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China bet almost three times as much. Rhetoric in the West is starting to change as they make progress. Used to be that people would laugh and say it’ll never h

by ein0p 3y ago

China bet almost three times as much. Rhetoric in the West is starting to change as they make progress. Used to be that people would laugh and say it’ll never happen. Now there’s talk of “what we’re going to do when they flood the market with cheap silicon”. All thanks to largely self-defeating sanctions. Same thing will happen with AI acceleration hardware. In fact it’s already happening.

deleted 3y ago
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karlgkk 3y ago
They were always going to try to in-house chip making - it's a huge point of geopolitical risk for them. Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Sanctions on letting them buy chips 1. reduced available R&D money for US competitors by reducing their revenue and 2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity. If you want to see effective de-industrialization, look at what happens to US industry when China applies the opposite of sanctions (subsidies). Adam Smith figured out that mercantilism is inherently self-defeating over two hundred years ago. Maybe nation-states will catch up in the next few centuries.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    China is still a few decades from commercially viable high end semiconductors. Yes, they can subsidize poor yields, but it doesn’t really bring them closer to figuring out the problem (they basically need to experiment a lot, and that will take time even if the money is there). China was always going to do this, they announced they were going to pour billions into semiconductors and modern jet turbines more than a decade ago. The trick is ensuring the money isn’t siphoned off to corruption.
    - cavisne 3y ago
      Out of curiosity what’s stopping them cloning existing processes and technology like they do for everything else?
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        The processes being hard to just clone, involving a lot of detailed expertise and being extremely sensitive to minute differences. The West is able to lean on existing knowledge Intel has from running its own fabs in the US and the knowledge of ASML in the Netherlands who makes the machines. Basically, they could get a machine and take it apart and figure out how it works, but that's meaningless if they don't understand how to make the stuff or how to keep it working well.
        drevil-v2 3y ago
        You don't think China already has folks working in TSMC fabs stealing IP? If you believe that every Taiwanese engineer is rabidly anti-China then I have a vaccine I want to sell you. It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel. The only unknown is if there is will be hot war before they reach that inflection point.
        baq 3y ago
        The proof is in the pudding: they haven’t been able to replicate the process. ASML tools are step 432 of 1234. There’s a whole fab built around it and a whole supplier ecosystem. They will eventually succeed. That is obvious. High end chips have become existential in the modern world, especially now with AI, but have already been before that. When will they succeed is an open question as stealing the blueprint is absolutely not enough.
        MangoCoffee 3y ago
        >China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_International_Corporation#Litigation_with_TSMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In... China has done what you said since 2005. it've been 20 years. is China leading the semis industry?
  - tw04 3y ago
    >2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity. The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. The Western sanctions had almost 0 bearing on accelerating local chip production, but it did do a GREAT job of limiting their ability to buy the hardware required for advanced fabrication. You also seem to have a belief that a "monopoly" in China is anything remotely like the West. It's not a free market, if a company in China tries to gouge the market or take it in a direction that's not approved at the expense of what the party wants, their executive leadership will quickly find themselves on the outside looking in (if they're lucky) or sitting in a jail cell if they aren't. See: Jack Ma Semiconductors were core to the "Made in China" strategy the party was pushing in 2014... https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/semiconductors-in-china-brave-new-world-or-same-old-story https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insig...
    - joshuaissac 3y ago
      > The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. Whatever encouragement or pressure the Chinese government was applying was insufficient to get manufacturers like Huawei to switch to domestic suppliers. Chinese companies still worked with established companies like TSMC, until forced by US sanctions to switch to worse domestic alternatives.
      - corimaith 3y ago
        If sanctions are so effective the CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods.
