https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37894925#37896319
So I'd wager that this investment is to bring technologies such as this up to scale.
But do-it, do-it-cheap, do-it-at-scale, do-it-right has been the standard playbook out of Asia for 50 years now. I'd suggest that Canon is going down the road of being a player in the 5nm market.
Even if it has a lower yield, having a competing technology to EUV is absolutely amazing in several ways.
"Wright found that every time total aircraft production doubled, the required labor time for a new aircraft fell by 20%"
So the playbook atm is more promise than concrete reality.
Nor is there some law that says "they did it for other technologies, so they'll manage it for this one too" (besides, this is survivorship bias, forgetting about the technologies they didn't manage to do it).
If you want to see effective de-industrialization, look at what happens to US industry when China applies the opposite of sanctions (subsidies).
Adam Smith figured out that mercantilism is inherently self-defeating over two hundred years ago. Maybe nation-states will catch up in the next few centuries.
The government was both going to demand, and fund local companies creating a competing product and was already doing so long before sanctions arrived. Nothing about the sanctions sped up the process in the least. The Western sanctions had almost 0 bearing on accelerating local chip production, but it did do a GREAT job of limiting their ability to buy the hardware required for advanced fabrication.
You also seem to have a belief that a "monopoly" in China is anything remotely like the West. It's not a free market, if a company in China tries to gouge the market or take it in a direction that's not approved at the expense of what the party wants, their executive leadership will quickly find themselves on the outside looking in (if they're lucky) or sitting in a jail cell if they aren't. See: Jack Ma
Semiconductors were core to the "Made in China" strategy the party was pushing in 2014...
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insig...
Whatever encouragement or pressure the Chinese government was applying was insufficient to get manufacturers like Huawei to switch to domestic suppliers. Chinese companies still worked with established companies like TSMC, until forced by US sanctions to switch to worse domestic alternatives.
They could, but a domestic trade sanction, just like foreign sanctions, would guarantee at least near-term damage to Chinese companies.
Domestically, Beijing would be seen as the responsible party for the resulting economic damage, causing resentment towards the government, with no actual guarantee of self sufficiency. Companies, in general, do not care about having a domestic supply chain; they want to increase profits.
Internationally, other countries would also see China as the initiator of the conflict, and those that are negatively affected may want to respond with sanctions of their own, escalating it beyond what Beijing intended.
The risk analysis is different between foreign sanctions and domestic sanctions. In the end, the Chinese government was not prepared to take that risk, but the American government was.
One of the reasons groups like the USSR or Serious Communist China ended with everyone starving is that there is literally no known method to determine the correct price without mass signalling through a free market. Ditto what direction "should" be taken - the only known method is 10s of companies (ideally with funding weighted by what clever investors think is likely to work) where 9s of them fail and a selection succeed.
China isn't getting where they are because the party is helping. If anything it is the opposite, the party must have some capitalist incubators where they are holding themselves back from interfering all that much, otherwise the whole thing will collapse at some point because some bureaucrat refuses to believe prices were set too low until the shortages starve millions to death.
This is certainly a claim, let's see how it stands up against the historical record (as from wiki): 1961: Last famine in the PRC 1966: Start of the Cultural Revolution 1976: Mao dies
I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling these, but if you've got some arguments explaining why the Cultural Revolution was after the end of "Serious Communist China" I'd be interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste...
The 'USSR' starved in the 90s after the fall of communism.
> Serious Communist China ended with everyone starving
Oh this nonsense. Serious Communist China had to deal with nuclear threats from both the US and the USSR. Serious communist china tok a back water colonized nation to a nuclear power within a single generation.
> there is literally no known method to determine the correct price without mass signalling through a free market.
You have it backwards. 'Free markets' led to 'starvation'. That's why we, in the US, have farm subsidies. A form of 'price control' along with many other measures. There is no nation ( especially a major ) on earth that has a 'free market'. There was also never a time when we had 'free trade' either. I'll let you figure that one out by yourself.
Every industry, from housing to oil, has price controls on them. It's all a matter of the degree and levers used.
The same idiots who praise government subsidies to build up our own chip industry are whining about 'price controls'.
