It's finally clear to me now. For ages I didn't know why the US wanted to prevent China from developing chips. This video says that the main purpose is to restrict Chinese military development, which poses a substantial threat to US national security. I always thought the US didn't want China to have chips is due the fact that China is a communist and "unfriendly" country. But doesn't the US know that military chips are decades behind commercial chips? China has had no problem developing its own chips for military applications. Right?
Weapons like missiles, tanks, aircraft and so on have to interact a lot with the physical world, with their operators, and their target so they need a lot of analog ICs, sensors, RF and programmable logics circuits, but vast majority of that is mostly mature nodes due physical, budget, reliability, compatibility and other constraints, in some cases the use of exotic materials like SiC or GaN for high power and fast switching and Hard rad ICs is better than just resolution to archive the desired performance but world militaries do NOT consume near the volumes required to justify the building high end semiconductor fabs.
And you may say but what about supercomputers to design nukes and hypersonic missiles, but really? is weapon design the main driving force of compute power or is high end physics like fusion research or bioinformatics or climate prediction or astronomy? I think is the latter, even in the 90s I think was that way, The Chinese in the 70s did the calculation of their nuclear test using mechanical calculators. My hot take is that I don't see the military as a big consumer of computing power compared to the civilian sector, does China 3 exaflops of computing power are going to be used exclusive to hypersonic research? I personally don't think so.
I watched this interview between this guy called Chris Miller, an author and a think tanker i guess and Paul Triolo, a think tanker. and Mr Miller said that the military has been the driven force of the semiconductor industry and Mr. Triolo correct him telling him that has not being that way since the 70s, consumer electronics IS the main driver of the semiconductor industry, the military just piggyback on that success.
The Japanese semiconductor industry in the 80s and early 90s is a testament to that, the Japanese success was driven by the Japanese civilian electronic industry.
In the 90s the US recovered from the Japanese because California was the center of the civilian PC and software revolution, that required a lot of chips, that companies like Intel or AMD supplied.
In the mid 2000s was rise of the fabless model and smartphone who give rise to the success of Taiwan and South Korea semiconductor industry
I think in the case of the Soviet Union was totally contrary, the obsession with national security of the soviets force that nation to allocate most of their quality semiconductor manufacturing resources to military production and because the military is not a huge consumer of chips basically discouraged the Soviets from building a robust a semiconductor supply chain and innovate in top of that, some people say that was Western export controls, I don't think so, semiconductor manufacturing equipment and materials in the 80s was not near as complex as is today, I have no doubt that the country who invented the Atomic Layer Deposition technique would have created an entire advanced semiconductor supply chain on its own. Other people say is capitalism and communism, I don't think is that simple because the Japanese semiconductor industry was heavily supported by the Japanese state, it was not called Japan. Inc for not reason. So that let me to think that was the Soviet obsession with national security that let them to see semiconductor manufacturing as something for the military first and civilian second. ICs for fighter jets and transistors for consumer radios.
In the case of China most of their military IC production is done by CTEC. I think SMEE-CTEC lithography tools are probably more than enough to satisfy more than 99% of China military chips needs by volume.
What had been really worrying the Chinese government since 2010 is China civilian state sector, if you want an idea how big that is, just remember how worry Micron got when they got banned from government purchases, we are talking about the one of the biggest sector in the world, an entire economy on its own right, communications, transportation, oil, mining and so on. Any cuts on ICs could really disrupt the Chinese economy. So is not just the military.