        joshuaissac 3y ago
        > CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods. They could, but a domestic trade sanction, just like foreign sanctions, would guarantee at least near-term damage to Chinese companies. Domestically, Beijing would be seen as the responsible party for the resulting economic damage, causing resentment towards the government, with no actual guarantee of self sufficiency. Companies, in general, do not care about having a domestic supply chain; they want to increase profits. Internationally, other countries would also see China as the initiator of the conflict, and those that are negatively affected may want to respond with sanctions of their own, escalating it beyond what Beijing intended. The risk analysis is different between foreign sanctions and domestic sanctions. In the end, the Chinese government was not prepared to take that risk, but the American government was.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    In fairness, a lack of sanctions an also accelerate the industrial progress of rivals. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had close partnerships with Detroit auto makers that helped their industry.
  - sparrowInHand 3y ago
    The inherently parasitic, extractive elite in every empire so far loved mercantilism though, it appeals to the centralization focused, extractive, landlording mindset. China is trying to be as mercantilistic as possible (buy raw goods everywhere, ship only final products) and has none of the free trade idealism of the us. Which is one of the reasons the belt and road initivative is already collapsing.
    - mastax 3y ago
      I'm starting to think the US has little free trade idealism left.
      - sparrowInHand 3y ago
        The empire, the external face-hugger to any country, eats it all after a while, turning it into giant estates ala rome, with slaves and no middle class - with hired mercenaries for troops.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  >they were effective in their goals and slowed China down I believe that, unfortunately, the US has a much lesser grip on the global economy nowadays. So, these kinds of sanctions only slow them down (the US), while other economies benefit immensely, even China itself. i.e. there will always be a buyer for a billion surplus chips in the market.
- csomar 3y ago
  I am not seeing it. Either I am blind or we are seeing two different things? China sky-rocketed since the pandemic. They had a rough lock-down but there is something strange brewing there: Their tech/quality sector is releasing stuff at record speed (cars, phones, chips, etc..), their exports have boomed and even in this recent downturn seems to have stabilized, their "green" transition is happening at an unbelievable speed (look for China solar installation for last year), they continue to pump highways, HS rail, metros, airports at mind-boggling quantities, etc... I am afraid the train left the station, or more like the rocket has launched already. I don't think the sanctions are going to make that big of an effect and if anything, they might come to bite the US back than anything else.
  - oezi 3y ago
    The infrastructure spending is indeed mind boggling, but I have the feeling similar to their real estate glut that they are building too low quality and are making a grave mistake in this because they will be stuck with this infrastructure for the next decades (comparable with how the US is stuck with its aging airports, highways and congress centers).
    - csomar 3y ago
      The public infrastructure (especially the newer one) is actually quite decent even by Western standards. The private buildings are not, at least the old ones (actually they are quite bad). The Chinese government recently banned high-rises because of this. Many of these buildings are now a liability to the public.
  - karlgkk 3y ago
    The sanctions are making a huge impact - chip making is more complex than almost any other current industry. I don't think sanctions will stop them from achieving their goal, but it will push them back from their goal of independence by about a decade. Who knows if it comes back to bite the US. If I were China, I'd remember how the US treated them. I don't know.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I agree they were always going to try it, but the point is prioritization. All the sanctions did is bump it up on the prioritization list alot. So for instance in 2011 we passed an act banning China from the ISS. The argument was that they had nothing to offer, and implicitly that they'd just steal everything. 10 years later they've created, launched and manned their own space station, have carried out the only sample return from the Moon since 1972, and in general have one of the most advanced space programs on the planet. Had we continued to collaborate with China in space, it's likely that most of these developments would have happened at a much slower pace, simply because they'd have had a lower overall priority. Sanctions, in general, are just a very poor weapon that increasingly obviously seem at least as likely to hurt the sanctioner as the sanctioned.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > Had we continued to collaborate And the West would have had access to the same tech. The issue with putting a wall between yourself and the biggest manufacturing hub on the planet is that the well manufactured stuff might not be on your side of the wall.
