Posted on 07/14/2022 5:18:34 AM PDT by FarCenter
NEW YORK – China’s semiconductor industry has lagged the US in patents and lagged South Korea and Taiwan in fabrication, but it hopes to leapfrog its competition by adopting revolutionary new chip design technologies.
Advanced chips used in 5G smartphones and some workstations squeeze billions of transistors onto a fingernail-sized chip by shrinking the dimensions of the transistor itself to 3 to 5 nanometers. Most chips have gate widths of 28 nanometers and higher. Etching tiny circuits on silicon is enormously difficult.
Only the Dutch manufacturer ASML makes the lithography machines that use the short wavelengths at the extreme end of the ultraviolet spectrum to shrink transistors to such tiny dimensions. And the fabrication plants are extremely expensive, costing up to US$20 billion each.
In 2020, the US forced the Dutch government to ban exports of ASML’s most sophisticated lithography machines to China. ASML uses American intellectual property, giving Washington leverage.
But ASML continued to sell its previous generation of lithography equipment, which etches 14-nanometer transistors using “deep ultraviolet” (DUV) light. China bought 81 such machines in 2021 alone.
China’s largest fabricator, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), now produces 14-nanometer chips. With 5% of the world’s fabrication market, SMIC lags its Taiwanese and Korean competitors but it is expanding rapidly.
As Scott Foster and Jeff Pao reported in Asia Times, Washington last month asked the Dutch government to stop ASML from selling the older DUV machines to China as well.
Semiconductor Industry executives told Asia Times that the Dutch would not accede to the American demand. ASML’s China sales exceeded $2.7 billion in 2021, including the 81 DUV lithography machines.
The American intellectual property (IP) content of the older machines isn’t big enough to justify an American ban, analysts and executives say.
(Excerpt) Read more at asiatimes.com ...
Or...Just invade Taiwan & take over their chip industry.
They probably have all their top designers and engineers working on ways to build black doors in to the chips.
And China produces vastly more new chip engineers per year than the US does.
It is very doubtful that any Taiwanese chip fab would be functional following an invasion. The destruction of a relatively small number of multimillion dollar machines would prevent further operation.
To my mind, the smaller the chip component dimensions, the more vulnerable the product is to EMP. A solar event or a purposed weapon would cripple far more 3-to-5 nm chips, than it would 14 nm chips.
If these chips are to be manufactured, there should be significant EMP protection. Not sure how... you could not meaningfully Faraday Cage them.
According to this article only 6 days ago, we're trying to get China not to manufacture even the 14nm versions: "U.S. Wants China's SMIC to Stop Making 14nm Chips"
ASML moved their Asian operations to Singapore over a decade ago because they were afraid of Chinese intellectual property theft. Whatever they are selling to China today, it has to be 2-3 generations behind the "real" cutting edge.
I think it is a dishonest article overselling China’s capabilities.
It puts two claims out there
1) China makes 5% of the chips
2) China is now capable of making 14nm chips.
It doesn’t say what percentage these 14nm chips make of Chinese output. I suspect it is something like less than 1% and they don’t say it because then it wouldn’t be such a scary story. Try it for a size - “China makes 0.05% of the <=14nm chips of the world and we should all be scared!”
Why the hell aren’t we making our chips here??
To make that happen it would take a small import tariff on all electronics, say 10%. That is way more than marginal difference in production cost. That is the only government "interference" needed.
You are obviously a brilliant individual with keen insight who is also faster at the keyboard, since I was just going to post that.
The finest nodes are used for only certain types of chips, such as GPUs, Smartphone processors, high-capacity RAM, etc.
There is a vast amount of production at coarser nodes, especially for industrial, automotive, avionics, etc., which require high reliability, long life, environmental tolerance, etc.
Plus, for some applications like microcontrollers, shrinking the active area on the wafer is not important, since the part of the wafer for connections, saw kerf, testing, etc. doesn’t shrink.
Applied Materials: SMIC Move To 7nm Node Capability Another Headwind
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4513009-applied-materials-smic-move-another-headwind
“...the fabrication plants are extremely expensive, costing up to US$20 billion each.”
We could have built some plants instead of wasting money on the UKE-RUS crap war.
Best chips are all still made in America, but what we got a shortage of is inferior chips.
Why they’re not made in America - everybody can make inferior chips. It’s all about the price and it is just a competition to squeeze wages and costs by the lemon squeezers.
Taiwan, South Korea and the USA are already working on a 20 angstrom process.
They can build anything.
China is stuck in 15 year old process technology.
ChiComs can take out Taiwan and S Korea in ten minutes if they want to.
May want to ask the Biden that Intel is moving to Germany with the help of fed money.
It is hard to produce engineers of any kind in a country where mathematics is “RACIST”.
True.
Maybe the far left wokists in the illegitimate Dementia Joe regime will draft the barely educated BLM terrorists on the streets and make them engineers.
Chuckle.
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