Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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The West does not exist. It is the US empire imposing its will and bullying the so called allies. A recent poll showed that 80% of Germans have a negative view of the US. With regard to technology the US has lost its edge. 20 years ago the US had a clear lead in semiconductor now Taiwan and Korea are ahead. The EUVL is from a Dutch company with a small share of US originated technolgies. As I said before we are witnessing the twylight of the US empire comparable to the British Empire immediately after WWII!
How many times I have heard this story China can't do this, they are too poor, they are too stupid, they are hated and have no allies. Then it's wtf how did China do it. They have been predicting China failing longer then I have been alive.
PiSigma
"the engineer"
15+ years behind? How do you get these numbers?
I certainly don't remember having 7nm chips 15 years ago.... I remember pentium 4
PiSigma
"the engineer"
Please don't quote Brookings on this forum.... That's like quoting Ron Vara and expect people to not rip you apart.
...there were also a whole lot more players in 1978, because the level of technological capability and industrial efficiency needed to chase each new leading node kept increasing in difficulty. Amazing to think just how many countries and players “lost” ground as cutting edge became more technically challenging. Today’s leads in the lithography market are far more determined by economic factors than technological capability.
I mean...even that dude’s economic analysis is kind of...dumb. By his logic the US and the EU shouldn’t be able to have completely self contained aviation stacks, when they basically own the most advanced capabilities almost entirely within their own borders. He doesn’t factor in price effect on global trade and global marketshare when you’ve fully saturated a caprice market of 1 billion domestic customers, nor does he factor in growing base of R&D as the domestic industry increases in size.
For the 'we were not that fall behind in the 80s' sentiment, the hard truth is China was far behind even in the 80s. The well-known science writer Yuan Lanfeng (who moonlights as a computational chemist) explains it well in this video:
According to Yuan, the Chinese yield rates in the 80s were never high enough for industrial scale production. We cannot compare what was basically a series of lab projects with real mass produced product.
According to Yuan, the Chinese yield rates in the 80s were never high enough for industrial scale production. We cannot compare what was basically a series of lab projects with real mass produced product.
Which is *exactly* my point. China could make EUV lithographs and cutting edge chips today, just based on what their research output looks like. But it can’t do that at an industrially competitive scale relative to global competition. It’s not the basic technological capabilities but the industrial capability to achieve commercial viability that China needs to achieve. This is a completely doable task. It just takes a lot of time.
You are simply plain wrong... you and your soft power argument again seriously... TSMC doesn’t need soft power and it is not soft power that is so dominant... it is economics pure and simple, they can produce chip cheaper and in larger quantities than their competitors... TSMC was formed at a time when chip companies had to have their own fabs, meaning the chip companies had to sink millions - billions on their own supply chain in the form hardware, and kept having to chase the latest tech like some pretentious second gen school boy, this meant that their products were expensive not entirely because they gouge the customer, tho I am sure wanted to, but because they had no choice since capital investment had to be made to keep with the times... it also meant that only the big boy can play with this toy... what TSMC did was focus on one thing, which was production, and changed the industry to the way it is now to the point where it is pretty much irreplaceable, through their investments they made chip production affordable in an industrial sense... apart from Samsung no one even comes close. However it also presented its own sets of problems for them as illustrated by the current ban of business with Huawei, but it doesn’t matter for TSMC due to the fact that they have customers to replace lost business because they are, for lack of a better term, a monopoly, the only one who can make these high-end chips for the rest of the world at affordable price effectively muscling out all other competition.
You might be asking why don’t others just copy the formula well try asking a private investor, VC or whatever to invest billions on a venture knowing that returns might be years away, you are going to be pricing higher than you competitor for sure and what you are producing is not unique to provide the edge you might need for the business to succeed whilst at the same time still having to chase tech that is moving forwards and having the possibility of investing billions more before you even see a return... remember that your competitor isn’t just going to stop and wait for you, they are also increasing production to meet demand...
For SMIC they also don’t have to make the machines that make the chips because there are other companies to do that for example SMEE... the bad relations would have happened regardless... the biggest problem SMIC is having apart from the technical problem is creating the virtuous circle where they can start to balance their investment and revenue so that it can cover for some of needed capital to reinvest into the business again, you don’t just keep investing and hope for the best, the business need to actually run like a business... not even China can simply keep plugging money into a problem that isn’t just about investment.
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