Sure, being an essential part of the global supply chain for tech is important. It's also important to show support for Taiwan, to convince Japan, South Korea, etc from arming with nukes. That could set off a chain reaction in which everyone who is close says "f*ck it, I guess if everyone else is doing it..." The veneer of the US security umbrella folds and everyone suddenly feels they need to build (or retain) the bomb to protect themselves (like Ukraine failed to do in giving up theirs.) Now everyone needs MORE nukes because you have a LOT more targets.
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.
Add half of Africa and some middle east. Ukraine with its top notch black earth is the literal 'breadbasket of Europe'. Hitler knew it and Stalin knew it very well when he forced starvation to death upon Ukrainian population to subjugate them.
> he forced starvation to death upon Ukrainian population to subjugate them
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.
If china succeeds in leapfrogging ASML. With their particle accelerator light source it likely won’t matter. They will have a home engineered piece of the solution.
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 are two years behind in your assessment, and technology moves pretty fast especially when you're trying to catch up.
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.
> Not sure why you are basing your whole argument on euv.
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.
Instead of using vague abstractions like "pouring unlimited money" and "hiring the right people", I'd hope that predictions would be predicated more on the actual specifics of the progress being made, i.e what are specific engineering problems to be overcome and what is their progress in doing so. If it's not, it's really just astrology one is using.
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!
Industrial espionage is a thing. China has so far managed to get every tech they ever wanted and I don't see why EUV could not be stolen. Everything, even very advanced technology, can be reverse engineered, especially if you already know conceptually what it does. Software and data (and blueprints) can be stolen as well. ASML and TSMC have a lot of security in place but at least on HN I would assume everybody knows that that does not guarantee perfection. If the knowledge is out there, it will spread.
> 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)
Isn’t the point that other countries would have to think twice before letting China get their hands on Taiwan? The advantage to China would be immense if they secured Taiwan.
You're assuming that China is afraid of "other countries", or that those countries can do anything to stop them. Truth is, China right now is challenging the US for global dominance, they are afraid of noone. They don't need anyone's permission to "get their hands on Taiwan".
No, I’m assuming that they’ll want to get their hands on Taiwan with as little mess as possible and keep the assets intact if possible. If their only choice was to start a global war, I don’t think they’ll do it regardless if they would win or not.
Well, that assumption might be wrong as well... Yes, taking control of the TSMC fabs is the best possible outcome for China, but destroying them is also not so bad. It limits the supply of bleeding edge semiconductors to the Western world, giving Huawei and other Chinese companies more time to catch up.
WW3 would not be sanctions rivaling those Russia are under. WW3 would be zero trade, submarines sinking the shipping etc. What Russia is under is just sanctions, not real war measures.
Maybe. It would certainly be good for Intel if Taiwan's and South Korea's microchip manufacturing were destroyed. They'd have a near-total monopoly, like int the 90s.
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.
There is another alternative that is much more likely: China gets to or at near parity and then no longer needs to get their hands on Taiwan. At that point they could just as easily destroy it as that they would want to occupy it. And that is a lot simpler. As long as Taiwan has an edge they are safer than when they are a commodity.
Kinda like Hong Kong when it came to the finance industry. Agree mostly. Instead of destroy, I would say China wouldn’t need to/care to maintain their fine balance/
special relationship with Taiwan anymore and would throw their weight around more.
This is true but it has been fascinating seeing them trying to catch up. Necessity being mother of invention, all of that.
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.
My worry is that they're not bringing anything new to the table except "this is actually possible if you will it".
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:
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.
MIC2025 made china manufacture over 90% of all semi domestically. They have replacements/clones of every jelly bean part imaginable. China can keep manufacturing like nothing happened if/when Taiwan is erased from the map.
They have a cost advantage. Kinda fine for where I'm standing; if we want to have more investment, we must liberalize migration! If we don't liberalize migration, necessarily the capital-labor ratio will be more capital-scarce in other countries.