So China can glean some of the process, but, because the design, assembly, and setup of the machines is done by western contractors, they're effectively locked out of 'the hard part'. Not to say they can't learn it, it's just not nearly as trivial as the rest of the things they clone.
Also worth noting that, many of the chinese clones are made in the same plants as the orignals, sometimes in parallel to the originals as to benefit from existing successful processes that were already in place, but using cheaper materials, less QC, different branding, etc.
It's actually quite impressive engineering really, they can often reduce part count and cost significantly while shipping a functional, albeit inferior, product. Chip fabs don't work in that model though, so, that presents an additional difficulty.
The West is able to lean on existing knowledge Intel has from running its own fabs in the US and the knowledge of ASML in the Netherlands who makes the machines.
Basically, they could get a machine and take it apart and figure out how it works, but that's meaningless if they don't understand how to make the stuff or how to keep it working well.
If you believe that every Taiwanese engineer is rabidly anti-China then I have a vaccine I want to sell you.
It is my belief that China will steal what it can, corrupt who it can, threaten who it can and most importantly, re-invent what it is missing (they have a bigger STEM education pipeline that most Western countries combined) until they no longer have this achilles heel.
The only unknown is if there is will be hot war before they reach that inflection point.
ASML tools are step 432 of 1234. There’s a whole fab built around it and a whole supplier ecosystem.
They will eventually succeed. That is obvious. High end chips have become existential in the modern world, especially now with AI, but have already been before that. When will they succeed is an open question as stealing the blueprint is absolutely not enough.
So, from 10,000ft I see what you're saying, and might even agree.
But what possesses someone to describe a people or country like this? We do the same with Russia; "other" them, like they have inherently "evil" traits. As if the US isn't above or involved in espionage.
I guess I'm confused how otherwise seemingly intelligent people can look at another country and think their people are fundamentally different. But god forbid you point that lens at the wrong group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In...
China has done what you said since 2005. it've been 20 years. is China leading the semis industry?
It doesn't even have to be something as advanced as semiconductors, duplicating a line that manufactures something as prosaic as paint is an exercise in patience and frustration. It's like building software from source using documentation, you may think you wrote down all the steps, but you find all the crap you missed when you actually try to execute the task.
2) Top-down command is anathema to engineering progress
American corporations are bad enough for only reporting good news up the chain (see: Intel and deep UV lithography). A dictatorship like China is going to be ridiculous. You will deliver good news to Dear Leader, and you will deliver it when expected, or you will find yourself in the doghouse. So, especially if your task fails, you will make bloody sure that it either gets reported as successful or that you leave someone else hanging with the consequences (see: China and water and rocket fuel). This slows the engineering process to a crawl as nobody can trust anything delivered from anybody else.
This is not an attempt to suggest China's government is good, because it's not, but it's also not a carbon copy of the worst sides of the Soviet Union - for all of Deng's brutal authoritarianism, he did recognise and address a lot of the worst mistakes of Mao and the Soviets in terms of the economy.
It also still doesn't necessarily mean employees in a private company in China will be as open to reporting issues as they might have been elsewhere, but it does mean there are incentives in play that at least make many executives want to put effort into identifying and addressing issues.
I lived for a few years behind the iron curtain, in an actual honest to god dictatorship. The fear pervading and perverting society was palpable. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and you might die, and your family will suffer too. Not to mention destroying your career and social status. Best to lie most of the time, even to realtives. You never know who to trust, and the price of a mistake is enormous.
From the way you phrased your question, I get the feeling you have no idea what a dictatorship is like. The two are only very superficially similar. Look at how Navalny ended up vs Ilya Sutskever.
/r/redditmoment
I'm going to set a reminder to check in on this comment in three years to see how it has aged. My guess is, very poorly.
It's a total coincidence it has a ton of karma, too. Yup
I believe in Hong Kong instead. And thus has so many prejudices.
This guy has quite an obsession, don't you think? Oh, right We shouldn't think. Let's just blindly eat the narrative.
It's of course difficult to remain respectful to other people when their views are remote from yours. The temptation is strong to think that they can't possibly be reasonable or fair, they must be in bad faith, etc. But after many years of moderating these disputes I can tell you that most of these perceptions are mistaken—what's really going on is that people have such different backgrounds that it's hard for them to relate to each other.
