they will have to come up with entirely new processes on the atomic scale.
“It is going to happen.”
What is? China matching TSMC’s current chipmaking capabilities, at which point TSMC will be years ahead again?
It conceivably could, in your new timeline of a decade rather than the few years you predicted earlier.
Must it? Not at all.
You have adequately demonstrated your knowledge. Ten years is not that long. It’s happening. We should prepare for it, not deny the reality which is what most do.
“It’s happening?”
If you mean that China is attempting to close the semiconductor manufacturing gap, that’s correct.
If you mean that they are closing that gap, that’s baseless.
There’s no evidence that they are any closer to closing that gap in manufacturing advanced microchips even with the billions of dollars they’ve poured into the industry since before US sanctions began.
The forum users you were talking about may not be preparing for the Chinese investment in semiconductor infrastructure, but the u.s government has been for years.
We didn’t invite TSMC to set up in Arizona because we wanted a cool company in our backyard. It’s directly related to the imposed sanctions and the knowledge that China will attempt to close that gap.
Biden isn’t investing tens of billions of dollars into chip manufacturing on a whim, it’s a deliberate preemptive response to what has obviously been coming for a while with Taiwan refusing to integrate with China and holding such technological superiority over China.
China will eventually be able to compete in the mass semiconductor commercial market for non-essential chips, but are about as far away from today’s advanced chip manufacturing as your '99 iMac is from the Oculus Rift.
Their 3.7Ghz x86 CPU on DDR5 is only about 7 years out of date tops only on the clockspeed. Kinda close to a coffee lake.
Not to mention China has been funding and driving RISC-V research and development for years, especially with their open source projects using linux.
They’re not doing this blind, even 26nm die manufacturing is common knowledge now.
High end chips just happen to be a very expensive market both in resources and technological scale, which is why it primarily grew as a global consortium of companies relying on each other to produce the final product
China has already perfected the art of replicating a globalized industry at home because they have the resources and internal funding. The complexities and proprietary information involved with current gen chip production won’t stop them lol. They don’t need to aggressively attack Taiwan in any way to achieve what they need. Maybe some cyber espionage to speed things up, which they have done before with military tech, but nothing more lol.
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It’s absolutely incredible to me that US thought they could hobble a nation of 1.4 billion that has a superior education system and produces more STEM graduates than US does. This was the definition of hubris.
Holy shit that is a fascinating read. Reads like a presidential brief.
I try my best for this community :)
