Kind of sad what's happened to US semiconductor manufacturing. Speaking from an American perspective, of course.
If you were Taiwanese this would worry you?
It makes complete sense for Taiwan to invest in maintaining it’s “silicon shield” even as china tries to catch up with fabrication on the mainland.
China can comfortably make chips that might be the equivalent of 5 year old Taiwanese ones. Last time I checked, that’s extremely viable.
No military general ever is going to say, “we can’t invade, we’re half a decade behind!”
Nothing screams “favorable market conditions” like WW3 and sanctions rivaling Russia.
But it would be incredibly stupid strategically.
I think only sensible path is to give Taiwan nuclear weapons. It removes all the dangers for ever.
End result requires more energy, has lower yield and is overall more expensive.
For military purposes and whatnot that's enough, but they can't put this in consumer devices without subsidies.
It is still hard to get much of a clear picture on how well they are doing on this stuff. Chinese companies are saying they are near parity, the opposition says they are 15 years behind, the reality is probably somewhere in between.
While they have made a lot of quick progress, that is no guarantee for future gains.
On the flipside Canon's Nanoimprint Lithography promises lower cost, even if their feature size is 15nm in practice. They also appear to be having competition now:
https://www.zyvexlabs.com/apm/atomically-precise-nano-imprin...
Recently Canon shipped the first commercial device and it appears that this path will see continued development. 15nm(14 advertised) is already good enough for, say, automotive applications.
they wont. full stop. they've even admitted as much in industry. they'll be extremely happy if they're (only!) a few years behind tsmc
at this point, what will be a real earthshaker is if china manages to get past 7nm. smic has gotten a long way but even that company's 7nm process has serious limitations (much higher cost and worse yields)
and anyways, aside from a handful of use cases (ai being one tbh), 7nm chips are more than viable for any general purpose task. a "leapfrog" is quickly diminishing from a "need" to a "want", and the resulting governmental support is fading as well. of course, it'll still be a high priority for the chinese, but it's not like top of the list.
You could buy phones with SMIC 7nm chips as early as mid 2024, that means yields were good enough around mid 2023.
This indicates they'd be on track to do 5nm this year, which is what the news articles indicate. The impressive part is that this is catching up with ASML+TSMC combined. There's no other company or government in the world that has achieved this vertical in the last few decades. China is willing to sink Manhattan project level resources into this, for good reason.
The Chinese perspective itself certainly isn't anything close to these vague abstractions, outside of vague anti-western polemics or nationalist chest-beating. After all with the same logic we're pouring a "manhattan's worth of funding" into "AI", dosen't mean we're going to be reaching Gen-AI anytime soon!
> Everything, even very advanced technology, can be reverse engineered, especially if you already know conceptually what it does
This isn't true. Maybe for software it is. Manufacturing is one of the hardest stages, and China lacks tooling for the ultra-high precision engineering required to actually implement this process.
It's kind of like building a nuclear bomb - conceptually it's easy. Hell, the first nuke was dropped before the microwave oven was commercially available.
The real challenge is manufacturing the damn thing. Refining all of that uranium is not an easy task - even today.
China has spent billions of USD equivalent trying to copy EUV. They have had access to EUV installations and fully disassembled them (funny story: they broke it putting it back together).
They are highly motivated, they have a ton of money, and frankly, they're no a bunch of dummies.
And yet, they still don't have it. (fwiw i think they will by the end of 2030)
I disagree. We already have, by anyone's standards from 2021.
We keep shifting the bar, somewhat intentionally so that progress doesn't stall.
I guess my mistake was assuming they would ship it considering how rough it is financially, but they probably will for bragging rights.
> You could buy phones with SMIC 7nm chips as early as mid 2024, that means yields were good enough around mid 2023.
That was a halo product
> The impressive part is that this is catching up with ASML+TSMC combined.
Without euv, they are mining diminishing returns.
> There's no other company or government in the world that has achieved this vertical in the last few decades.
No, they had the advantage of copying and learning from decades of industry experience.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive, but expecting Chinese leadership in this space by 2030 is foolish.
Of course, I’m never going to rule out anyone’s long term success, but there is no indication they’re in any position of leadership.
My rough best guess is that they’ll be shipping euv-involved chips by 2028. That’s not a leapfrog, that’s parity
Not sure why you are basing your whole argument on euv. There's nothing magical about it that prevents them from stealing/reinventing it.
I'm not. We were talking about "leapfrogging" and that naturally requires a technology that enables processes beyond EUV's capabilities.
In fact, many hours before you responded to my post, I responded to my own post with this: "My rough best guess is that they’ll be shipping euv-involved chips by 2028."
> There's nothing magical about it that prevents them from stealing/reinventing it.
If it was so easy they'd have done it already.
