I've personally observed this 'war' from a couple of angles. First is in the process equipment required to fabricate the chips. China has endeavored to create i

I've personally observed this 'war' from a couple of angles. First is in the process equipment required to fabricate the chips. China has endeavored to create its own chip equipment industry, the way that Japan did in the 80s and Korea did in the 90s. I was personally involved in development of 3 product lines by a Chinese capital equipment firm, that have been in development for 10 years. They were a customer for our system component. To kick start the effort, they paid expert, targeted process consultants from the US. To date, none of the 3 have cracked into volume shipments to the fabricators. Ten years in, both Japan and Korea had built equipment that could at least compete domestically. In Japan's case, internationally. The Chinese progress was stifled by ineffective engineering management that ultimately drove our program manager to resign. Recently, I visited Korea and was told that Chinese semiconductor companies are recruiting semiconductor process engineers from Korea, paying them 3-5x their Korean salary under 5 year contracts, effectively buying out their career. This could be an effective approach to garner the technical expertise needed, but I wonder whether it will simply repeat the outcome of the equipment effort: Experts were brought in and paid well for their knowledge, but it could not be realized due to business cultural or management style constraints. This is my personal and obviously limited experience, but in the end, fabricating semiconductors is a multidisciplinary endeavor of great complexity. Success depends equally on commitment, pragmatism and effective collaboration, as it does on technical excellence. That is the price of entry to leading edge technical achievement and I'm not sure the Chinese industrial firms are there yet.