China's Struggle To Make Advanced Chips Dramatized in New Series (bloomberg.com) 49
A new series in China tells the story of a scrappy startup developing the advanced chipmaking technology that multinational trade sanctions today are keeping out of the country. From a report: Airing on Alibaba's Netflix-like Youku from Monday, My Chinese Chip hits on a priority issue for the Beijing government -- semiconductor leadership and self-sufficiency -- and depicts a state-supported firm successfully building lasers for deep ultraviolet lithography machines. An escalating trade war between the US and China has barred the best such DUV gear, provided by ASML, from being sold in the Asian country. My Chinese Chip shows a domestic company overcoming a plethora of challenges to nevertheless succeed. Its trailer opens with a single line in English: "We are executing a lithography machine trading war against China's government." The title can also be read as a pun on My Chinese Heart, as "chip" and "heart" sound the same in Chinese. Its official name in English is The Best Chip.
Weakness (Score:1)
Is this 'CCP approved'? Somehow I can't see them making movies about how they suck, then again it does fit the "I'm such a poor victim" narrative that's so popularly popuLUST these days.
('')
Re:Weakness (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, for the moment, it must be; otherwise it wouldn't exist. (There's no such thing as non-state-run media in mainland China. There's barely any such thing as a non-state-run *company* honestly. Anything much larger than a single-family businesses run out of a home, has to have a communist party branch office in its corporate structure.) But that approval can disappear without warning if narrative-shaping priorities shift, either on a party official's whim, or as a result of the CCP's Machiavellian internal politics.
User-created content can sometimes fly under the radar on state-run social media, but the minute anything starts to go viral, it's under the microscope.
What's going on here, is that the sanctions to which Russia has been subjected during its war on Ukraine, have the CCP leadership spooked that maybe they won't be able to conquer Taiwan without losing control of the mainland, and that's totally unacceptable. They've built their "mandate of heaven" / "social harmony" (roughly speaking, their domestic public approval rating) almost entirely on economic growth, and anything that threatens to wreck that is terrifying to the party leaders. But it is impossible to overstate the importance, to internal CCP politics, of the perceived ability to imminently "re-unify" (i.e., invade and conquer) Taiwan; a top-tier leader's support within the upper ranks of the party is heavily dependent on this. So if it looks like these two things are becoming mutually incompatible, that's very bad and has to be very visibly fixed, pronto. (Note that the most important thing here is perception. Reality is secondary. The *actual* ability to take Taiwan is not the main point. You mostly just have to be able to keep your fellow communist party officials convinced that maybe you're about to do so, any time now. As soon as this one last puzzle piece slots into place, it's a done deal. For real this time.)
Politics is weird in every country, but even in that context, China is special.
Advanced chips (Score:2)
The title can also be read as a pun on My Chinese Heart, as "chip" and "heart" sound the same in Chinese. Its official name in English is The Best Chip.
Clearly their mocha sriracha on artisan russets is stealing our vital technologies when the market is ripe for exploitation; the damn pepper crop just failed in the last year and a half. If they can deliver on these they will take over a large American market share.
Seems like propaganda to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume this story is about SMIC. I cannot read the walled article. While SMIC and China have struggled to create leading edge chips, it is a stretch to say they have succeeded. China can make older chips with features above 7nm. The trade war with China meant the Dutch company, ASML, could not sell any more EUV machines to China, and ASML is the only company that can make EUV machines. Chinese companies had purchased two machines before sanctions. Two machines are not enough to make a large number of chips. It was thought without EUV, Chinese foundries could not make chips with the smaller features whereas Korea's Samsung and Taiwain's TSMC are currently making 3nm and 2nm chips .
It was revealed last year that SMIC was able to make some 7nm chips using older DUV machines. However the only chips made were for crypto mining and not for any other purpose. SMIC does not appear to making a large number of more complicated chips for other applications like scientific computing, enterprise, consumer, etc. But to add to the challenge, ASML is now banned from selling more DUV machines to China.
Personally I am skeptical that SMIC has succeeded. Cryptomining ASICs are far simpler than other chips to fabricate. Making a CPU would be an accomplishment. With new restrictions, SMIC is unlikely to scale up any current process as they cannot get more DUV machines. Also I am somewhat skeptical that it actually done with DUV and suspicious that it was made with the existing EUV machines.
