Trump boosts China's chip industry like Xi Jinping never could
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
I'm trying to find and am not having luck, but I swear that Scotty from the youtube channel Strange Parts had an excellent interview with Rigol about this.
First, China was already trying to move toward manufacturing independence.
Second, instead of buying 5nm chips, China is settling for working on initial 14nm production. That's 8 YEARS old at this point (not even comparable to Intel's 14++++ stack).
Third, this also seemed to be on the back of equipment purchased earlier. Moving forward, they can't buy cutting-edge manufacturing devices. Instead, they have to create a whole industry to make the machines to make advanced chip fabs. I somehow doubt that the normal, rather loose Chinese tolerances are up for the job.
Fourth, they also need to build out an entire silicon refinery industry which is itself not an easy task to be accomplished within the next few years.
By the time all this is in place, the economic repercussions will have been extreme.
If Biden wins the election, he's going to continue the same process, but I somehow doubt this same outlet will continue pumping out such dumb partisan pieces.
The problem is: How do you convince a world class chip designer like HiSilicon that it should use a local foundry rather than TSMC? TSMC which is more advanced, more reliable, maybe even cheaper? Without breaking China's commitment to WTO and other agreements that facilitate open trade.
That problem is solved now by the policies of the US.
And not only for Huawei. Here is for example SMIC announcement of an improved "FinFET N+1" process explicitly without US technology:
https://cntechpost.com/2020/10/12/smic-achieves-breakthrough...