Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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The good thing is that US politicians normally don't function that quickly. They will probably give a year or two before they realize Chinese alternatives are available and that they just torpedoed Nvidia/Qualcomm/AMD.
The key for all the Chinese AI chips is that they can be done with 7 nm process, which is something SMIC has already demonstrate with their N+1 process.
Aside from Baidu, the one to watch out for is HiSilicon
A lot of their newer chips just couldn't be produced in the recent years. @latenlazy mentioned this to me, but Huawei probably doesn't care about high margins/yield on its 7 nm or 14nm process, so they might just be able to crank out a lot of AI/server chips with low margins for a while. Everyone else can keep using TSMC/Samsung process until they get banned or domestic ramp up. After all, they've already expanded a lot of energy in designing their chip. It's more important for them to have production ramped up first.
SMIC needs to be buying as many ASML/SMEE DUVs as possible. I'd be curious to see the full year import number from ASML. This is time for Chinese government to step in and support construction of new fabs so they can meet local demand. There probably has never been a more optimistic time if you are a chip maker in China.
I think there will be a huge requirement from China for their DUVs over the next couple of years. After that, ASML will be in trouble in China unless they start exporting EUVs. This is a conversation ASML needs to be having with Dutch government. At the end of the day, US government is already forcing the decoupling of its own firms with China. The next step is force decoupling of Samsung and TSMC from China. So while ASML probably does get most of its revenues from Taiwan and SK right now, that won't be the case if China is decoupled from TSMC/Samsung.
I think ASML plans is to have high NA EUV ready for 2025 and pressure the Dutch goverment to be allowed to sell low NA scanners to China before they make their own EUV scanners under the reason that low NA EUV is "mature technology".
US will not allow that.
If Gigaphoton develops their EUV light source the full responsibility will shift to the Japanese and Dutch goverment.
Or if China develops their own light source the responsability will be shifted to only the Dutch goverment.
Can you just swapped a component like that?
China is not able to manufacture DUV systems even remotely competitive with anything ASML sells. While ASML would undoubtedly like to sell its EUV systems to Chinese companies, they most certainly aren't losing any sleep over worries about a potential Chinese EUV rival in the next 5 years.
There's no economic way to leapfrog DUV and go straight into EUV. It took ASML 10 years to go from a EUV prototype to a machine capable of high volume manufacturing. By the time they made the first prototype they were already a market leader in DUV immersion. There are simply too many critical technologies that need to be mastered on DUV before being able to move on to EUV that make leapfrogging attempts a huge risk.
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ASML signed agreement to have a certain percentage of US tech inside EUV, not to mention what US could do to Netherland.
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