  - tonyhart7 3y ago
    do you know what caused golden space age in 60's ??? because American don't want lose to USSR the world need strong rival like China to challenge western hegemony. that's why we have Artemis now, if China still in backwater like in 60's, we would not have project Artemis
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down. What goal is that again? China is down to 5-7nm chips in practically no time which is more than enough for virtually every industrial and military application (the latter being the ostensible target of sanctions). Huawei is even shipping phones now again on domestic supply chains. Pretty much the only thing the sanction have achieved is what, that Chinese gamers can't play Cyberpunk 2077 at max graphic settings? The irony is that cutting edge chips are predominantly used in sectors that China itself regulates to hell already. If you're concerned with China's generative AI advances you could have spared yourself the sanctions because so is the Chinese government
  - karlgkk 3y ago
    It's a margins game, now. West is still ahead. Won't last forever, but it will for a few years more, at least.
- FooBarWidget 3y ago
  They always wanted to, but Chinese companies didn't cooperate because market incentives were lacking. Chinese fabs wanted to buy the best international equipment and shunned Chinese toolmakers. Chinese toolmakers never had a chance to break through to large market share. Until now: the sanctions gave toolmakers a captive market. Chinese toolmakers sucked because they didn't have market share and lacked practice. With a captive market, they finally have customers to practice on. This learning-by-doing cycle is what allows them to rapidly improve their quality, something they couldn't do before. The sanctions hurt short-term, but also gave them a long-term opportunity which they didn't have before.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
It's not going to change much. Most ICs don't need or benefit from 2nm features. It's only value in the West is in boosting yield of high profit margin VLSI devices where it makes sense to air freight them to SZ for assembly. Those represent a tiny slice of the semiconductor market. Cheap jellybean semiconductors will stay in SEA close to their final assembly point since their dice are already tiny and you can't squeeze more parts out of a wafer without compromising on specs.
bee_rider 3y ago
It seems quite early to evaluate if they are making any progress, if the goal is to catch up to, say, ASML.
- ein0p 3y ago
  They’re at 7nm now. Working towards 5nm. Yields leave much to be desired, but in the absence of other options cost doesn’t really matter. They’ll just have to make more wafers.
  - mupuff1234 3y ago
    Where did you get the 7nm from?
    - ein0p 3y ago
      Google “SMIC 7nm”.
      - maxglute 3y ago
        Ultimately chokepoint still around creating litho/entire semi supply chain. which TBF is coming along. Big Fund was wasetful but did produce a lot of uncoordinated domestic players, US sanctions now forcing them to coordinate. PRC probably only actor with entire indigenous semi supply chain on the horizon. Fabbing leading edge chips was always the "easy" part, there's a reason TSMC/Samsung were willing to open fabs on mainland before US sanctions/CHIPs act without massive subsidies. Other east asians know Chinese work culture is compatible, they can work how they work and make what they make. Hence SMIC/Huawei can do 7nm and eventually 5nm with some TW/SKR training in years prior. Semi is probably going to be less like oil and more like agriculture in coming years, it's just something strategic many govs have to subsidize.
    - throwaway2990 3y ago
      Huawei apparently is making 7nm chips for their Mate 60 phone, but it’s apparently terrible, overheating issues, slow, high power consumption. I think the power issue is because the camera and mic are on 24/7, they showed QR codes being read while the screen is off.
huytersd 3y ago
I understand globalization for most run of the mill items but I can’t believe we’ve let the high tech manufacturing go offshore.
throwaway2990 3y ago
“Rhetoric” There’s no rhetoric. When you phrase things this way it just makes you sound like an anti-USA pro-China troll.
- ein0p 3y ago
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  - mnau 3y ago
    That horse left the barn. That's like EU going back to Russian gas, because it's cheaper. Not going to happen.
  - corimaith 3y ago