I don't think it's easy to migrate to Taiwan (it's very unlikely that it's easier than migrating here, most East Asian countries make that difficult) so that doesn't seem to actually be a prerequisite.
We already have a pretty serious unemployment problem among college graduates so something else seems to be going on (a problem with domestic universities?)
Unemployment is actually a symptom of inelasticity(?) of wages. Some people become unemployed instead of getting a minimum wage job. Until Americans can subsist on a 1k monthly salary, the cost advantage in Taiwan is real.
I blame the American corporate meme. American corporations are hideously slow, lumbering and quite honestly many are just "too big to fail" prop ups at this point. Long gone are actual qualified individuals running even semiconductor manufacturers and its just bean counters and country club nephews.
Pretty sure Intel failed because of the opposite, they were too ambitious in attempting to do both fab and design that they out outmanuvered by more nimble companies like AMD and TSMC.
American corporations are what created "Silicon Valley" in the first place. America is not slow, and it's definitely not "too big to fail" as the current administration is trying to make it fail, but that is an aside.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This. There are a few areas in the US that have a long history of being incubators of engineering firms beyond Silicon Valley, all because of WW2 which had tons of money being spent to produce certain types of equipment in each area.
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.
“Silicon Valley” is more than just some of the post-war defense research and high tech weapons contracts. It includes the financing/fundraising, the talent pool, nearby university research, and the advantages of “fail fast” startup culture (including California’s jurisprudence). It didn’t become recognizable in its current form until after NASA’s Moon Shot project threw tons of funding at research and manufacturing of computer miniaturization.
>"The popularization of the name is often credited to Don Hoefler, the first journalist to use the term in a news story.[1] His article "Silicon Valley U.S.A." was published in the January 11, 1971"
"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.
I skimmed it pretty quickly, but it doesn't change the fact that nobody called it "Silicon Valley" until 1971. The article you sent me was about WW2, and military, so far as I could tell. Reading it wouldn't change anything about my statements.
It literally tracks the histories of the individuals who founded all the corporations people think of as belonging to "Silicon Valley". Things tend to exist for a while before they get a widely recognizable name, friend.
Silicon Valley as people think of it today (tech, talent, and capital) is generally considered to have come together in the early 1970s. That doesn't mean the ingredients weren't there before -- tech had been around for decades already, and the laws allowing free movement of talent go back to the late 1800s -- but by most accounts the early 1970s are when it all clicked. Note that there's no fact of the matter to be right or wrong about here, though.
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.
Thanks for letting me know you didn't read the article, and adding nothing to what is already said within it. If you go back and read it now, you may learn some things about how history differs from what is "generally considered" as you put it. Have fun!
I've seen Steve's talk. Like all historical accounts it's just a story. It pulls some details into the foreground and pushes the rest back. Other stories arrange the details differently, for example marking Silicon Valley's beginning quite a bit earlier, with the founding of HP, a decade before the Department of Defense existed. Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth, and people aren't wrong to disagree with it or with you.
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!
TSMC's competitive advantage comes from Taiwan's unique willingness to look away from wanton dumping of used acid wash like it's the 80s in Silicon Valley? Or moderately more expensive labor on one of those highly automated factories with FOUPs zooming every which way?
Quite a bit of "Silicon Valley" was founded on outright theft from competitors. Now that the American industry is entrenched and "protect intellectual property" dominates over "improvement", falling behind other nations is inevitable.
One of the risks of any belief in American exceptionalism is that it hides the reality that there’s nothing special about America to have deserved its position in industry and commerce. There’s no special reason why it might not soon be someone else’s turn.
The military industrial complex, endowment funds from large colleges and academic research created Silicon Valley.
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.
Software engineer salaries in the US are significantly higher than electrical and computer engineering salaries and have been for a whole. Most of the bright and ambitious EE and CE people went to faang companies in 2010s and probably earlier too.
A big reason why TSMC is competitive on the global market is precisely that their wages are low.. Granted, they don't have a finance industry or big tech to draw away talent.
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.
