Preventing the Flow of High-End Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment to China

[F-22Raptor]

The primary U.S. export control target to constrain competitors’ AI capabilities
should be the semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) necessary to
manufacture high-end chips. Slowing the growth of China’s high-end semiconductor
manufacturing ability, coupled with continued U.S. investments in microelectronics
R&D, will set back China’s attempts to catch up to the United States and its allies,
and force it to continue to rely on foreign firms to supply its high-end
semiconductors. While constraining China’s chip manufacturing capability does not
inherently restrict China’s ability to acquire high-end chips, it would force China to
rely more on U.S. and allied firms for such production, which would provide the
United States with significant leverage over China’s future capabilities.

There are four primary reasons SME makes an ideal target for export controls to
limit China’s future AI capabilities:

1. Compute is key to AI - AI is becoming increasingly reliant on compute over
time,166 even as its application becomes more widespread. These two forces
demonstrate that high-end semiconductors will be essential to power many
future AI applications.

2. China will likely remain reliant on high-end semiconductor imports - In
2016, semiconductors were China’s largest import, totaling over $200
billion,167 and it does not have significant domestic production capability for
chips below 14nm.168 However, it has invested heavily in the semiconductor
field to grow its domestic supply chain and become an industry leader by
2030, with the ultimate goal of decreasing or eliminating its reliance on
foreign hardware.169 From 2014 to 2018, China was the world’s largest
importer of SME, accounting for 29 percent of global imports.170

3. High-end SME is very specialized - In particular, extreme ultraviolet (EUV)
lithography tools, the most advanced photolithography technology, are
necessary for producing chips at the 7nm node and below and cost $120
million, weigh 180 tons, and require 20 trucks or three fully loaded Boeing
747s to ship.171 The complex nature, rarity, and size of this equipment makes
it difficult to replicate or steal.

4. U.S. Allies control the SME market - The manufacturers of SME are
concentrated within a very small geographic group of allied nations. In 2017,
the eight largest SME firms were located in the United States, Japan, and the
Netherlands.172 These three countries also contained over 90 percent of the
global SME industry in 2015.173

Photolithography tools, the most complex and expensive type of SME, are even more
concentrated than SME writ large, with one active Dutch company (ASML) and two
active Japanese companies (Nikon and Canon).174 Furthermore, ASML has a
monopoly over EUV lithography tools. ASML also has a dominant 88 percent
market share in ArF immersion photolithography tools, the next most advanced
photolithography technology, necessary for chips from the 7nm to 45nm node.
Nikon is the only other supplier of ArF immersion photolithography tools.175

Recommendation 5: The United States should work with the
Netherlands and Japan to restrict the export of EUV and ArF immersion
lithography equipment to China, and take steps to increase demand for
such tools among U.S. firms.

The United States must work in cooperation with the Netherlands and Japan to
prohibit the export of EUV and ArF Immersion lithography equipment to China, in
order to restrict China’s semiconductor production capability at the 45nm node and
below, which the Commission assesses to be the chips most useful for advanced AI
applications.176 Although Chinese firms do have existing production capability down
to 14nm at limited scale, China’s ability to manufacture photolithography equipment
capable of production below the 90nm node is significantly more limited. If these
controls are effective, it would be very difficult for China to obtain any new high-end
lithography equipment, and any repairs or maintenance on existing equipment
would likely prove difficult. While chips 45nm and below currently present the most
utility for advanced AI applications and are the most feasible to control, this standard
will also have to be continuously reevaluated to ensure controls are capturing the
proper equipment and not unnecessarily harming industry.