    That's assuming what you say is true (well it's unfalsifiable in foresight) and you are not employing some reverse psychology here. Incidentally I find that pro-China accounts or forums use similar arguments to profusely support removing sanctions.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      It’s also quite literally true. There’s a reason there’s only one ASML. That reason is free trade - it makes it untenable to invest hundreds of billions into developing alternatives - you can just buy state of the art instead and move on to higher value things. Now we’ve forced China to (eventually) build “their own ASML”. Which they will eventually succeed at, given the strategic importance of this tech. Oops.
      - mnau 3y ago
        It didn't cost hundreds if billions to build EUV. > Overall, EUV lithography machines needed more than $6.3B in R&D investments over 17 years to come to market Japan could do it too (GigaPhoton had viable light source, but no customer). Even if they were only 10% as efficient in R&D, it's peanuts to Chinese government. EUV is being talked as some super mega project, but this is basically peanuts. Roughly 80 F-35. Even if rhey are far less efficient i wouldn't count on it for long. Sure, it's legacy SWE for now, vut even that us better than all countries save 3-4. Current sanctions are bust, it's time to comtemplate blank ban on chinese made chip. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chip-equipment-makers-grab-market-share-us-tightens-curbs-2023-10-18/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chip-equipment-ma...
awesomeMilou 3y ago
Except that Canon released a 5nm node thats market ready about 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319 So I'd wager that this investment is to bring technologies such as this up to scale.
- luckystarr 3y ago
  This technology is useful for small production volumues only though. It's too slow to produce chips at 5nm at high volumes. If it's also that much cheaper such that you can just throw money at it to produce in parallel, then it may work, but it I haven't seen such comparisons yet.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    I don't follow what you are trying to say. But do-it, do-it-cheap, do-it-at-scale, do-it-right has been the standard playbook out of Asia for 50 years now. I'd suggest that Canon is going down the road of being a player in the 5nm market.
    - awesomeMilou 3y ago
      You could summarize it as "Wah Wah, competing technology not as good as trillion dollar R&D from competitor with 20 year market advantage". Even if it has a lower yield, having a competing technology to EUV is absolutely amazing in several ways.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      He is trying to say that until they succesfully move to the "do-it-at-scale, do-it-right" parts, we're at the do-it part atm, and that's no real competition to those doing it at scale and right already. So the playbook atm is more promise than concrete reality. Nor is there some law that says "they did it for other technologies, so they'll manage it for this one too" (besides, this is survivorship bias, forgetting about the technologies they didn't manage to do it).
    - rofrol 3y ago
KoftaBob 3y ago
and it's not going super well for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Industry_Investment_Fund#Corruption_investigation_scandal_and_criticism_of_the_fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...
seydor 3y ago
I have no problem with that. Look at how cheap photovoltaics became, and how it became win win overall
zer00eyz 3y ago
Sorry but do you have a source for this? Everything I have read/seen not only points to the Chinese being decades behind but their efforts being black holes of money time and effort that yield NO progress.
- mnau 3y ago
  Huawei design division was on par with apple. Ymtc was first in the market with 200+ layer NAND. Their domestic share of semi equipment machines with publuc tenders (=legacy) has gone through the roof and is over 60% (was 10? I think five years ago). These are legacy, so unsanctioned tools. There is a lot of waste, but there are results.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    > Huawei design division was on par with apple. https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7nm-n2-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n... 7nm and 3nm are not even in the same ballpark. And the legacy tech is useful, but this isnt "progress" its production. The distinction is large, production did not sustain declining producers.
sgift 3y ago
Why are the sanctions self-defeating? I don't remember anyone saying China could never do the same thing domestically. They are a powerhouse of industrial espionage after all. Doesn't mean the west has to make it easier for them.
throwaway4good 3y ago
There was a rumour at one point of a 1 T RMB fund for Chinese semiconductors but I don't think that came to be. However it appears that a number of large Chinese firms are getting unlimited state support for research in highend semiconductor production not relying on a US controlled supply chain. I recommend this piece for anyone who is interested in the current state of the Chinese semi industry: New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls by Paul Triolo https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the-chinese-semiconductor-industry-beijing-responds-to-export-controls/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the...

