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But will it work? If China simply throws enough money at it. The US maybe is able to prevent a Dutch company selling to China. But what if China goes "Hey mr.
by chvid 6y ago
But will it work?
If China simply throws enough money at it.
The US maybe is able to prevent a Dutch company selling to China. But what if China goes "Hey mr. Dutch lithography specialist and mr. Taiwanese electrical engineer. Come work for us for couple of years and help us build this. Nice flat here in Shenzhen and plenty of money. Bring your family as well."
How can the US prevent that?
- sq_ 6y agoI think the key to the US strategy here is that the lithography tech and hardware, especially for EUV, is insanely complex and difficult to get working correctly. Even if you entice a lot of engineers and researchers from around the world to come work for you, it'll still take a very long time to build up the capability yourself.
- dragandj 6y agoNot to mention that these researches might be incentivized by the opposite side to stall your progress from the inside.
- chx 6y agoYou can't solve this with an engineer or two. If you look at the next-generation lithography road maps, even in the early 90s EUV was just beyond the horizon, but it was on the road map. By 2014 more than twenty billion dollars were spent by various governments and private research when ASML began to ship these https://web.archive.org/web/20150920221539/http://www.asml.com/asml/show.do?lang=EN&ctx=5869&rid=50281 https://web.archive.org/web/20150920221539/http://www.asml.c... and even so it was another four years before the first actual devices using EUV CPUs shipped. And, let's not forget, the first device was the A12 Bionic for the iPhone XS/XS Max/XR and some iPads. In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, Apple sold 46.89 million iPhones worldwide. And there were other companies jumping on the bandwagon but that's a lot of preorder money to help bootstrapping this.
- chvid 6y agoThis article is almost 2 years old: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2162684/taiwanese-engineers-lured-mainland-china-chip-makers-go https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2162684/tai... Taiwanese engineers lured to mainland China as chip makers go into overdrive "More than 300 senior engineers from Taiwan have moved to mainland chip makers so far this year, joining nearly 1,000 others who have relocated since Beijing set up a US$22 billion fund to develop the chip industry in 2014" Even with the "chokepoints" it is just a question of time and money, no? In particular now that China essentially is being forced to be self-sufficient.
- blackrock 6y agoThis sounds similar to the atomic bomb project. The hardest thing about producing the atomic bomb itself, was to determine if it was actually possible. But once it was achieved, then everyone knew it was possible. So all you had to do was throw more time and money into cracking it. And a little espionage probably didn’t hurt too. The 5nm EUV, while it sounds cutting edge today, may just need enough time, money, and focus to achieve it. Someone already achieved it, so we know it is possible. And SMIC may go a different route to achieve the same result, thus giving China independent Intellectual Property rights to it.
- chx 6y agoNot sure whether we are talking of the same problem but the Oak Ridge site alone cost more than a billion dollars and nothing cost a billion those years (the total federal budget outlay in 1942 was a modest 35 billion which admittedly climbed to almost 93 billion by 1945). The K-25 building was half of that: 1,640,000 square feet floor space, 97,500,000 cubic feet volume. The Hanford site was another 400 million. They created an entire industry out of nothing. EV is not that bad but yes, it's quite bad. And the possibility was always known, the devil really is in the details.
- discourses 6y agoStill, the Soviet Union somehow repeated that. Despite the fact that half the country was still in ruins. Kiev and Minsk don't have that many pre-war buildings.
- loyukfai 6y agoChina doesn't have unlimited money. If it has to spend more on this, then other aspects will suffer. Of course in reality it's much more complex, my point is that not everything can easily be resolved by "throwing enough money" at it... Cheers.
- jbverschoor 6y agoOf course it does. It can just print extra, just like everybody else
- mpfundstein 6y agohow do you think this will impact their world trade?
- ferzul 6y agothey have about a billion underutilised resources. why should it mean a thing for their world trade?
- rmk 6y agoWorld trade is denominated in USD, no? A small percentage is Euro and smaller percentage in Yen, perhaps. A negligible percentage of world trade is in Yuan, I believe.
- gdy 6y agoChina had been throwing money at developing jet engines without much success.
- 0xFFC 6y agoGenuinely, can you elaborate a little bit about this? I am so curious.
- gdy 6y agoI don't know much but perhaps this link could give you a starting point. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-being-held-back-its-terrible-jet-engines-140252 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-air-force-bein...
- agumonkey 6y agosometimes the domain plays a role, is jet engines as critical for normal growth (surely jet engines are key in war) as electronics ?