Chinese semiconductor industry

ansy1968 said:

@Oldschool but HW is designing a 3nm chips shows the need to prepare for the future, you're right at least that part of the equation is ready while waiting for the rest to catch up. Hisilicon had become a world class competitor to Qualcomm now SMEE need to up its game to at least threaten ASML just a little bit...hehehe.

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The thing is we don't know how long the wait gonna take. It's really is open ended. The 3nm preparation could be a moot point

One thing I learned China will surprise you .when you least expected and when you expect something , alot of times it will disappoint you. So, you really don't know.

I gives ws10 jet engine as example. The path is very tortuous.

Oldschool said:

The thing is we don't know how long the wait gonna take. It's really is open ended. The 3nm preparation could be a moot point

One thing I learned China will surprise you .when you least expected and when you expect something , alot of times it will disappoint you. So, you really don't know.

I gives ws10 jet engine as example. The path is very tortuous.

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Jet engines are not important, China can thrive without airplanes

Without chips, China is back to the stone age.

So I expect China to put 10000x more resources into this chip problem than the jet engine which is basically nothing compared to this

Oldschool said:

China semiconductor market big is good news to US. US wants to sell to weaklings like Lenovo, Xiaomi, Oppo.
It just ban and kill someone like Huawei or others that design its own chips or can be military supplier
It's all about selective killing.
I don't believe complete tech decoupling is US strategy.

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You underestimate the cruelty the US is capable of. This is the same country which sanctioned Iraq to the point they couldn't get food or medicine easily. Just look at what they do to Syria today. At the time of the Soviet Union all semiconductor exports to it were restricted.
The Soviet Union the Warsaw Pact countries basically had to reverse engineer the hardware they needed to use and manufacture it.

The only reason the US is not making a blanket ban is simply because a lot of their own companies manufacture in China still.
Once that production is moved elsewhere to Vietnam, or whatever, you will see a blanket ban happen.

visitor123 said:

lol. I don't know if you are aware of this but Taiwan who supposedly has the monopoly on "the important technology on Earth" has a GDP 1/2 of Spain and lower per capita. And Spain exports mostly pork.

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Taiwan can purchase everything else on the global market and the PRC cannot.

gelgoog said:

You underestimate the cruelty the US is capable of. This is the same country which sanctioned Iraq to the point they couldn't get food or medicine easily. Just look at what they do to Syria today. At the time of the Soviet Union all semiconductor exports to it were restricted.
The Soviet Union the Warsaw Pact countries basically had to reverse engineer the hardware they needed to use and manufacture it.

The only reason the US is not making a blanket ban is simply because a lot of their own companies manufacture in China still.
Once that production is moved elsewhere to Vietnam, or whatever, you will see a blanket ban happen.

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This exactly...

But I see it as the US using a blanket ban to indirectly force all the companies to decouple from China, not the other way around. They won't want to wait for all the companies production to move out of China first, they will institute the blanket ban as the means to trigger and acceleration the migration of companies, factories and supply chains out of China...

(in the same token, what do you guys think the petrodollar hegemony is? its an arrangement where the US uses its military to hold the world's oil hostage and forces all nations that need oil to buy in on the US dollar as reserve currency... now US could have just told everyone to use dollars or else, but instead they did it more strategically by making the mafia protection deal with OPEC and then all the nations are forced to fall in line because everyone needs energy... likewise in the 21st century and the 4th industrial revolution, chips are the new Oil... and the semiconductor supply chain is the new OPEC... so the US will use this as the chokepoint to force the other nations of the world to be compelled to move their supply chains out of China since a blanket chip ban will have exactly this consequence and effect... vs if the US just up and decreed all nations must stop trade with China, no one would really listen to them... they tried to get everyone to stop buying Huawei and it didn't work, that is when they resorted to the TSMC ban and then Huawei was forced to cut production of its phones due to lack of chips and lost significant marketshare... likewise the US strategic goal is to erase China's economic progress and to force the world to decouple from China... and I see them doing this chip ban as the means of last resort now that COVID didn't "do China in" like they had planned/hoped...)


For this reason, I believe the US will do the blanket chip ban within six months to a year from now.

Oldschool said:

I gives ws10 jet engine as example. The path is very tortuous.

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It's not a very good comparison. China has no presence in the commercial aviation sector. As well, those sanctions go all the way back to the 80s. China had to build everything from scratch and still struggling.

That is not the case in semiconductors whatsoever. Everything is already in place, all China is missing are a few missing pieces. That isn't to say the task will be easy but it's nothing like what China had to endure to build up its own aerospace and defence industries.

You folks probably don't remember but it was forbidden to sell PlayStation 2 game consoles to Iraq.
Because they supposedly could be used for military purposes...

That is how petty these kinds of export bans can be.

@z117 you underestimate the effort in having your own complete semiconductor chain. It is greater than to manufacture jet engines.
Just think about this. The US can manufacture jet engines with 100% US made equipment and supplies. But it cannot manufacture chips with 100% US made equipment and supplies. In fact no nation on Earth can do this right now.

China can manufacture quite a lot of it yes, but to improve the quality, quantity, and price to the point of being competitive isn't easy at all.

quantumlight said:

Jet engines are not important, China can thrive without airplanes

Without chips, China is back to the stone age.

So I expect China to put 10000x more resources into this chip problem than the jet engine which is basically nothing compared to this

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I am referring to similarity of the engineering effort.

There is really no substitution for time.
China needs time. Time to make everything synchronize.

If China has complete domestic technology at older 65nm and widely adopted through the country, it would be different story.

Big companies like Huawei, SMIC, don't support domestic equipments before so now they want domestic equipments to work. It's not happening.

It will take time

z117 said:

It's not a very good comparison. China has no presence in the commercial aviation sector. As well, those sanctions go all the way back to the 80s. China had to build everything from scratch and still struggling.

That is not the case in semiconductors whatsoever. Everything is already in place, all China is missing are a few missing pieces. That isn't to say the task will be easy but it's nothing like what China had to endure to build up its own aerospace and defence industries.

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Just my hunch it will take longer than expected to weep out the bugs, reliability issue. It takes time to do trial and error..

If US do a complete ban on semiconductor to China, which Chinese companies gonna die?

Yup, the likes of Lenovo, Xiaomi, Oppo that has to rely on high end chips for subassembly and export to western markets.

Let them die then.
Majority of Chinese companies can survive with it's own low end chips.

The country can survive on 45nm, 28nm.

Oldschool said:

If US do a complete ban on semiconductor to China, which Chinese companies gonna die?

Yup, the likes of Lenovo, Xiaomi, Oppo.

Let them die then.

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A blanket ban is declaration of war, probably within an hour of this announce TSMC will get some DongFeng Express packages