by ein0p 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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karlgkk 3y ago

They were always going to try to in-house chip making - it's a huge point of geopolitical risk for them. Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down.

whatshisface 3y ago
Sanctions on letting them buy chips 1. reduced available R&D money for US competitors by reducing their revenue and 2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity. If you want to see effective de-industrialization, look at what happens to US industry when China applies the opposite of sanctions (subsidies). Adam Smith figured out that mercantilism is inherently self-defeating over two hundred years ago. Maybe nation-states will catch up in the next few centuries.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  China is still a few decades from commercially viable high end semiconductors. Yes, they can subsidize poor yields, but it doesn’t really bring them closer to figuring out the problem (they basically need to experiment a lot, and that will take time even if the money is there). China was always going to do this, they announced they were going to pour billions into semiconductors and modern jet turbines more than a decade ago. The trick is ensuring the money isn’t siphoned off to corruption.
  - cavisne 3y ago
    Out of curiosity what’s stopping them cloning existing processes and technology like they do for everything else?
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      The processes being hard to just clone, involving a lot of detailed expertise and being extremely sensitive to minute differences. The West is able to lean on existing knowledge Intel has from running its own fabs in the US and the knowledge of ASML in the Netherlands who makes the machines. Basically, they could get a machine and take it apart and figure out how it works, but that's meaningless if they don't understand how to make the stuff or how to keep it working well.
      - drevil-v2 3y ago
        You don't think China already has folks working in TSMC fabs stealing IP? If you believe that every Taiwanese engineer is rabidly anti-China then I have a vaccine I want to sell you. It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel. The only unknown is if there is will be hot war before they reach that inflection point.
        baq 3y ago
        The proof is in the pudding: they haven’t been able to replicate the process. ASML tools are step 432 of 1234. There’s a whole fab built around it and a whole supplier ecosystem. They will eventually succeed. That is obvious. High end chips have become existential in the modern world, especially now with AI, but have already been before that. When will they succeed is an open question as stealing the blueprint is absolutely not enough.
        MangoCoffee 3y ago
        >China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_International_Corporation#Litigation_with_TSMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In... China has done what you said since 2005. it've been 20 years. is China leading the semis industry?
- tw04 3y ago
  >2. raised the local price to monopoly prices, creating a great reward for the first local manufacturer to achieve parity. The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. The Western sanctions had almost 0 bearing on accelerating local chip production, but it did do a GREAT job of limiting their ability to buy the hardware required for advanced fabrication. You also seem to have a belief that a "monopoly" in China is anything remotely like the West. It's not a free market, if a company in China tries to gouge the market or take it in a direction that's not approved at the expense of what the party wants, their executive leadership will quickly find themselves on the outside looking in (if they're lucky) or sitting in a jail cell if they aren't. See: Jack Ma Semiconductors were core to the "Made in China" strategy the party was pushing in 2014... https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/semiconductors-in-china-brave-new-world-or-same-old-story https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insig...
  - joshuaissac 3y ago
    > The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. Whatever encouragement or pressure the Chinese government was applying was insufficient to get manufacturers like Huawei to switch to domestic suppliers. Chinese companies still worked with established companies like TSMC, until forced by US sanctions to switch to worse domestic alternatives.
    - corimaith 3y ago
      If sanctions are so effective the CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods.
      - joshuaissac 3y ago
        > CCP could just do the same thing to themselves via a trade ban on imported goods. They could, but a domestic trade sanction, just like foreign sanctions, would guarantee at least near-term damage to Chinese companies. Domestically, Beijing would be seen as the responsible party for the resulting economic damage, causing resentment towards the government, with no actual guarantee of self sufficiency. Companies, in general, do not care about having a domestic supply chain; they want to increase profits. Internationally, other countries would also see China as the initiator of the conflict, and those that are negatively affected may want to respond with sanctions of their own, escalating it beyond what Beijing intended. The risk analysis is different between foreign sanctions and domestic sanctions. In the end, the Chinese government was not prepared to take that risk, but the American government was.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  In fairness, a lack of sanctions an also accelerate the industrial progress of rivals. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had close partnerships with Detroit auto makers that helped their industry.
