Lol. Lmao.
In the funniest timeline, the US nationalizes Nvidia to delay China from making chips that work well with LLM's... by a year tops.
Link to original Fortune article the PC Gamer article pulled from, with this juicy relevant quote:
To do that, Raimondo said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which manages export controls for the US, needs more funding from Congress.
“I have a $200 million budget. That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” she said. “If we’re serious, let’s go fund this operation like it needs to be funded.”
I'm not sure that's true anymore. China has done pretty well at poaching TSMC engineers, and the US embargo has essentially forced China to eat it's own dog food and hothouse development. They've already regained capability far faster than the US anticipated. TSMC only has an institutional and hardware monopoly at this point I'd guess, Knowledge has already diffused into Mainland China.
Yeah. It's actually Russia that is around 10 to 15 years from catching up. I've been following both the Russian and Chinese state firms in charge of developing semiconductor fab tooling. The main Chinese firm is about to make a full two or three generation leap past ASML (the top western firm) in the coming 3 or so years. The Russian state firm in charge of this type of tooling hasn't made anything since shortly before the USSR fell, back when Russia still maintained semiconductor lithography tech parity with the US and only right around the time the Ukraine war kicked off have they started back up their r&d.
The new EUV light source and lithography machines China has going into trial production are more advanced than anything ASML (where TSMC & western fabs get their EUV light source) has in the works. China decided to leapfrog the western firms by skipping the inefficient method of vaporizing tin microspheres with a laser to make pulses of EUV light (extremely inefficient, low quality light) and instead is going with particle accelerators to generate continuous EUV light that is higher quality (greater culmination, narrower frequency range) and higher output (10 to 100 times brighter for given power input) while using less valuable fab infrastructure space. Because a particle accelerator lacks all the moving parts and is mostly solid state, it has many times greater mean time between failure compared to the ASML machines that have duty cycles around only 90% operational uptime and 10% maintenance downtime. Rather than needing to build/buy a dozen or more EUV machines to equip a fab at scale (one ASML light source per lithography station) and have them still be a production bottleneck, you can install a single one of the Chinese particle accelerator light sources to provide EUV light to more than a dozen lithography stations placed around the circumference of its ring.
edit:
another observation. the western lithography tooling firms seem to be at a tech development disadvantage because they make so much of their money from service contracts to maintain the machines they sell. I could never see ASML decide on their own to create the type of hardware Chinese state firms have in the works because the complexity and unreliably of their machines is a major source of revenue after they make the initial sale. Their board of directors and shareholders would never allow it. ASML would also never design a machine that can replace a dozen or more machines of the same cost even if it meant higher quality output for the end user. This is why I can't see them competing in the long run now that China has made development of advanced lithography tooling a national priority with full backing of the state.
Hey, nice to see someone with some industry knowledge posting! I would extrapolate the "service contract" model's inefficiency to the whole industry. It's not just lithography, it's also everyone from etch and defect metrology, to testing/binning and packaging. The big semiconductor names don't build any of the production tools. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and the other fab owners buy all of their tools from other companies, and those other companies sell them service contracts in order to more effectively hoard their IP.
A state-owned enterprise that does all of its own service and R&D would blow the capitalist firms out of the water. I estimate that 80% of the workforce at any given fab is superfluous, and only employed to safeguard each company's IP. All of this increases production downtime, as the manufacturing technicians aren't allowed to know enough to fix problems themselves and have to wait on the service company's service engineers to show up to do anything more than the most basic tasks. On top of the actual manufacturing inefficiencies this model introduces, the capitalists from each company involved are taking their outsized takes from every transaction. Some of it goes to funding R&D, but a state owned enterprise would be able to redirect significantly more profits to R&D.
GOOD post
Aside from path dependency/capitalism is there a reason no firm in the west has jumped on this new tech?
It's mostly path dependency. Semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive, you don't want to build a new one from scratch every generation, and this tech is new. China having not invested in extensive lithography machine manufacture before now means they can jump straight to the best tech.
That makes sense. Thanks!
Googled a bit but I have no idea how they're generating EUV from a particle accelerator. It supposedly "captures the energy emitted by high-energy particles during acceleration", but again, I have no idea how that would work. Are they just phrasing "and then it was slammed into a target" in a weird way?
Here are a few papers on the subject in chronological order:
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) sources for lithography based on synchrotron radiation (2001) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168900201008877
Steady-State Microbunching in a Storage Ring for Generating Coherent Radiation (2010) - https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.154801
Demonstration of a ring-FEL as an EUV lithography tool (2020) - https://journals.iucr.org/s/issues/2020/04/00/ve5121/index.html
Experimental demonstration of the mechanism of steady-state microbunching (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03203-0
A synchrotron-based kilowatt-level radiation source for EUV lithography (2022) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z
Thank you, will give these a read later!