Given Dutch and Japanese companies are the sole suppliers of EUV and ArF
Immersion lithography equipment, these two governments have the collective ability
to significantly reduce China’s ability to produce high-end semiconductors. In 2019,
the United States reportedly put significant pressure on the Netherlands to block a
sale of EUV lithography equipment from ASML to SMIC. These efforts proved
successful, as ASML ultimately let the contract expire without delivering the
equipment.177 The United States should double down on such efforts, while also
encouraging Japan to restrict China’s access to ArF Immersion equipment.178

Furthermore, the United States should set a clear policy goal of remaining two
generations ahead of China in state-of-the-art microelectronics fabrication
capabilities by utilizing a combination of export controls and substantial commercial
R&D investment.179 In support of this goal, the United States should initiate a
simultaneous effort to provide tax credits or subsidies to U.S. firms that purchase
semiconductor manufacturing equipment, to include EUV and ArF Immersion
lithography equipment from Dutch or Japanese firms, to support efforts to build
advanced foundries in the United States. This program, which would require
Congressional authorization, could partially assuage concerns from the governments
of the Netherlands and Japan about the financial impact of controls on SME, while
simultaneously working to revitalize the semiconductor manufacturing base in the
United States. This credit could also be coupled with additional initiatives, such as a
federal match program for existing state and local incentives, and tax credits for
efforts to study and reduce the potential environmental impact of semiconductor
facilities. Combined, these incentives would further efforts to grow diverse U.S. high-
end microelectronics fabrication capabilities. This would complement the recent,
encouraging announcements by TSMC that it intends to build a state-of-the-art
fabrication facility in the United States,180 and would also benefit other firms
exploring similar proposals.181

The “CHIPS for America Act,” a bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced by Senators
John Cornyn (R-TX) and Mark Warner (D-VA), as well as by Representatives
Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Doris Matsui (D-CA), includes such a tax credit for
SME, along with several other investments which seek to revitalize the U.S.
semiconductor manufacturing base.182 This Commission supports this bill, which
incorporates several of the Commission’s first quarter recommendations focused on
maintaining U.S. leadership in high-end microelectronics that are key to AI,
including by funding research for next generation microelectronics technologies and
creating a national laboratory and incubator dedicated to establishing U.S.
leadership in microelectronics packaging and manufacturing. The Commission
believes the CHIPS Act would create a more competitive U.S. market for
semiconductors, revitalize the broader U.S. microelectronics industrial base,
incentivize firms to bring additional elements of the manufacturing process back to
the United States, and ensure the United States retains global leadership in advanced
microelectronics research and development.


An excerpt from the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence

 

[Feng Leng]

Report: SMIC could start 7nm chip production by next year

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

Report: SMIC could start 7nm chip production by next year

That's not the most significant thing. I know this report is pure BS for the simple reason it doesn't mention the most important acronym in this game, SMEE.

 

[F-22Raptor]

Report: SMIC could start 7nm chip production by next year

Talk is cheap. Let’s see it happen and at scale.

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

That man is on fire today, looks that the man is really hurt by seeing the self-inflicted wound caused by the Trump Administration and the Neocons.
You see that only equipment that this people talk to restrict is EUV lithography, because they know the Chinese are relative advance in pretty much else and they are mistaken, the Chinese are closer to EUV than most people think, the Chinese are expected to deliver an 28nm lithography machine by next year that is half step between the 38nm of DUV and the 14nm of an EUV system that means they are really close to EUV system once that happen it will be harder for the U.S.A to force the Japanese or the Europeans not to sell the equipment, because the don't want to lose business. The irony of the situation is the United State that is incapable of doing similar systems.
https://cntechpost.com/2020/06/05/f...achine-expected-to-be-delivered-in-2021-2022/

 

[F-22Raptor]

At the mercy of the US
But Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, shares Gwennap's more gloomy assessment.

"Currently, there aren't viable alternatives to Lam Research or Applied Materials for near leading-edge or leading-edge technology," he told Light Reading by email. "There are alternatives to lagging technology solutions, but they have US intellectual property inside."

Nor is manufacturing equipment the only problem. Nowadays, when semiconductors are being designed, companies rely on clever software called electronic design automation (EDA) to lay out the complicated circuitry.

HiSilicon uses the same EDA software as its contract manufacturers in this entire process, and Huawei reckons the best and most widely used technology comes from just three companies: Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics. All are US-based.