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  The inherently parasitic, extractive elite in every empire so far loved mercantilism though, it appeals to the centralization focused, extractive, landlording mindset. China is trying to be as mercantilistic as possible (buy raw goods everywhere, ship only final products) and has none of the free trade idealism of the us. Which is one of the reasons the belt and road initivative is already collapsing.
  - mastax 3y ago
    I'm starting to think the US has little free trade idealism left.
    - sparrowInHand 3y ago
      The empire, the external face-hugger to any country, eats it all after a while, turning it into giant estates ala rome, with slaves and no middle class - with hired mercenaries for troops.
moralestapia 3y ago
>they were effective in their goals and slowed China down I believe that, unfortunately, the US has a much lesser grip on the global economy nowadays. So, these kinds of sanctions only slow them down (the US), while other economies benefit immensely, even China itself. i.e. there will always be a buyer for a billion surplus chips in the market.
csomar 3y ago
I am not seeing it. Either I am blind or we are seeing two different things? China sky-rocketed since the pandemic. They had a rough lock-down but there is something strange brewing there: Their tech/quality sector is releasing stuff at record speed (cars, phones, chips, etc..), their exports have boomed and even in this recent downturn seems to have stabilized, their "green" transition is happening at an unbelievable speed (look for China solar installation for last year), they continue to pump highways, HS rail, metros, airports at mind-boggling quantities, etc... I am afraid the train left the station, or more like the rocket has launched already. I don't think the sanctions are going to make that big of an effect and if anything, they might come to bite the US back than anything else.
- oezi 3y ago
  The infrastructure spending is indeed mind boggling, but I have the feeling similar to their real estate glut that they are building too low quality and are making a grave mistake in this because they will be stuck with this infrastructure for the next decades (comparable with how the US is stuck with its aging airports, highways and congress centers).
  - csomar 3y ago
    The public infrastructure (especially the newer one) is actually quite decent even by Western standards. The private buildings are not, at least the old ones (actually they are quite bad). The Chinese government recently banned high-rises because of this. Many of these buildings are now a liability to the public.
- karlgkk 3y ago
  The sanctions are making a huge impact - chip making is more complex than almost any other current industry. I don't think sanctions will stop them from achieving their goal, but it will push them back from their goal of independence by about a decade. Who knows if it comes back to bite the US. If I were China, I'd remember how the US treated them. I don't know.
somenameforme 3y ago
I agree they were always going to try it, but the point is prioritization. All the sanctions did is bump it up on the prioritization list alot. So for instance in 2011 we passed an act banning China from the ISS. The argument was that they had nothing to offer, and implicitly that they'd just steal everything. 10 years later they've created, launched and manned their own space station, have carried out the only sample return from the Moon since 1972, and in general have one of the most advanced space programs on the planet. Had we continued to collaborate with China in space, it's likely that most of these developments would have happened at a much slower pace, simply because they'd have had a lower overall priority. Sanctions, in general, are just a very poor weapon that increasingly obviously seem at least as likely to hurt the sanctioner as the sanctioned.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Had we continued to collaborate And the West would have had access to the same tech. The issue with putting a wall between yourself and the biggest manufacturing hub on the planet is that the well manufactured stuff might not be on your side of the wall.
- tonyhart7 3y ago
  do you know what caused golden space age in 60's ??? because American don't want lose to USSR the world need strong rival like China to challenge western hegemony. that's why we have Artemis now, if China still in backwater like in 60's, we would not have project Artemis
Barrin92 3y ago
>Sanctions were not self-defeating, if anything, they were effective in their goals and slowed China down. What goal is that again? China is down to 5-7nm chips in practically no time which is more than enough for virtually every industrial and military application (the latter being the ostensible target of sanctions). Huawei is even shipping phones now again on domestic supply chains. Pretty much the only thing the sanction have achieved is what, that Chinese gamers can't play Cyberpunk 2077 at max graphic settings? The irony is that cutting edge chips are predominantly used in sectors that China itself regulates to hell already. If you're concerned with China's generative AI advances you could have spared yourself the sanctions because so is the Chinese government
- karlgkk 3y ago
  It's a margins game, now. West is still ahead. Won't last forever, but it will for a few years more, at least.
FooBarWidget 3y ago
They always wanted to, but Chinese companies didn't cooperate because market incentives were lacking. Chinese fabs wanted to buy the best international equipment and shunned Chinese toolmakers. Chinese toolmakers never had a chance to break through to large market share. Until now: the sanctions gave toolmakers a captive market. Chinese toolmakers sucked because they didn't have market share and lacked practice. With a captive market, they finally have customers to practice on. This learning-by-doing cycle is what allows them to rapidly improve their quality, something they couldn't do before. The sanctions hurt short-term, but also gave them a long-term opportunity which they didn't have before.

