Chinese semiconductor industry

localizer said:

That machine is only part of the problem.

China need to develop everything from ground up. Need to step up its espionage game.

I hear many companies in China are trying to cover all steps of the chip making progress. It’s a start but we must get there.

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At this point, espionage is secondary.

What matters is original Research and Development, so you have your own technologies.
And it's better to go for completely new technologies that have no competitors, and which make existing foreign technology obsolete.

A quick question: where does TSMC get its machines? Does it make machine by itself?

SteelBird said:

A quick question: where does TSMC get its machines? Does it make machine by itself?

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TSMC gets its machines from many countries (including the United States). The most important machine is the made by the Netherlands, by a company called ASML.

ZeEa5KPul said:

I get enough of this defeatist tripe elsewhere, I don't need to deal with it here. If you're that absurdly pessimistic about China's prospects, no wonder you called for cutting off all medical supplies to the US. Just what indication do you have that China's research on EUV hasn't made progress? What's so magical about EUV that only the Dutch can do it? Is it because they wear those wooden shoes?

No, seriously, you need to sit and think of a good answer to this question. What is so special about this particular technology that thinking it can be advanced by time and money is equivalent to thinking a pandemic will automagically disappear?

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This is your good answer:

Inside a cutting-edge EUV machine 50,000 droplets of molten tin fall through a chamber at its base each second. A pair of lasers zap every drop, creating a plasma that in turn releases light of the desired wavelength. The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost anything, including air, the process must take place in a vacuum...

The machines, weighing 180 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus, are themselves a testament to the electronics industry’s tangled supply chains. ASML has around 5,000 suppliers.

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This is the special technology and magic that China would need to implement. It took ASML decades to complete this. It cannot be done for at least five years. (Perhaps never, because the machines depend on German lenses - which America would block.) And by that time Huawei's mobile division will be long dead, and SMIC will be far far behind.

Relax folks.

As evident from previous few days events. Do not get suck into US feeling of despair, bitterness and resentfulness due to their own incompetence. Let US wallow in their bitterness all they want. China should gift US with metaphorical mirror through continued rebuttal via its' media.

Have some faith in China to remain calm and play a responsible role. China can stand on its own plus some even if there is a total decoupling. Unfortunately, the rest of the world are more vulnerable and will suffer more.

Despite these setbacks China is still by far the largest importer of semiconductors in the world. US restrictions on sales of 5nm chips to Huawei may lead to previously out-competed companies taking advantage of a vacuum where TSMC and US chip companies can't compete in. This might be able to reduce the impact of the US restrictions, while eroding US technological dominance.

Hopefully Huawei has stocked up on 5nm chips though.

This is a huge vacuum for non-US companies that could greatly transform the world's supply chains. If the US government seriously enforces the restrictions, it'll hurt Huawei a lot in the short run, but it might work out for the best. Huawei just needs to survive for around 10 years. Probably.

China is making progress on both DUV and EUV lithography. Specifically, Chinese researchers already solved the EUV's light source (the main technical bottleneck).


America is run by its wealthy dynasties. Above all, they care about money and power/control for themselves only. They don't care about its citizens at all. All of them are expendable. They only care that Americans are pacified enough to go with their program. So, if you wish to hurt America's controllers, hurt their pocketbooks and weaken their power/control.

As for retaliation against American cheating and sabotage to distort the free market against superior competitors, China should consider issuing a blacklist of unreliable suppliers that bans all products that involve any American components. In other words, the ban applies to any and all products/services (not just of American origin) that contains American parts. This may evolve to include American-allied suppliers too if merited.

The justification writes itself. America is an unreliable cheat with a mercurial temper that weaponizes its businesses to kill competitors. These actions attack the very spirit of a free market. America has attempted to kill numerous legitimate Chinese businesses, used food and medical sanctions to commit mass murder against anti-imperialist nations (eg Iran), etc. American suppliers represent an existential risk to our supply chain and banning American components is just risk mitigation that any responsible company must do. This black list combined with the irresistibly large Chinese market will make it hard for non-American companies to refuse - especially when many components probably have Chinese substitutes.