"The reason the US companies are the industry leaders, and particularly for these more advanced technologies like 7nm, is that they provide a whole pile of programs that assist you in not just designing the chip but testing the chip and making sure all the circuits function in the right way," says Gwennap.

"There are all these additional tools that sit on top of the basic chip design environment that really help manage the complexity of doing a 7nm design, and so those are the pieces you would be missing if you tried to design a chip without those US-based tools," he says.

Another option for Huawei would be to use chips from another designer (that is, not HiSilicon) to continue producing equipment. The most straightforward approach would be to replace its custom chips with so-called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The problem here is that Intel and Xilinx, the world's two largest FPGA suppliers, may already be off limits as US chip companies.

"Huawei is in a tough spot and at the mercy of the US for its highest-performance CPUs [central processing units], GPUs [graphical processing units] and FPGAs," says Moorhead.

Any switch to other designers would, in any case, be a massive undertaking, says Gwennap. "You would have to come up with a whole combination of chips to do something and at the end of the day it would probably be less powerful, less efficient and more costly than the custom solution."

Ian Levy, the technical director of the UK's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), is similarly unconvinced.

"Assuming you can find someone to design a chip that's near enough to the original, the integration into the wider product is a very complex job," he wrote in a blog that sought to explain why the NCSC favored a ban. "This is a really complex engineering task."

Some kind of band aid
Huawei pleaded for more time in the run-up to the UK's ban, insisting it had the inventory to serve all the UK's 5G basestation needs.

The claim is credible. Under contracts with Chinese operators, Huawei will this year erect about half a million basestations in its domestic market. With a now-obsolete 35% cap on its UK 5G presence, it would have required inventory for no more than 20,000 basestations in the UK, says Ed Brewster, its UK director of communications.

Yet few operators would choose a vendor whose ability to meet future needs – including demand for products based on Release 16, a new set of more advanced 5G specifications – is so uncertain. "Anything new that comes out is going to be next to impossible to accommodate," says Gwennap.

He anticipates Huawei will create "some kind of band aid" that allows it to continue shipping goods at inferior quality once existing stockpiles run out.

Perhaps the company's best hope is that US authorities, possibly under different leadership early next year, agree to ease the restrictions as they try to mend bridges. "If the US keeps up the bans, it will be disastrous for Huawei," says Moorhead.

In the absence of a policy U-turn, unless Huawei can defy the odds in the next few months, and magically produce a long-term fix, it may struggle to hold onto a major part of its business.

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/wit...risks-losing-its-technical-edge/d/d-id/762523

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

At the mercy of the US
But Patrick Moorhead, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, shares Gwennap's more gloomy assessment.

"Currently, there aren't viable alternatives to Lam Research or Applied Materials for near leading-edge or leading-edge technology," he told Light Reading by email. "There are alternatives to lagging technology solutions, but they have US intellectual property inside."

Nor is manufacturing equipment the only problem. Nowadays, when semiconductors are being designed, companies rely on clever software called electronic design automation (EDA) to lay out the complicated circuitry.

HiSilicon uses the same EDA software as its contract manufacturers in this entire process, and Huawei reckons the best and most widely used technology comes from just three companies: Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics. All are US-based.

"The reason the US companies are the industry leaders, and particularly for these more advanced technologies like 7nm, is that they provide a whole pile of programs that assist you in not just designing the chip but testing the chip and making sure all the circuits function in the right way," says Gwennap.

"There are all these additional tools that sit on top of the basic chip design environment that really help manage the complexity of doing a 7nm design, and so those are the pieces you would be missing if you tried to design a chip without those US-based tools," he says.

Another option for Huawei would be to use chips from another designer (that is, not HiSilicon) to continue producing equipment. The most straightforward approach would be to replace its custom chips with so-called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The problem here is that Intel and Xilinx, the world's two largest FPGA suppliers, may already be off limits as US chip companies.