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So not only are they still far behind today, they also have absolutely zero chance of producing EUV lithography machines so they will continue to fall farther and farther behind.
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That statement assumes no-one in China can read the staggering amount of published literature on lithography technology and recreate it domestically. Sure, it'll cost a ton of money (which the Chinese government has no problems spending) and take some time, but given the incentive the US has provided eventually there'll be a Chinese ASML, just like there are already Chinese almost-everything-elses.
An all-out ban was a totally dumb thing to do. The correct approach would have been to dribble out slightly
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and recreate it domestically
Sure, eventually they will. Unfortunately for China it'll be in about 50 years and the rest of the world will be so far ahead it won't matter.
An all-out ban was a totally dumb thing to do.
China had already made their intentions of creating a domestic semiconductor industry ("Made in China 2025") very clear. By doing this and forming a coalition this will put China forever generations behind the rest of the world in semiconductor manufacturing. There's no scenario where China alone (or with Russia, Iran, etc lol) will get anywhere close to the leadin
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Unfortunately for China it'll be in about 50 years and the rest of the world will be so far ahead it won't matter.
And you're saying that based on what? The whole industry, or at least ASML, has only existed for forty years, so you're saying that China will take longer to recreate from published research and data what ASML did from scratch through trial and error?
I'd say, given sufficient state backing (meaning $$$), five years to get to generation n-1, which is good enough for most things. Ten at the outset, but once they're there ASML can pretty much shut up shop against Chinese competition, which is exactly the si
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And you're saying that based on what? The whole industry, or at least ASML, has only existed for forty years, so you're saying that China will take longer to recreate from published research and data what ASML did from scratch through trial and error?
It was hyperbole, it was meant to imply "so long as to be impractical or irrelevant" I didn't actually calculate this and come to exactly 50 years :)
I'd say, given sufficient state backing (meaning $$$), five years to get to generation n-1, which is good enough for most things.
They will never, ever be at generation n-1 given the current trajectory. All they have are DUV machines which are dead ends stuck at 7nm and zero EUV machines. That's like saying they are really close to building a spaceship because they built a steam locomotive except they didn't even build the steam locomotive, they bought it.
It's really, really hard to
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I realise *UV is incredibly difficult, but it's also something where the hard work was the R&D part, the million wrong paths followed before the correct one was hit. If you look at rocketry as a case study then within maybe five years of V2 technology and scientists coming on the market in 1945 pretty much every country that wanted to had missiles that would have been science fiction before 1939. They don't need to reinvent this stuff from scratch, they just need to read the published literature and f
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Just as an aside, there's a notion that, as we can't really predict which chain of inventions will lead to truly useful breakthrough, frivolous fun and seeming waste, can be important. And so does the short term profit focus get in the way of that.
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Also, China doesn't need to compete with TSMC's most advanced nodes, in the same way that most countries don't need a handful of whiz-bang fifth-gen fighters, they need as many fourth-gen fighters (nearly 50-year old tech) as possible.
Currently China is capable of maybe making chips from 20 years ago. In terms of chip technology that is ancient. It's not fourth generation. That's closer to Vietnam era war fighters. And here's the problem: No one wants that technology except for the most basic of microcontrollers. By saying China does not need to compete, you are saying China is okay with only making chips for toys and IoT devices.
And that is just on the manufacturing end. China also has little ability to design chips.
if they can step up a bit to produce higher-specced ones they'll continue to erode non-China market share as they already have at the lower end with STM32 clones and similar, and at the even lower end with entirely domestically-created microcontrollers that are essentially unknown outside China.
The likes of Intel,
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Unfortunately for China it'll be in about 50 years
Do you honestly think that we should just sit back and not worry about this because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, China will never catch up?
They keep leapfrogging ahead of us on technologies like EV batteries and 5G. Thermal imaging too - FLIR used to have the market sewn up, but a few years ago the Chinese started making far better sensors at far lower cost. Overnight it went from 1000 Euro for a 32x28 pixel sensor to 300 Euro for a 240x192 pixel sensor.