The blacklist can easily be expanded with other justifications - IT products banned due to NSA industrial espionage, entertainment banned due to racism/propaganda/psychological warfare (eg Hurt Locker movie, Call of Duty video game), agriculture banned due to health dangers (eg glyphosate), misc banned due to ties to US military or fraud, etc. The blacklist could even be made public into a global list to expose America's dirty tricks and dangerous products, which will further reduce their profits and control.

On a separate note....

China should poach as much talent as possible during the coronavirus crisis as people are laid off and turn desperate. Attention should be focused on removing the technical lynchpins of American corporations. While preferable, It does not matter if these lynchpins are useful to China.

Warnings should also be issued against Chinese studying in hostile Western nations. Recruitment of overseas talent should ramp up. Anti Chinese crimes should be publicized to assist these efforts.

China needs to prevent America from stealing TSMC's technology/ip. By 2023, Chinese semiconductor FABs will be very competitive to TSMC. Their fate is sealed so offer them a lifeline ", join us and we prosper together. Join them and we'll ensure your investments are in vain." See the blacklist above.

As America gets more desperate, it will resort to military force. Frustrate their efforts. For example, sell anti stealth radars to targets of American imperialism eg Venezuela used a Chinese anti stealth radar to expose a f22 recently. Use these humiliations to hurt American prestige, sales, and influence while increasing China's

As the largest trading nation in the world that makes practically everything people want and need to buy, China should consider accepting only RMB for Chinese goods. Buyers can pay USD but it'll cost them 20-30% more.

As for banning medical exports it depends on the math. Manqiangrexue is correct. It looks really bad. On the other hand, this would create more economic damage, which leads to political unrest, which leads to investments leaving - a self reinforcing death spiral. It's a geopolitically useful option worth exploring, but it would require a delicate PR campaign if enacted. China would have to create a justification that would be accepted in the court of public opinion.

Hadoren said:

Inside a cutting-edge EUV machine 50,000 droplets of molten tin fall through a chamber at its base each second. A pair of lasers zap every drop, creating a plasma that in turn releases light of the desired wavelength. The mirrors guiding this light, made of sandwiched layers of silicon and molybdenum, are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimetre. Because EUV light is absorbed by almost anything, including air, the process must take place in a vacuum...

The machines, weighing 180 tonnes and the size of a double-decker bus, are themselves a testament to the electronics industry’s tangled supply chains. ASML has around 5,000 suppliers.

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Wooo, fancy. Nah, not really, that's just that kind of pablum a liberal arts major "journalist" would write. I could write you a story like that about any technology that China has already mastered. You are right that it would take decades of research for China to master it... good thing it's been researching it since at least 2000. You think China just woke up to this game? Not at all, it saw all this happening from miles away. By the way, that edifying discussion is about the light source, something which the Changchun Institute of Optics announced a breakthrough in before things went silent. Do you think they went silent because all the researchers suddenly decided to destroy their brains by huffing glue before dynamiting their lab and bringing progress to a halt, or do you think it went silent because it moved to a phase where it's a sensitive national security matter and people generally don't blab about things like that?

I think people need to understand and appreciate what China is because sometimes people can think it's a country. They say that it took Germany umpteen years to do this and Japan a bazillion to do that. China is not a country, it is a world. Even with its relative backwardness and poverty there is simply no basis for comparing the scale of talent and money China can hurl at a problem to anyone else.

Suppose Huawei handset and laptop division goes belly up, do you think that's going to stop the company? Do you understand that the Chinese state's backing and its capacity to marshal resources are essentially limitless? Do you think American technology companies won't be destroyed by severe Chinese retaliation? Can America support its companies the way China can?

Edit: On a technical note, why did China decide to go the discharge-produced plasma (DPP) route rather than the laser-produced plasma (LPP) route that ASML took? From what I can see in the literature, the LPP route has clear power-efficiency advantages.

manqiangrexue said:

I can't keep writing the same things to you over and over again just because you can't read. I'll quote myself from #163:

"Everyone else can make these bans because they're not major manufacturers. China is the world's biggest manufacturer and everyone relies on China. If you and all your neighbors all keep your handkerchief shoelace masks to yourself, that's fine but if 3M says it's keeping all its masks to itself, it's going to be a big problem. "

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Manqiang. You might as talk to the wind!