7 ms·

How is China going to become independent of foreign chips without ASML's photolithography machines?

by hypertele-Xii 2y ago

DeathArrow 2y ago
By building their own machines and developing alternative techniques.
- rvba 2y ago
  China couldnt produce ballpens utill around 2017. If companies can defend themselves against espionage and/or takeovers there can be a moat. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
  - maxglute 2y ago
    Ballpoint pen TIPS. Which BTW USA _still_ DOESN'T produce - not can't (distinction important) just like PRC didn't want (again, not can't) to produce tips until 2017. Prior to 2017, only Switzerland, Japan made ballpoint tips. Reason PRC ended up making ballpoint tips was premiere used tips as proxy for scaling up precision manufacturing of tungsten carbide for advanced munitions. Which they did in about a year, because PRC focusing state capacity pretty good at demonlishing moats. In this case they got state metallurgical factory (TISCO) with revenue with $15 billion to divert (waste) their massive resources to make some ballpoint pen tips, which had a global addressable market of 20M, aka rounding error for PRC state owed metal industry. Meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ballpoint pen tip metal and that's enough to supply domestic tip maker for decades. The _real_ story behind the pen tips is building up machines to make advanced munitions at scale, few years later, i.e. now - we have stories of PRC cruise missile gigafactory that can churni out components for 1000 missiles per day. A few days is sum US+partner production per year. For reference JP acquiring 400 tomahawks for 1.7B.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > The _real_ story behind the pen tips is building up machines to make advanced munitions at scale, few years later, i.e. now - we have stories of PRC cruise missile gigafactory that can churni out components for 1000 missiles per day. Woah. Who are they arming themselves up to fight with that many missiles? Trisolarians?!
      - maxglute 2y ago
        IMO entire US security architecture within 1st island chain, aka japan, south korea, philippines, taiwan, anything within 1500-2000km. The math/economics behind cruise missile gigafactory flex is hinting they can make more commodity cruise missile per 1-2 weeks to bleed entire US inventory of missile defense, aka they can spam so much smart munitions, from purely ground launched platforms on mainland PRC (as in capability independant of airforce/navy), that any fixed targets, where fixed is anything that stays stationary for more than 2-3 hours, in 1IC is simply not defensible. Broader TLDR is telegraphed/public US strategy last few years for the next decade+ to deter PRC is to preposition more hardware, in distributed manner, make more survivable (agile basing, marine MLRS) etc. PRC retort is saying, they're going to make so much advanced munitions, that they can hit essentially any hardware US+co can possibly preposition in theatre that has to sit still for more than a couple hours, with 100,000s to spare to degrade other strategic targets. It's basically conventional MAD for any US partners in region, who are mostly import dependant islands, significantly more so than PRC who is still a continental sized land power with associated resources land connections. PRC hinting they can degrade their critical/energy infra, lock down their ports from importing energy/calories, basically turn them into cuba/gaza, indefinitely, from purely PRC domestic inputs. So think twice about allowing US to operate from their territory in 1st island chain in TW scenario. They're probably onto something since this development is almost 6 month old and non of US/western strategic writing is openly discussing it, because there simply isn't a viable counter, short of assuming China can't make 100,000s of a thing, or Made in China things must be duds. As many are relearning, having industrial capacity to make magnitude more commodity fires > wunderwaffles. West loves to mention about US ship building prowess during WW2, and how US simply outproduced adversaries. Now we have stats like PRC having 230x advantage in military ship building. Just military, PRC peacetime shipbuilding just passed 160 million dead weight tons, which is more than ENTIRE US ship building program in WW2. Extrapolate that to cruise missiles. IMO the biggest strategic development in region in a long time.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I think you're indirectly proving a different point (sorry). It's implausible China, which has successfully built particle accelerators, 500m telescopes, 7nm chip processes, and so on endlessly - simply could not figure out how to build a high quality ball point pen. However, it's entirely plausible is that it's a much trickier engineering problem than it sounds like, with a meaningful upfront cost (in both time and money) to solve, for a very small economic benefit at the end of the tunnel. And so there was no incentive for anybody to solve this in China because imports worked fine. Until they didn't - because a high ranking Chinese politician critiqued China's lack of a high quality domestic solution. And then, lo and behold, about a year later that domestic solution emerged. It's not like there was some grand concerted effort to solve the 'pen problem.' It's just that trade was working perfectly fine, so there was no motivation to change. Give people a motivation to change or create, and they will. Like the old saying goes, 'necessity is the mother of all invention.' And right now these trade wars are giving the rest of the world every motivation to detach themselves from Western economies. It's not hard to see how this turns out.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Yeah, the thing to measure isn't how long it took them to make ballpoint pen tips. The thing to measure is, how long it took them from the moment they decided to make them domestically.
      - rvba 2y ago
        The article states that "a reported five years of research and development" was required. I think an EUV machine litography might be harder to make if you need to invent it from scratch.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    >China couldnt produce ballpens utill around 2017. US still can't make high speed trains in 2024.
- carom 2y ago
  For civilization this is honestly a great thing. I would love if there were two ASMLs in geographically diverse regions. Even better that they are not encumbered by the same intellectual property regime. It will lead to high end chips being more ubiquitous and cheaper.
logicchains 2y ago
Acquire the technology via state-sponsored industrial espionage and spend hundreds of billions on replicating it locally?
makeitdouble 2y ago
Aren't they still getting the ASML machines, and are "just" barred from buying Intel/Qualcomm final products ? I assume at some point they'll make their own photolitography, but until then they seem to be getting what they need to produce their chips, one way or another.
- Valakas_ 2y ago
  They are still getting ASML machines yes, just not the EUV ones.