They have very rapidly improved their se
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China can read the staggering amount of published literature on lithography technology and recreate it domestically.
Considering only one company in the world can make EUV machines currently I would think it requires more than reading the available literature.
. Sure, it'll cost a ton of money (which the Chinese government has no problems spending) and take some time, but given the incentive the US has provided eventually there'll be a Chinese ASML, just like there are already Chinese almost-everything-elses.
Again considering there is no Japanese ASML nor American one, I would think throwing money at the issue is the way to solve the problem.
An all-out ban was a totally dumb thing to do. The correct approach would have been to dribble out slightly older machines at just the right rate that China can't really do that much with them but also enough that they're not incentivised to create their own alternatives.
Er what? Everyone who is doing leading edge chips are going to want the new machines. Also EVERYONE in the world has been trying to make their own EUV machines. It has not happened for many reasons.
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Anyone have a grasp on how much of an impact this 7nm limitation is.
I understand it is most efficient and faster... but how much is it limiting real world use cases?
Industrial/military use I'd imagine that is fine at 10 nm or whatever.
I have an older Ryzen 5 3600 that is 7nm and still works very well.
I'm going to assume regular desktop computer is workable at 10 nm.
I'm guessing mobile phone chips and what not would probably have an impact given how size, battery life... are important. But you could still ma
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I'm just trying to get a sense of the real life impact. I understand it's not going to be as efficient, but can China make 'good enough' chips to function well.
As other countries produce faster and smaller chips, China will be stuck with older and bigger chips. For the sake of argument, China could make 7nm at scale. That means they could never make anything better than the Ryzen 5 3600 in the next 5-10 years. While AMD makes 8000 and 9000 series CPUs in the next 5 years alone, at best China is stuck with 3000 series. That is IF they could make them at scale.
Zeihan video will explain this (Score:5, Informative)
Some of Peter Zeihan's videos [youtube.com] explain this in detail.
There are 3 types of chips, China is good at making the simpler microcontrollers (that are in everything nowadays), and not the high-end chips that are in modern computers or cell phones.
Basically, Chinese manufacturing of the high-end chips was done using imported labor from the US, that's been completely stopped, and China has no capacity to develop the new technologies needed.
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China imported labour from Taiwan. Big salaries and bonuses offered to anyone who could bring that high end manufacturing to the mainland. Remember that Taiwan is where the cutting edge tech is, not the US. The machines are developed in Europe, and TSMC in Taiwan is the only cutting edge manufacturing facility. In the US you have Intel, who is stuck on an older 7mn node.
If you think China has no capacity to develop the technology then you are deluding yourself. China has some of the best universities in the
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China has the world's largest single market for chips. They also have reasonable knowledge of semis with capabilities in every single sector of chipmaking. This means they will get there regardless of if the US wants it to happen or not.
SMIC only isn't doing better as a foundry because there are no better machines in the market for them to acquire. They are banned from getting any leading edge Western machine tools. But the Chinese's own semi tools market has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past d
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But the Chinese's own semi tools market has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past decade. Much faster than the rest of the world market in semi tools. So it is only a matter of time really.
And how will China get parts for these tools that are only made in other parts of the world? For example the lenses for ASML EUV machines are only made by one manufacturer that cannot sell to China. China has to replicate this lens technology, too?
I would not be surprised if in a decade the Chinese were pretty close to leading edge.
Considering the Japanese nor Americans have not been able to make EUV work, and they were decades ahead of China, I do not share your optimization. And that was when Japan and the US was not under severe sanctions that limited their ability to get parts and person
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Considering the Japanese nor Americans have not been able to make EUV work, and they were decades ahead of China, I do not share your optimization. And that was when Japan and the US was not under severe sanctions that limited their ability to get parts and personnel.
Likely neither Japanese nor Americans, having assured supply, didn't need to invest massively into making EUV, so they picked the easy path.
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Intel refused to buy EUV machines to put in their main production facilities. They only had a much older prototype EUV model for test purposes. The EUV machines were very expensive and initially had low production rate. Intel tried to milk their DUV machines all the way to 7nm or more with a proprietary highly complex multi-patterning process which they never quite got to work. Now Intel decided to skip the initial generation of EUV and go straight into high NA EUV.