Do what you have to do.
At the same time, users aren't allowed to accuse each other of being shills, etc. - this too is well-established and also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you feel that users are breaking the rules you're welcome to flag the comments or to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com but responding by breaking the rules yourself is not ok.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had close partnerships with Detroit auto makers that helped their industry.
Had we continued to collaborate with China in space, it's likely that most of these developments would have happened at a much slower pace, simply because they'd have had a lower overall priority. Sanctions, in general, are just a very poor weapon that increasingly obviously seem at least as likely to hurt the sanctioner as the sanctioned.
And the West would have had access to the same tech. The issue with putting a wall between yourself and the biggest manufacturing hub on the planet is that the well manufactured stuff might not be on your side of the wall.
the world need strong rival like China to challenge western hegemony. that's why we have Artemis now, if China still in backwater like in 60's, we would not have project Artemis
I am afraid the train left the station, or more like the rocket has launched already. I don't think the sanctions are going to make that big of an effect and if anything, they might come to bite the US back than anything else.
Who knows if it comes back to bite the US. If I were China, I'd remember how the US treated them. I don't know.
What goal is that again? China is down to 5-7nm chips in practically no time which is more than enough for virtually every industrial and military application (the latter being the ostensible target of sanctions).
Huawei is even shipping phones now again on domestic supply chains. Pretty much the only thing the sanction have achieved is what, that Chinese gamers can't play Cyberpunk 2077 at max graphic settings? The irony is that cutting edge chips are predominantly used in sectors that China itself regulates to hell already. If you're concerned with China's generative AI advances you could have spared yourself the sanctions because so is the Chinese government
I believe that, unfortunately, the US has a much lesser grip on the global economy nowadays. So, these kinds of sanctions only slow them down (the US), while other economies benefit immensely, even China itself.
i.e. there will always be a buyer for a billion surplus chips in the market.
Chinese toolmakers sucked because they didn't have market share and lacked practice. With a captive market, they finally have customers to practice on. This learning-by-doing cycle is what allows them to rapidly improve their quality, something they couldn't do before.
The sanctions hurt short-term, but also gave them a long-term opportunity which they didn't have before.
I recommend this piece for anyone who is interested in the current state of the Chinese semi industry:
New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls by Paul Triolo
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/02/a-new-era-for-the...
I think the power issue is because the camera and mic are on 24/7, they showed QR codes being read while the screen is off.
The copium levels in the atmosphere here are reaching critical levels.
They’ve stuck with DUV, which everybody else in the world decided was a dead end. Sticking with DUV may cause further progress to be impossible for all we know (maybe somebody should ask Intel). Going to EUV will require a different set of skills. They’ll have to replicate ASML’s machines to do so. Nobody else has figured it out. Their process on figuring out DUV tricks doesn’t tell us anything about their progress making that other type of machine.
Yet you have no problem proclaiming it's leading them to a dead end.
Don’t read more into the post than that. I’m not going to defend an affirmative claim that they aren’t making progress. They have a ton of engineers and are willing to invest in the field, so it is entirely plausible to believe that they’ll catch up.
Release day of Mate 60 saw Huawei stores empty.
I trust the live videos on the release day providing more evidence of demand that sales numbers which are as manipulated as much as their covid numbers.
https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_reaches_30m_sales_of_mate_60...
Semi is probably going to be less like oil and more like agriculture in coming years, it's just something strategic many govs have to subsidize.
There’s no rhetoric. When you phrase things this way it just makes you sound like an anti-USA pro-China troll.
Everything I have read/seen not only points to the Chinese being decades behind but their efforts being black holes of money time and effort that yield NO progress.
Their domestic share of semi equipment machines with publuc tenders (=legacy) has gone through the roof and is over 60% (was 10? I think five years ago). These are legacy, so unsanctioned tools.
There is a lot of waste, but there are results.
https://www.techinsights.com/blog/techinsights-finds-smic-7n...
7nm and 3nm are not even in the same ballpark.
And the legacy tech is useful, but this isnt "progress" its production. The distinction is large, production did not sustain declining producers.