TSMC to stop supplying Huawei with chips

[mr moose]

29 minutes ago, ThePointblank said:

Considering it took ASML and industry partners over 15 years to get a viable EUV scanner system built for high volume manufacturing to be able to produce sub 7nm chips, and they are the only ones out there with a working unit, it will take the Chinese well over another decade to figure out the technology and get it to the point where they can mass produce with the systems.

 

The semi-conductor industry is a very high cost intensive industry, with large needs for capital to build the fabs, acquire the tools, and hire highly technically skilled people to be able to design and build chips. China has the potential for the latter down already, but the issue is former. It has been trying to close the gap here in technical know-how through attempting acquisitions, but the current political climate in Washington and in the West from here on makes another effort to outright buy the expertise makes this unlikely.

 

And at this current pace, China in order to catch up would need the decades of human capital and expertise these companies have collected. It is one thing to talk about theoretical science, it's another to demonstrate the applied sciences needed for high end semiconductor production. Calibrating and perfecting the application of a theory is much harder than just mere application. It takes years and years of experience, trial and error, even sometimes lucky mistakes to really master applying a complicated theory. In said process, sometimes new scientific phenomenons are observed and need to be explained.

 

This isn't an industry where you can start from scratch and be among the best in a few years.

 

The Chinese are not starting from scratch and they have been doing it on the back of the work already done by everyone else.  I hate to say these things because people conflate them, but the Chinese are very good at industrial espionage cutting development time in half for them.

 

The topical review (the work that demonstrates they know how to get the required precision) I linked to earlier is work they were doing in 2018.  It is extremely likely that the Heuwei and the Chinese government have been developing there own EUV  since before then if not from then. 

 

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

 

 

You throw enough money and minds at a problem that has already been solved once and you will get to the solution, china has both a great deal of money, and a great deal of minds, highly educated, some in the top echelon of their fields. 

 

 

If there is one thing that proves this it is the covid pandemic,  vaccines take decades to develop, but the second governments remove the red tape and bureaucracy and scientists can work on the vaccine rather than grant applications and worry about funding cuts, we get several vaccines already in human trials with AstraZeneca ready to produce 2B doses and sell at cost during the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

[WelshFruitSnacks]

16 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

The Chinese are not starting from scratch and they have been doing it on the back of the work already done by everyone else.  I hate to say these things because people conflate them, but the Chinese are very good at industrial espionage cutting development time in half for them.

 

The topical review (the work that demonstrates they know how to get the required precision) I linked to earlier is work they were doing in 2018.  It is extremely likely that the Heuwei and the Chinese government have been developing there own EUV  since before then if not from then. 

 

 

Lets look at how much the US ban can actually hurt huawei aside from just the fab side. On the chip development side all three major EDA companies, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics are American. China needs to develop and validate decades of software tooling in if/when Huawei loses access to those tools. Which isn't easy since those tools are still buggy (personal experience). Plus those guys are only there because they had to beat/acquired everyone else in a competitive market. China would probably only have a single company working on the replacement, reducing their potential for success (equal quality). Unless they simulated a competitive environment at an increased cost of developing multiple versions for a single winner.

 

China would possibly lose access to ARM architectures if ARM ( a British firm) denies them access. While an ISA is "relatively" easy to come up with, the compilers, software, and operating systems are all issues to be resolved. This would also force Chinese technology to be incompatible with the rest of the world. Like what if all the standards organizations just stop working with China. (VESA,IEEE and other Tech Consortium)

 

Just in terms of pure work that needs to be done even if you have all the manpower and know-how in the world it would take a decade to catch up.

 

Now back to the main argument on fab tooling. China without the data that Western Countries have on individual pieces of tech: Lenses, Wafer manufacture, dielectrics, air-gap tech... Would take ages to calibrate any machines they could make. Not to mention even having that data isn't as useful as you might think because a lot of the calibration depends on the specific environmental factors that they are operating in. The same process in Korea and the US can have wildly different yield rates because of the turning for moisture, dust, specific air composition, local gravity, EM background noise...

 

Sure China has the expertise, and resources. Maybe  even enough corporate espionage to get these the base products made in a couple of years. They still have to take the time to account and figure out all the local variables to get the fabs to actually produce decent results when they actually start producing chips. 

 

Sure you can make the things in a small scale lab but the variability at larger scales will kill your commercial viability. We've been able to "make" smaller scale transistors for years with ion deposition on 4in research wafers. Getting these things to work properly with deposition equipment is a different ball game.

 

Just research itself isn't useful , pretty much everyone has access to those papers you pointed out (academic research), but why are there so few players in this space? If it was commercially viable you would expect to see multiple companies on it. Even Carl Zeiss's competitors and consumers ,who have the most to gain to replicate the optics, can't do it. China can't just throw research experts and money at the problem and expect to quickly produce the same result.  Also, even if the government has unlimited money they can't exactly have a 400 million dollar cost per item if western companies can do it for 100 million. They still need be in the same ball park for cost reasons.

 

Not to mention that if there is any evidence of corporate espionage or patent theft they wouldn't even be able to sell products outside of China. Limiting the market to purely domestic sale/uses. Huawei would still be fucked.