"Huawei is in a tough spot and at the mercy of the US for its highest-performance CPUs [central processing units], GPUs [graphical processing units] and FPGAs," says Moorhead.

Any switch to other designers would, in any case, be a massive undertaking, says Gwennap. "You would have to come up with a whole combination of chips to do something and at the end of the day it would probably be less powerful, less efficient and more costly than the custom solution."

Ian Levy, the technical director of the UK's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), is similarly unconvinced.

"Assuming you can find someone to design a chip that's near enough to the original, the integration into the wider product is a very complex job," he wrote in a blog that sought to explain why the NCSC favored a ban. "This is a really complex engineering task."

Some kind of band aid
Huawei pleaded for more time in the run-up to the UK's ban, insisting it had the inventory to serve all the UK's 5G basestation needs.

The claim is credible. Under contracts with Chinese operators, Huawei will this year erect about half a million basestations in its domestic market. With a now-obsolete 35% cap on its UK 5G presence, it would have required inventory for no more than 20,000 basestations in the UK, says Ed Brewster, its UK director of communications.

Yet few operators would choose a vendor whose ability to meet future needs – including demand for products based on Release 16, a new set of more advanced 5G specifications – is so uncertain. "Anything new that comes out is going to be next to impossible to accommodate," says Gwennap.

He anticipates Huawei will create "some kind of band aid" that allows it to continue shipping goods at inferior quality once existing stockpiles run out.

Perhaps the company's best hope is that US authorities, possibly under different leadership early next year, agree to ease the restrictions as they try to mend bridges. "If the US keeps up the bans, it will be disastrous for Huawei," says Moorhead.

In the absence of a policy U-turn, unless Huawei can defy the odds in the next few months, and magically produce a long-term fix, it may struggle to hold onto a major part of its business.

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/wit...risks-losing-its-technical-edge/d/d-id/762523

Yeah this is the same people who said that Huawei was over because couldn't replace U.S. made chips like those qorvo and qualcomm just to see how a year later Huawei replaced most of them.
If this people think that Huawei is a national secuirty problem i want to see their faces when they realized that they have lost their semiconductor industry.

 

[mmr]

Report: SMIC could start 7nm chip production by next year

Nice.

Isnt it the goal though? Made in china 2025...where china exceed usa on 5g...green tech...ai...iot...robotics etc....usa pressure will only ensure made in china goal faster and ever less dependent on usa.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

Now the troll is just scraping up whatever trash article he can find on the internet. We've gone from "US national security commission" to whatever "light reading" is supposed to be. Pathetic.

Just something to chew on for anyone who thinks China is some johnny-come-lately to photolithography:
http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2017/7/381798.shtm

Every single dirty trick the US is trying has been foreseen and prepared for. China saw you coming from miles away.

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

Huawei obsession will cause serious damage to US semiconductor industry: expert Featured

The US obsession with Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies may be well-intentioned, but could end up seriously harming the country's economy and national security, a senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says, in an article written as a brief for the Centre and sent to subscribers of The China Wire website in its weekly email titled "What we're reading this week".

In the article, very appropriately headlined Washington's China Policy has lost its Wei, Scott Kennedy said the campaign against Huawei threatened an industry which was the bedrock of the US economy: the semiconductor industry.

"The campaign to isolate Huawei and the greater technology decoupling enterprise threatens this historic success and accelerates China’s technological independence," he wrote.

"Decoupling would also harm the United States’ military preparedness and reduce the costs of Chinese aggression, most importantly, with respect to Taiwan."

Rather than the policy it had adopted, Kennedy said the US needed a policy he called principled inter-dependence to address the risks posed by Huawei and Beijing's high-tech drive, while also continuing to benefit from being part of a dynamic global economy.
"This approach does not require the United States to trust Huawei or China, but it does depend on Washington having greater confidence in itself and working more effectively with friends and allies," he said.
For a number of years now, in fact since 2012 when a 66-page Congressional report on Huawei painted the company as not doing business "the American way", the US administration has been campaigning to have Huawei equipment removed from its networks.

