US bans export of tech used in 3nm chip production on security grounds | Hacker News Reader

US bans export of tech used in 3nm chip production on security grounds

theregister.com

69 pointsorionion32 comments

There's no way they'll be manufacturing "3nm" chips this decade without ASML selling them the machines to do so, while this would delay them by months at best.

This makes no sense unless the US expects ASML to ship EUV machines to China very soon, because now China will be prepared if they receive such machines later and it likely won't slow them at all. They will know to source materials elsewhere and I have little confidence in software export bans working in this day and age.

Surely the US would pick an inopportune moment to yank this away from China to inflict maximum chaos and delay development as much as possible. What prompted this to happen now? Are they about to acquire EUV machines somehow?

> What prompted this to happen now?

The State Department expected that they'd be able to pressure China into going along with the Russia sanctions. China did not. Now the State Department feels threatened and is trying to show China who the big dog is.

There's been a string of minor insults going back and forth.

Pelosi went to Taiwan.

China announced the will no longer cooperate with non-citizen extradition requests from the US.

A bunch of other stuff I've forgotten.

This is just the next item in the series.

The PRC recently surrounded TSMC with ships, soldiers, missiles, and aircraft.

Citation??

Wow, do you not watch the news?

Not TSMC specifically, Taiwan, but they are an island nation so if they get surrounded they can’t export

They weren’t blockaded though, so they can still export at this point (and maybe PRC ships are not there anymore anyway)

The parent comment said 'recently surrounded' as to say it happened last week.

As far as I know, nothing of this sort of happened.

Yes it did… pelosi visited Taiwan and PRC had a tantrum over it

PRC threw a tantrum about it, no doubt about it. But, it never 'surrounded' the island. Two completely different things.

As far as I know, the videos posted of the PLA's combats by official sources during the visit were nothing but their regular exercises, as they had some PLA foundation anniversary.

They’re replying in bad faith. Best to ignore it. The frequency and scale of military activities off the coast of Taiwan (where most TSMC facilities and staff are located) is widely acknowledged.

> Announced Friday by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and enacted today, the rule will ban the export of two ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor materials, as well as some types of electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) technology and pressure gain combustion (PGC) technology.

> In particular, the BIS said that the semiconductor materials gallium oxide and diamond will be subject to renewed export controls because they can operate under more extreme temperature and voltage conditions. The Bureau said that capability makes the materials more useful in weapons.

Do SaaS providers of these kinds of software now have to kick off Chinese customers?

SaaS? The ban is all about hardware and materials.

ECAD is software.

Code is speech.

not all speech is protected

All code is protected as speech https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1559224417674137600

That doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. Publishing and running code are very different things. Additionally, the major code hosts are not bound by free speech laws.

Not all code is speech.

Not all speech is code

Aside: the press release is a bit more specific than all ECAD software, the language it uses is "Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) software specially designed for the development of integrated circuits with Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistor (GAAFET) structure".[1]

I'm not all that clued up on the latest in chip manufacturing, but GAAFET seems like a fairly cutting edge thing used only in high-end modern chips, and I wouldn't be surprised if many ECAD softare packages are unaffected (but again, this is not my field, so could be 100% wrong there, which I am sure people will point out).

[1]: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/about-bis/newsro...

I used to work for an ECAD company, very few customers used 3nm, maybe there are more now, but I don’t know what GAAFET would be used for

GAAFET is the next step after FinFET to allow such small transistors to be feasible.

If there is a ban and ECAD is included in the ban, then yes, they must kick off Chinese customers

Pressure Gain Combustion tech was a very promising approach to increase the efficiency of planes, gas turbine power stations, rockets, and many other fields.

An export ban effectively kills all that tech.

Banning efficiency improvements like this isn't exactly great for the environment. People will just keep burning coal.

Why does an export ban kill the tech?

VC won't touch anything with an export ban (the potential market size has just been reduced from 8 billion people down to 300 million)

Scientists stop research in the area because they typically can't publish papers on it in international journals.

Companies already in the field have to fire all their remote non-US workers and non-US customers. And that usually, together with the lack of new VC funding, kills the company.

The only exception is if the US military pays for R&D instead, but in that case typically everything is kept secret and nobody gets to use it except some missiles.

> VC won't touch anything with an export ban (the potential market size has just been reduced from 8 billion people down to 300 million)

Is there any indication this technology would be made entirely unavailable outside the US?

> Companies already in the field have to fire all their remote non-US workers and non-US customers. And that usually, together with the lack of new VC funding, kills the company.

This is not the case, multinational companies operate under export control regulations as a matter of course. It sometimes requires compartmentalization and not everybody can work on everything, naturally.

> The only exception is if the US military pays for R&D instead, but in that case typically everything is kept secret and nobody gets to use it except some missiles.

Is that really typical? The US military has paid for a lot of R&D for things we use every day, jet engines, civilian rocket and satellite technology and many other aerospace technoloies, GPS, the internet, EUV lithography, off the top of my head.

I assume this export ban will also apply to the 'American empire ' - Ie. UK, Europe, etc.?

I expect China to have its own EUV machines in the next few years. Any bans will only serve to convince the Chinese government to give more money to their scientists.

Can you elaborate? Are they developing them now? If not how realistic is it that they could have something as sophisticated as ASML in a few years?

According to ASML, they have 4700 suppliers (https://www.asml.com/en/company/sustainability/responsible-s...). How many of those are essential to the development of EUV equipment and would be affected by this ban is unclear (though I'd expect a reasonably large percentage).

This is not realistic, though in the long term who knows

ASML has 32000 employees. Lithography machines are their only product. They have been working on EUV for decades. They're the only company currently able to make it today. They and Nikon are the only companies currently able to make previous gen machines.

A Chinese knockoff would also not have access to their suppliers in most cases, such as Zeiss, which are critical to the tech.

It's going to take a while.

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