The reason the Japanese never got their EU
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As for SMIC's capability, or lack of it, they proved capable of mass producing 14nm FinFET. They produced the HiSilicon Kirin 710A in large volume.
There are also claims their 10nm process has been serially produced, and they were able to produce 7nm ASICs for cryptomining.
Their yields might be low however because they were not allowed to buy the most advanced DUV tools.
The advanced process design team at SMIC used to work at TSMC and Samsung. So I do not know why you think they lack capability. Their only r
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China has their own supply chain for lithography. They have RSLaser as a light source supplier and UP Optotech as a lens supplier for DUV for example.
https://www.en.etowncapital.co... [etowncapital.com]
https://www.wsj.com/market-dat... [wsj.com]
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What Intel calls "7mn" is actually their 10nm process renamed, a bit like how AMD used to name their Athlon processors based on equivalent Pentium performance.
Intel's current 13th gen Core parts are built with a mixture of 10nm and 7nm dies. So actually while not being able to match TSMC is obviously something that the Chinese will be keen to work on, their current process is more than capable of producing modern and highly competitive chips.
As ever we are screwing ourselves by under-estimating China. It wi
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their current process is more than capable of producing modern and highly competitive chips.
And what processes are those? China makes the cheapest and most basic microcontrollers suitable for toys and dumb devices. They are not even making the middle tier of automotive and aerospace controllers. Yet somehow China can leap frog everyone else magically.
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China is already at 7nm.
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Are we having fun yet? (Score:2)
So now, China is even better at making fun of other countries than the US.
This is not even propaganda, this is their way to say "we don't care, we have so much money, mainly thanks to your subsidies that you keep sending (EVs, rare earth, solar panels...), that we can afford to make a sitcom about all that".
I never thought "time to grab the popcorn" was meant to be understood literally.
Well, at least it wasn't a horrible... (Score:2, Insightful)
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The difference is that those of us living in democratic societies are free to criticize, make our own propaganda, or lobby our government. Where as in China, you cannot question any government sanctioned propaganda, no matter how tame.
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The difference is that those of us living in democratic societies are free to criticize, make our own propaganda, or lobby our government.
Yes, that we are & I think we're somewhat better off for it. Not in any way defending the Chinese govt's approach to civil participation & I'll bow to Chinese people's own opinions & feelings on that matter.
However, I am criticising anyone who gets on their high horse & criticises another countries political discourse & systems without acknowledging their own country's shortcomings (I'll always be among the first to acknowledge mine), which is what I was pointing out. I think it's ver
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Those weren't commissioned in any way by the government. Those were brought to you by the letter A in STEM.
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Which disagrees with me how? The people who make these films can do whatever the hell they want, regardless of whether the CIA disagrees with it. Filmmakers in China do not have that option. Besides, so long as it's not outright lying, propaganda during a war isn't a bad thing. Having low morale and an unmotivated populace loses wars. And film wasn't the only way that was done:
https://www.archives.gov/exhib... [archives.gov]
Much the same as demoralizing the enemy wins wars. Much of what you see on r/Ukraine is war propaga
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I only watched one episode of 24. It was the season opener, and I guess the cliffhanger from the previous season saw our hero being subject to a Senate subpoena to provide evidence of torture or whatever. I was curious as what justifications the writers would use for torture.
If I remember right, within the first two minutes he was sitting in the senate, and before any questions, some senator excused him due to "national security". The show then totally forgot about it and they proceeded with standard hollyw
Science Fiction (Score:3, Interesting)
In the captivating Chinese sci-fi film "My Chinese Chip," a visionary storyline unfolds, envisioning a remarkable tale where a Chinese state-owned enterprise triumphantly emerges from a challenging siege. With unwavering determination, they pioneer cutting-edge chip manufacturing technology, ultimately achieving a resounding victory on a global scale.
Making dramas out of the tech world isn't new (Score:1)
Tracy Kidder's 1981 non-fiction book The Soul of A New Machine [wikipedia.org] about the creation of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 computer won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.
It may be non-fiction, but it's definitely got drama to it. You may have read it in college. If you haven't, and you are at all interested in how things were done in the late '70s, it's worth a read.
Video for English viewers? (Score:2)
Please kindly post it! :)