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

It's not going to change much. Most ICs don't need or benefit from 2nm features. It's only value in the West is in boosting yield of high profit margin VLSI devices where it makes sense to air freight them to SZ for assembly. Those represent a tiny slice of the semiconductor market. Cheap jellybean semiconductors will stay in SEA close to their final assembly point since their dice are already tiny and you can't squeeze more parts out of a wafer without compromising on specs.

bee_rider 3y ago

It seems quite early to evaluate if they are making any progress, if the goal is to catch up to, say, ASML.

ein0p 3y ago
They’re at 7nm now. Working towards 5nm. Yields leave much to be desired, but in the absence of other options cost doesn’t really matter. They’ll just have to make more wafers.
- mupuff1234 3y ago
  Where did you get the 7nm from?
  - ein0p 3y ago
    Google “SMIC 7nm”.
    - maxglute 3y ago
      Ultimately chokepoint still around creating litho/entire semi supply chain. which TBF is coming along. Big Fund was wasetful but did produce a lot of uncoordinated domestic players, US sanctions now forcing them to coordinate. PRC probably only actor with entire indigenous semi supply chain on the horizon. Fabbing leading edge chips was always the "easy" part, there's a reason TSMC/Samsung were willing to open fabs on mainland before US sanctions/CHIPs act without massive subsidies. Other east asians know Chinese work culture is compatible, they can work how they work and make what they make. Hence SMIC/Huawei can do 7nm and eventually 5nm with some TW/SKR training in years prior. Semi is probably going to be less like oil and more like agriculture in coming years, it's just something strategic many govs have to subsidize.
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    Huawei apparently is making 7nm chips for their Mate 60 phone, but it’s apparently terrible, overheating issues, slow, high power consumption. I think the power issue is because the camera and mic are on 24/7, they showed QR codes being read while the screen is off.

huytersd 3y ago

I understand globalization for most run of the mill items but I can’t believe we’ve let the high tech manufacturing go offshore.

throwaway2990 3y ago

“Rhetoric” There’s no rhetoric. When you phrase things this way it just makes you sound like an anti-USA pro-China troll.