How is China going to become independent of foreign chips without ASML's photolithography machines?

DeathArrow 2y ago

By building their own machines and developing alternative techniques.

rvba 2y ago
China couldnt produce ballpens utill around 2017. If companies can defend themselves against espionage and/or takeovers there can be a moat. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
- maxglute 2y ago
  Ballpoint pen TIPS. Which BTW USA _still_ DOESN'T produce - not can't (distinction important) just like PRC didn't want (again, not can't) to produce tips until 2017. Prior to 2017, only Switzerland, Japan made ballpoint tips. Reason PRC ended up making ballpoint tips was premiere used tips as proxy for scaling up precision manufacturing of tungsten carbide for advanced munitions. Which they did in about a year, because PRC focusing state capacity pretty good at demonlishing moats. In this case they got state metallurgical factory (TISCO) with revenue with $15 billion to divert (waste) their massive resources to make some ballpoint pen tips, which had a global addressable market of 20M, aka rounding error for PRC state owed metal industry. Meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ballpoint pen tip metal and that's enough to supply domestic tip maker for decades. The _real_ story behind the pen tips is building up machines to make advanced munitions at scale, few years later, i.e. now - we have stories of PRC cruise missile gigafactory that can churni out components for 1000 missiles per day. A few days is sum US+partner production per year. For reference JP acquiring 400 tomahawks for 1.7B.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > The _real_ story behind the pen tips is building up machines to make advanced munitions at scale, few years later, i.e. now - we have stories of PRC cruise missile gigafactory that can churni out components for 1000 missiles per day. Woah. Who are they arming themselves up to fight with that many missiles? Trisolarians?!
    - maxglute 2y ago
      IMO entire US security architecture within 1st island chain, aka japan, south korea, philippines, taiwan, anything within 1500-2000km. The math/economics behind cruise missile gigafactory flex is hinting they can make more commodity cruise missile per 1-2 weeks to bleed entire US inventory of missile defense, aka they can spam so much smart munitions, from purely ground launched platforms on mainland PRC (as in capability independant of airforce/navy), that any fixed targets, where fixed is anything that stays stationary for more than 2-3 hours, in 1IC is simply not defensible. Broader TLDR is telegraphed/public US strategy last few years for the next decade+ to deter PRC is to preposition more hardware, in distributed manner, make more survivable (agile basing, marine MLRS) etc. PRC retort is saying, they're going to make so much advanced munitions, that they can hit essentially any hardware US+co can possibly preposition in theatre that has to sit still for more than a couple hours, with 100,000s to spare to degrade other strategic targets. It's basically conventional MAD for any US partners in region, who are mostly import dependant islands, significantly more so than PRC who is still a continental sized land power with associated resources land connections. PRC hinting they can degrade their critical/energy infra, lock down their ports from importing energy/calories, basically turn them into cuba/gaza, indefinitely, from purely PRC domestic inputs. So think twice about allowing US to operate from their territory in 1st island chain in TW scenario. They're probably onto something since this development is almost 6 month old and non of US/western strategic writing is openly discussing it, because there simply isn't a viable counter, short of assuming China can't make 100,000s of a thing, or Made in China things must be duds. As many are relearning, having industrial capacity to make magnitude more commodity fires > wunderwaffles. West loves to mention about US ship building prowess during WW2, and how US simply outproduced adversaries. Now we have stats like PRC having 230x advantage in military ship building. Just military, PRC peacetime shipbuilding just passed 160 million dead weight tons, which is more than ENTIRE US ship building program in WW2. Extrapolate that to cruise missiles. IMO the biggest strategic development in region in a long time.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I think you're indirectly proving a different point (sorry). It's implausible China, which has successfully built particle accelerators, 500m telescopes, 7nm chip processes, and so on endlessly - simply could not figure out how to build a high quality ball point pen. However, it's entirely plausible is that it's a much trickier engineering problem than it sounds like, with a meaningful upfront cost (in both time and money) to solve, for a very small economic benefit at the end of the tunnel. And so there was no incentive for anybody to solve this in China because imports worked fine. Until they didn't - because a high ranking Chinese politician critiqued China's lack of a high quality domestic solution. And then, lo and behold, about a year later that domestic solution emerged. It's not like there was some grand concerted effort to solve the 'pen problem.' It's just that trade was working perfectly fine, so there was no motivation to change. Give people a motivation to change or create, and they will. Like the old saying goes, 'necessity is the mother of all invention.' And right now these trade wars are giving the rest of the world every motivation to detach themselves from Western economies. It's not hard to see how this turns out.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Yeah, the thing to measure isn't how long it took them to make ballpoint pen tips. The thing to measure is, how long it took them from the moment they decided to make them domestically.
    - rvba 2y ago
      The article states that "a reported five years of research and development" was required. I think an EUV machine litography might be harder to make if you need to invent it from scratch.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  >China couldnt produce ballpens utill around 2017. US still can't make high speed trains in 2024.
carom 2y ago
For civilization this is honestly a great thing. I would love if there were two ASMLs in geographically diverse regions. Even better that they are not encumbered by the same intellectual property regime. It will lead to high end chips being more ubiquitous and cheaper.

logicchains 2y ago

Acquire the technology via state-sponsored industrial espionage and spend hundreds of billions on replicating it locally?

makeitdouble 2y ago

Aren't they still getting the ASML machines, and are "just" barred from buying Intel/Qualcomm final products ? I assume at some point they'll make their own photolitography, but until then they seem to be getting what they need to produce their chips, one way or another.

Valakas_ 2y ago
They are still getting ASML machines yes, just not the EUV ones.