 

 

 

 

[mr moose]

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

 

Lets look at how much the US ban can actually hurt huawei aside from just the fab side. On the chip development side all three major EDA companies, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics are American. China needs to develop and validate decades of software tooling in if/when Huawei loses access to those tools. Which isn't easy since those tools are still buggy (personal experience). Plus those guys are only there because they had to beat/acquired everyone else in a competitive market. China would probably only have a single company working on the replacement, reducing their potential for success (equal quality). Unless they simulated a competitive environment at an increased cost of developing multiple versions for a single winner.

If you read the links I provided earlier this is not a single company in china, it's the Chinese government pushing for silicon independence (they have been for a while now).

 

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

China would possibly lose access to ARM architectures if ARM ( a British firm) denies them access. While an ISA is "relatively" easy to come up with, the compilers, software, and operating systems are all issues to be resolved. This would also force Chinese technology to be incompatible with the rest of the world. Like what if all the standards organizations just stop working with China. (VESA,IEEE and other Tech Consortium)

That has nothing to do with my point.  Putting china on an embargo is a completely different issue to whether they can develop their own fabs or not.  Denying them license to use IP doesn't mean they can't build it.

 

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

Just in terms of pure work that needs to be done even if you have all the manpower and know-how in the world it would take a decade to catch up.

From what point?  a decade of what?  There seems to be this idea that china are just starting from scratch right now.  They have been researching this as long as everyone else. again, read the stuff I linked earlier.

 

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

Now back to the main argument on fab tooling. China without the data that Western Countries have on individual pieces of tech: Lenses, Wafer manufacture, dielectrics, air-gap tech... Would take ages to calibrate any machines they could make. Not to mention even having that data isn't as useful as you might think because a lot of the calibration depends on the specific environmental factors that they are operating in. The same process in Korea and the US can have wildly different yield rates because of the turning for moisture, dust, specific air composition, local gravity, EM background noise...

 

What makes you think they don't have the knowledge?  What evidence is there that they are "decades" behind and can't do this?

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

Sure China has the expertise, and resources. Maybe  even enough corporate espionage to get these the base products made in a couple of years. They still have to take the time to account and figure out all the local variables to get the fabs to actually produce decent results when they actually start producing chips. 

Again, how much time? is there an actually figure you know of?  I have shown they have already spent more than 2 years on the mechanics of precision optics manufacturing fine enough for EUV application. And this is on top of everything they already do and know.

 

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

Sure you can make the things in a small scale lab but the variability at larger scales will kill your commercial viability. We've been able to "make" smaller scale transistors for years with ion deposition on 4in research wafers. Getting these things to work properly with deposition equipment is a different ball game.

 

Just research itself isn't useful , pretty much everyone has access to those papers you pointed out (academic research), but why are there so few players in this space? If it was commercially viable you would expect to see multiple companies on it. Even Carl Zeiss's competitors and consumers ,who have the most to gain to replicate the optics, can't do it. China can't just throw research experts and money at the problem and expect to quickly produce the same result.  Also, even if the government has unlimited money they can't exactly have a 400 million dollar cost per item if western companies can do it for 100 million. They still need be in the same ball park for cost reasons.

There are few players because it is high risk with intense startup and R+D costs. It's not a business you just start with a loan form the bank.   China don't have that problem as they aren't operating form the position of a western business in competition with other western businesses, they are investing as a matter of national security.   You wouldn't compare the research capabilities and output of DARPA to an individual company with only investors proving the funds. 

 

10 minutes ago, WelshFruitSnacks said:

Not to mention that if there is any evidence of corporate espionage or patent theft they wouldn't even be able to sell products outside of China. Limiting the market to purely domestic sale/uses. Huawei would still be fucked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

EUV lithography is not a patentable process,  the machines that do it and the specific systems involved certainly are, but not the actual process, that would be like trying to patent taking a photograph.  

 

I think you are starting to conflate many issues here.  Can China build their own fabs? yes, are they permitted to produce ARM without a license? no.  but there is a difference between the two and I am only concerned with the first.   

 

 

 

[leadeater]

32 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I think you are starting to conflate many issues here.  Can China build their own fabs? yes, are they permitted to produce ARM without a license? no.  but there is a difference between the two and I am only concerned with the first.   

Well and like you said permitted to produce ARM chips is also different from doing it, patents actually only work if everyone involved actually agrees to acknowledge them and abide by the principle of them. If a country's judicial system refuse to uphold patents then you're up a creek without a paddle and when the national goal is independence trade tariffs and sanctions become increasingly ineffective.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

when the national goal is independence trade tariffs and sanctions become increasingly ineffective.

In this specific case trade tariffs and sanctions become not just ineffective but a counter driving force.

[GOTSpectrum]

3 hours ago, mr moose said:

That has nothing to do with my point.  Putting china on an embargo is a completely different issue to whether they can develop their own fabs or not.  Denying them license to use IP doesn't mean they can't build it.

 

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well and like you said permitted to produce ARM chips is also different from doing it

I would love to see them roll out RISC-V stuff tbh, open source is a beat imo and if anyone can make it work large scale and high perforce it's china tbh