Yeah. People forget that capital allocation works differently in China. You ban something they want, they simply make it themselves.
I think banning their access to EUV lithography via the export ban of ASML machines is going to backfire horribly on the US. China has started allocating absolutely ridiculous amounts of money to hard science and have also changed the way they fund and prioritize projects to make them more commercially targeted. The end result of this is they now have a very large number of very smart scientists with nearly infinite funding being told to solve for the rest of the fab pipeline.
ASML might retain their monopoly for a few more years but I think this move will eventually result in Chinese building even better machines and likely more practical and for less money - as is the Chinese way.
>> ASML might retain their monopoly for a few more years but I think this move will eventually result in Chinese building even better machines and likely more practical and for less money - as is the Chinese way.
The complexity of ASML EUV light sources is incredible. China might just use a synchrotron for that. Sure there are issues to resolve but it seems like it has to be simpler in the end.
Those cores are 28nm and I believe they were made on TSMC.
Today, the manufacture ban has China still on 28 or maybe 22nm as their most advanced node.
They had some old 14nm stuff, but last I heard, the guys that owned it greatly over-promised to the Chinese Government.
China has no modern fabrication processes and no way forward toward designing one. At present, they are headed to a state of perpetually being 5 node (one decade) behind.
