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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.