There is plenty of such equipment as it was used liberally during the rollout of 3G and 4G networks in the US, especially in rural areas where Huawei's pricing and attention to getting things working properly before leaving endeared the company to rural network authorities.

In May 2019, the US placed Huawei on its Entity List; companies placed on it cannot obtain products made in the US with more than 25% of American content without obtaining a licence. But Huawei was able to easily skirt around this restriction by getting products it needed supplied by branches of US firms located outside the physical boundaries of the US.

American companies have no objection to doing business with Huawei; indeed, they are eager not to lose this business because Huawei's orders are in the millions and, often, billions of dollars.

About the only outcome from the Entity List entry to affect Huawei was its inability to continue using the proprietary version of Google's Android mobile operating system; this includes apps like Gmail, Maps, Drive, YouTube, the PlayStore and Photos. Huawei has had to confine itself to using the open-source version of Android, which has none of these apps, and is trying to create replacements.

Google applied for an exemption to continue supplying Huawei, but did not get one. Microsoft was more successful, obtaining a waiver from the Department of Commerce to continue supplying the Shenzhen firm with its Windows operating system that Huawei uses on its laptops.

The US came back in May this year with further restrictions aimed at cutting off Huawei's supply of semiconductors which it gets mostly from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. This was done through the Foreign Direct Product Rule that makes it necessary for any company — American or foreign — that sells American products or those made using American technology to require a permit before selling to Huawei.

Kennedy's musings apply to this latter rule. He pointed out that according to the US trade lobby group, the Semiconductor Industry Association, between 2000 and 2019, US chip sales almost doubled from US$102 billion (A$141.5 billion) to US$193 billion and now claimed 44.5% of the entire global market.

"Over the same period, domestic employment in the sector rose from 186,000 to 241,000 — many working in the country’s 71 major commercial fabrication facilities, which are spread across 18 states. The US chip sector is bolstered by a leadership position in semiconductor equipment, the tools used to make and process wafers as well as {those used to] test and assemble the final chipsets," Kennedy explained.

"According to the US International Trade Commission, US chip equipment firms, which have roughly 60,000 domestic employees, account for at least half of global production and in several areas are the only supplier. The United States is even more dominant in chip design software, controlling 80% of the global market."

Kennedy is not the first American expert to warn that Washington's semiconductor moves would end up hurting the US; as iTWire reported recently, China expert Doug Fuller has predicted that the US Government may end up shooting itself in the foot by weaponising the semiconductor supply chain.

Another word of advice has come from the British international magazine, The Economist, which said the May strictures could drive part of the semiconductor industry out of the US, not exactly the outcome that power brokers in the US expect.

Kennedy said the industry’s success was not achieved in isolation. Its growth — and the rise of chip firms such as Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia, equipment makers such as Applied Materials and LAM Research and chip design software firms such as Synopsis and Cadence — was intimately connected with the rise of the Asia-Pacific as a nexus of design, production, assembly, testing and consumption of chips and related downstream sectors; everything from smartphones and computers to telecommunications equipment and medical devices.

In this mix, China played an enormous role, Kennedy said. He illustrated this by pointing out that Chinese companies and consumers were deeply woven into this highly integrated network.

"China was the direct destination of US$8.8 billion of the US chip sector’s US$46 billion in exports in 2019; but if you include total sales from US chip firms, the total was at least US$70 billion," Kennedy said. "Those chips go to downstream Chinese and multinational firms, which are often co-located in dense industrial clusters, facilitating the continuous improvement of products and services at declining costs for global consumers.

"Simultaneously, US chip equipment firms export about 90% of their production, with the great majority going to East Asia, including US$3.6 billion to China. In addition to hugely benefitting from access to the Chinese market, having Huawei and other Chinese ICT firms integrated into global production networks means they are part of US-led ecosystems.