No, it's just insanely complicated to implement and the innovations required are not just the conceptual technology itself, but the high precision manufacturing prowess required to actually execute it.
And again, I think they're probably gonna have it before 2030. Hell, I could be convinced that they're going to start taping out EUV-based chips by the end of next year, although I would require a beer wager for that :)
But we were talking about leapfrogging, and that's "only" parity.
NATO doesn't consider Ukraine as significant because they have vital tech they supply globally. Rather, NATO is concerned about an aggressive regional power that may have aims on more than just Ukraine.
I don't mean to defend the Soviet regime here but in the interest of discussion: the "to subjugate them" aspect is still somewhat contested [0]. I'm not sure whether it would even class as genocide according to the UN's own criteria.
From my understanding: the famine was definitely man-made, the question is more about whether it was intentional.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
We already have a pretty serious unemployment problem among college graduates so something else seems to be going on (a problem with domestic universities?)
Among stem graduates?
I think America doesn't manufacture semiconductors because it is a very unclean process, full of nasty chemicals. It's expensive to make semiconductors and deal with the clean-up. There are less environmental restrictions and cheaper labor in other parts of the world.
There are a bunch of Superfund sites around Mountain View, CA that serve as a reminder about the US Semiconductor industry - Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, National Semiconductor, Monolithic Memories, and Raytheon to name a few.
Nobody in the U.S. really wants that in their back yard. Of course we've seen the same kind of thing from fracking, and everything else that rightly should be regulated or banned.
What happens now with a defunded and purposefully dysfunctional EPA is anyone's guess. Maybe manufacturers will exploit the political climate to further destroy the environment to make a few more million or billion dollars.
Press (X) to doubt.
According to https://steveblank.com/2009/04/27/the-secret-history-of-sili... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo the creation of Silicon Valley had more to do with academic expertise in radio research and Department of Defense funding circa World War II. Corporations were the "second wave".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley
"Silicon Valley" describes the period between the late 1960s and mid/late 1990s (and still to this day to some extent). It has nothing to do with what went on there around World War II. Yes, semiconductor corporations created "Silicon Valley".
Before that time it may have been a sort of "Vacuum Tube Valley", but that does not have the same ring to it. And around WW2 there was tech going on everywhere, not just around Mountain View.
If I had to pick a point in time as the beginning, I'd probably put it at the founding of either Kleiner Perkins or Intel (a couple years after or before the Silicon Valley moniker was coined, respectively). Before then funding mostly came from other companies. With Intel you have successful founders funding their own new company, and with Kleiner Perkins you have successful founders funding other founders. To me it isn't Silicon Valley until this dynamic emerges.
Narrative and fact are two distinct aspects of history which work together. Portraying the heavily referenced and fact-laden linked article / talk as "just story" borders on dishonesty by intentionally ignoring the facts presented - the most interesting part. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.
> Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth
I don't see anywhere I make such a claim. "Silicon Valley" is a narrative. My point has been that the facts paint a deeper and more complex history than that narrative provides. Have a nice day!
And of course, this is before the mega defense contractors that exist now. The military absolutely fucking hates those megacorps and does still try and actively fund new small business entrants to military contracting. The problem is mega corps buy them up as the US is owned by them.
A simple Google search for 'how many semiconductor fabs are in the U.S.' shows there are 70 commercial fabs.
American corporations are fading into irrelevance through "financial management". Manufacturing powerhouses like Boeing and Intel are a shadow of their former selve and are really just coasting on inertia.
Pretty much everywhere you see "innovation", you will see government money. Look at the pharma industry. I doubt there's a drug out there that wasn't created by researchers using federal grants.
I'm often reminded of the story of Tetris. A handful of Soviets created the game. What was capitalism's contribution? Licensing agreements, sub-licensing agreements and so on. Put another way: building enclosures. That and rent-seeking is really all American corporations do anymore.
> Nobody in the U.S. really wants that in their back yard.
Disagree. I worked in Intel's flagship semiconductor r&d division in Oregon in the 2010s.
Everybody wanted Intel in their backyard. It was a huge source of high paying and stable jobs, both for engineers with PhDs, like me, and for thousands of technicians and support staff.
There were protected wetlands on Intel's campuses, and parks and fields around them. Certainly Intel wasn't perfect from an environmental point of view, but it was not a high source of pollution.
I've worked at/with many other semiconductor fabs around the US and around the world, and they're mostly similar in this regard. Far "cleaner" than factories in many other industries.
I had a great job in R&D at Intel, in a department full of PhDs, in the 2010s, then jumped to another semi company from 2015-20.
Just before the pandemic in 2020, I got a job at AWS as a software engineer. It wasn't the only reason, but it was clear that I could make a lot more money in software.
I quickly became disillusioned with almost everything about how large software companies work, and now back working as a data scientist for an advanced manufacturing company 5 years later.