5 ms·

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?
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      And finally, they will force their citizens to be happy.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >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 So, from 10,000ft I see what you're saying, and might even agree. But what possesses someone to describe a people or country like this? We do the same with Russia; "other" them, like they have inherently "evil" traits. As if the US isn't above or involved in espionage. I guess I'm confused how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can look at another country and think their people are fundamentally different. But god forbid you point that lens at the wrong group.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    TSMC itself relies on lithography tooling coming from the west. I get people want the western world to be wrong here but they have the edge and China doesn’t. It’s going to take them awhile to catch up and by that point the west will have innovated in new ways. China overplayed its hand way to early and will suffer technologically for this.
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  it's not just ASML but its suppliers, like Zeiss that make some of the key components of chip-making tools that are extremely difficult to replicate
bsder 3y ago
1) Industrial processes are stupidly hard to duplicate. It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task. 2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.
- worldwidelies 3y ago
  What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question. I’ve always been under the assumption they operate similarly.
  - aydyn 3y ago
    Well there are a lot more corporations than dictators, and usually shit doesn't go sideways when a corporation falls.
  - lucianbr 3y ago
    As an employee of a corporation, I often speak my mind. The most I risk is being fired, and I believe I can find another job relatively easy. I sometimes do keep my mouth shut, because saying the truth would get me some sour looks, and I don't feel like dealing with that right now. I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous. From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.
jtriangle 3y ago
The tooling is ultra specialized and requires whole teams of highly skilled techs to assemble and calibrate. That's like half the cost involved, and the crews running the lines don't know much about how it works, they don't need to. If something goes wrong, they have service contracts. So China can glean some of the process, but, because the design, assembly, and setup of the machines is done by western contractors, they're effectively locked out of 'the hard part'. Not to say they can't learn it, it's just not nearly as trivial as the rest of the things they clone. Also worth noting that, many of the chinese clones are made in the same plants as the orignals, sometimes in parallel to the originals as to benefit from existing successful processes that were already in place, but using cheaper materials, less QC, different branding, etc. It's actually quite impressive engineering really, they can often reduce part count and cost significantly while shipping a functional, albeit inferior, product. Chip fabs don't work in that model though, so, that presents an additional difficulty.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  Reading Chris Miller's Chip War allowed me to realise how mind-bogglingly complicated the chip making process is.

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?
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    And finally, they will force their citizens to be happy.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >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 So, from 10,000ft I see what you're saying, and might even agree. But what possesses someone to describe a people or country like this? We do the same with Russia; "other" them, like they have inherently "evil" traits. As if the US isn't above or involved in espionage. I guess I'm confused how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can look at another country and think their people are fundamentally different. But god forbid you point that lens at the wrong group.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  TSMC itself relies on lithography tooling coming from the west. I get people want the western world to be wrong here but they have the edge and China doesn’t. It’s going to take them awhile to catch up and by that point the west will have innovated in new ways. China overplayed its hand way to early and will suffer technologically for this.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
it's not just ASML but its suppliers, like Zeiss that make some of the key components of chip-making tools that are extremely difficult to replicate

bsder 3y ago

1) Industrial processes are stupidly hard to duplicate. It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task. 2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.

worldwidelies 3y ago
What’s the difference between American Corporations and International Dictators? Serious question. I’ve always been under the assumption they operate similarly.
- aydyn 3y ago
  Well there are a lot more corporations than dictators, and usually shit doesn't go sideways when a corporation falls.
- lucianbr 3y ago
  As an employee of a corporation, I often speak my mind. The most I risk is being fired, and I believe I can find another job relatively easy. I sometimes do keep my mouth shut, because saying the truth would get me some sour looks, and I don't feel like dealing with that right now. I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous. From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.

jtriangle 3y ago

The tooling is ultra specialized and requires whole teams of highly skilled techs to assemble and calibrate. That's like half the cost involved, and the crews running the lines don't know much about how it works, they don't need to. If something goes wrong, they have service contracts. So China can glean some of the process, but, because the design, assembly, and setup of the machines is done by western contractors, they're effectively locked out of 'the hard part'. Not to say they can't learn it, it's just not nearly as trivial as the rest of the things they clone. Also worth noting that, many of the chinese clones are made in the same plants as the orignals, sometimes in parallel to the originals as to benefit from existing successful processes that were already in place, but using cheaper materials, less QC, different branding, etc. It's actually quite impressive engineering really, they can often reduce part count and cost significantly while shipping a functional, albeit inferior, product. Chip fabs don't work in that model though, so, that presents an additional difficulty.

baal80spam 3y ago
Reading Chris Miller's Chip War allowed me to realise how mind-bogglingly complicated the chip making process is.