"Despite progress by Huawei and other Chinese firms, they are still dependent on US and Western firms higher up the food chain. Many elements of this hierarchy have endured, with the semiconductor industry as its most crucial cog."

He said China would not stay quiet as the campaign to isolate Huawei continued. "Beijing will certainly respond in kind, locking out US firms in favour of their counterparts from Europe, South Korea and Japan, partly out of spite, partly out of a need to have reliable suppliers," Kennedy said.

"Moreover, as a result of these restrictions, China is accelerating its infamous 'indigenous innovation' strategy like never before. China’s chip industry is still several generations behind, but it is more likely to advance when deprived of external supplies. Rather than crushing China’s high-tech designs, US actions are fuelling them."


He said one consequence would be slower global sales and the US chip industry's gradual loss of dominance. He cited a Boston Consulting Group study as claiming a full decoupling with China would reduce the sector’s revenue by 37% and lower its global market share to 30%; by contrast, China’s market share would rise from 3% to 31%.


Added Kennedy: "And a weakened US chip industry cannot but hurt the rest of the country’s related sectors, including flagship companies and smaller suppliers as well as their employees. One might think that the US industry could prosper even more if it on-shored all of its manufacturing and locked Chinese competitors such as Huawei out of the West.


"But one industry insider told me the frank truth: 'The idea that we can decouple from China and our industry will still be successful is not tethered to reality'.”

Kennedy said it was possible to justify a smaller and less dominant US chip industry if crippling Huawei and the decoupling of the technology industry were both needed to protect the national security of the United States. But, he said, it would end up having a diametrically opposite effect.

"Most importantly, the United States’ military preparedness would suffer," Kennedy claimed. "Over the last few decades, federal funding has stagnated, but US industry has filled the gap and then some.

"Total semiconductor R&D by private firms in 2019 was almost US$40 billion, or nearly 20% of total sales. A less profitable US chip industry means fewer funds available for R&D, and less R&D translates into less progress in accelerating computing power and developing new applications, including for the US military and intelligence community.

"Conversely, as China fills some of the gaps created by the withdrawal of US firms from their industry, Beijing will have more resources available for their own civil- military fusion program."

While banning Huawei components from US 5G networks could reduce the risks of Chinese surveillance, a singular focus on the supply chain could well provide a false sense of security and result in the US letting its guard down to other cyber risks, Kennedy said.

"Instead, there is a school of thought that effective cyber security begins with the assumption of 'zero trust', viewing threats as possible from everyone and everywhere, regardless of the equipment.

"Having only US or 'trusted' suppliers will not on its own eliminate cyber risks. As a result, the benefits of building a 'fortress' for safe networks may be overstated, especially if doing so distracts the US from continuous monitoring and protection of networks and other emerging challenges."

Kennedy said the degree to which the US economy was embedded, including in high tech, in the Asia-Pacific also raised the benefits of co-operation with its allies and increased the costs of greater aggression to China.

"Having a stake in each other’s success helps cement closer US ties with South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and ASEAN, and all of them with each other," he explained.

"A similar logic of shared interests because of economic inter-dependence has tempered China’s diplomatic and security behaviour over the long run. Chinese actions in the South China Sea and elsewhere are deeply troubling, but fewer economic ties would lower the costs of such actions to China."

On the political side, he said the taming benefits of inter-dependence applied mostly to China’s relationship with Taiwan. "The island’s economy has blossomed in the last quarter century because of — not in spite of — the island’s economic integration with the mainland," Kennedy said.

"Roughly 40% of Taiwan’s exports go to China, and cumulative Taiwan investment in China is over US$200 billion. All the while, the proportion of manufacturing jobs in Taiwan has held steady (26.5%). If the new rules on chip sales are fully implemented and followed by further restrictions, Taiwan’s economy will suffer and the risk of cross-strait conflict is likely to grow.