ein0p 3y ago
[flagged]
- mnau 3y ago
  That horse left the barn. That's like EU going back to Russian gas, because it's cheaper. Not going to happen.
- corimaith 3y ago
  That's assuming what you say is true (well it's unfalsifiable in foresight) and you are not employing some reverse psychology here. Incidentally I find that pro-China accounts or forums use similar arguments to profusely support removing sanctions.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    It’s also quite literally true. There’s a reason there’s only one ASML. That reason is free trade - it makes it untenable to invest hundreds of billions into developing alternatives - you can just buy state of the art instead and move on to higher value things. Now we’ve forced China to (eventually) build “their own ASML”. Which they will eventually succeed at, given the strategic importance of this tech. Oops.
    - mnau 3y ago
      It didn't cost hundreds if billions to build EUV. > Overall, EUV lithography machines needed more than $6.3B in R&D investments over 17 years to come to market Japan could do it too (GigaPhoton had viable light source, but no customer). Even if they were only 10% as efficient in R&D, it's peanuts to Chinese government. EUV is being talked as some super mega project, but this is basically peanuts. Roughly 80 F-35. Even if rhey are far less efficient i wouldn't count on it for long. Sure, it's legacy SWE for now, vut even that us better than all countries save 3-4. Current sanctions are bust, it's time to comtemplate blank ban on chinese made chip. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chip-equipment-makers-grab-market-share-us-tightens-curbs-2023-10-18/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chip-equipment-ma...

awesomeMilou 3y ago

Except that Canon released a 5nm node thats market ready about 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319 So I'd wager that this investment is to bring technologies such as this up to scale.

luckystarr 3y ago
This technology is useful for small production volumues only though. It's too slow to produce chips at 5nm at high volumes. If it's also that much cheaper such that you can just throw money at it to produce in parallel, then it may work, but it I haven't seen such comparisons yet.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I don't follow what you are trying to say. But do-it, do-it-cheap, do-it-at-scale, do-it-right has been the standard playbook out of Asia for 50 years now. I'd suggest that Canon is going down the road of being a player in the 5nm market.
  - awesomeMilou 3y ago
    You could summarize it as "Wah Wah, competing technology not as good as trillion dollar R&D from competitor with 20 year market advantage". Even if it has a lower yield, having a competing technology to EUV is absolutely amazing in several ways.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    He is trying to say that until they succesfully move to the "do-it-at-scale, do-it-right" parts, we're at the do-it part atm, and that's no real competition to those doing it at scale and right already. So the playbook atm is more promise than concrete reality. Nor is there some law that says "they did it for other technologies, so they'll manage it for this one too" (besides, this is survivorship bias, forgetting about the technologies they didn't manage to do it).
  - rofrol 3y ago

KoftaBob 3y ago

and it's not going super well for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Industry_Investment_Fund#Corruption_investigation_scandal_and_criticism_of_the_fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...

seydor 3y ago

I have no problem with that. Look at how cheap photovoltaics became, and how it became win win overall

zer00eyz 3y ago

Sorry but do you have a source for this? Everything I have read/seen not only points to the Chinese being decades behind but their efforts being black holes of money time and effort that yield NO progress.

mnau 3y ago
Huawei design division was on par with apple. Ymtc was first in the market with 200+ layer NAND. Their domestic share of semi equipment machines with publuc tenders (=legacy) has gone through the roof and is over 60% (was 10? I think five years ago). These are legacy, so unsanctioned tools. There is a lot of waste, but there are results.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  > Huawei design division was on par with apple. https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7nm-n2-huawei-mate-60-pro https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n... 7nm and 3nm are not even in the same ballpark. And the legacy tech is useful, but this isnt "progress" its production. The distinction is large, production did not sustain declining producers.

sgift 3y ago

Why are the sanctions self-defeating? I don't remember anyone saying China could never do the same thing domestically. They are a powerhouse of industrial espionage after all. Doesn't mean the west has to make it easier for them.

throwaway4good 3y ago

There was a rumour at one point of a 1 T RMB fund for Chinese semiconductors but I don't think that came to be. However it appears that a number of large Chinese firms are getting unlimited state support for research in highend semiconductor production not relying on a US controlled supply chain. I recommend this piece for anyone who is interested in the current state of the Chinese semi industry: New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls by Paul Triolo https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the-chinese-semiconductor-industry-beijing-responds-to-export-controls/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the...