"The firm most immediately caught in the middle of this conflict is TSMC, the world’s largest chip contractor, who will soon have to stop doing business with Huawei, which currently counts for 12% of its revenue. Even if TSMC can find other business in the short term and can expand production in the US over the longer term — an initial step is the proposed US$12 billion fab in Arizona — it still stands to suffer mightily over the long term if sales to Huawei and other Chinese customers dry up.

"Just about every major Taiwanese firm, from Foxconn to Acer to MediaTek, is highly dependent on the continuation of cross-strait commerce. Close cross-strait economic ties are also vitally important to China. Not only do Taiwanese firms, such as Foxconn, employ millions of Chinese workers, but the island also plays a crucial role in China’s tech sector. In chip production, even with the emergence of manufacturers such as Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, TSMC is irreplaceable.

"This economic reality is a huge disincentive for China to openly use force against the island. A US policy to strangle China’s semiconductor and telecom sectors, thereby decoupling China and Taiwan’s economies, raises the security risks for Taipei and, hence, for the US.

He offered a few steps that could be taken: "Address the largest security risks with multiple tools and through co-ordinated action that has international legitimacy; Use export controls and investment restrictions to reduce national security risks, and use fair-trade tools to counter unfair commercial activity; Diversify and compete, do not decouple; and [Realise].applications matter as much as infrastructure."

 

[Pakistan Space Agency]

Why is the US behaving so desperate? It really makes no economic sense for the US to try and restrict Chinese economic growth.

To date, the US has benefited so much from Chinese growth.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

Why is the US behaving so desperate?

What does the US have to lose? The "continued interdependence" trajectory means certain death for US hegemony, but the irony is that Trump's confrontation is just hastening the arrival of that end. It's pure desperation, nothing more.

The US is simply not equipped politically or economically or even militarily to compete against China no matter how much of a head start it has. It's like trying to put some fat couch potato in a footrace with Usain Bolt, no matter how much of a head start you give lardy, Bolt will eventually overtake him.

 

[F-22Raptor]

Now the troll is just scraping up whatever trash article he can find on the internet. We've gone from "US national security commission" to whatever "light reading" is supposed to be. Pathetic.

Just something to chew on for anyone who thinks China is some johnny-come-lately to photolithography:
http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2017/7/381798.shtm

Every single dirty trick the US is trying has been foreseen and prepared for. China saw you coming from miles away.

Once again, talk is cheap. When SMIC begins producing "7nm" chips(which is actually comparable to TSMCs 10nm process) at scale let me know.

Practically all EUV machines contain a high percentage of US sourced technology. And the miniscule amount of companies that produce them have a high percentage of US engineers.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

Once again, talk is cheap. When SMIC begins producing "7nm" chips(which is actually comparable to TSMCs 10nm process) at scale let me know.

Practically all EUV machines contain a high percentage of US sourced technology. And the miniscule amount of companies that produce them have a high percentage of US engineers.

You know full well China does exactly what it says. That's why you're so fearful.

Put the article I posted through machine translation and read it slowly so the full implication eventually reaches you. I know you'll put two and two together eventually, champ!

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

What does the US have to lose? The "continued interdependence" trajectory means certain death for US hegemony, but the irony is that Trump's confrontation is just hastening the arrival of that end. It's pure desperation, nothing more.

The US is simply not equipped politically or economically or even militarily to compete against China no matter how much of a head start it has. It's like trying to put some fat couch potato in a footrace with Usain Bolt, no matter how much of a head start you give lardy, Bolt will eventually overtake him.

Like eldalmari said Sanctions on China usually have the opposite effect, they cause disruption but at the end of the day are futile in stopping China technological advance and usually end in a more self-reliant China. In the last few decades Chinese companies have give preference to U.S and other Foreign semiconductor companies because is easier, safer and allow then to generate profits faster but a the same time it create a vicious cycle in which local semiconductors companies and startups do not growth because if nobody buys your equipment or software you can't make better equipment or software. The irony is that by allowing selling of semiconductors in China the Americans have contained the Chinese semiconductor industry. Now things have definitively change, now is a matter of life or death for some companies.