China has all the young scientists and engineers needed to make their own factories in no time.
in no time.
Why has China been unable to produce good small geometry silicon chips to date? The best they have done is to produce large geometry chips equivalent to about 30 years behind leading edge tech today. They have had many excellent engineers graduate from the USA and other parts of the world over the past 3 decades, yet they can't seem to replicate the technology.
There is a tremendous challenge to brining up a small geometry fab. Multiple years are required to bring up a new state of the art fab even if you have the technology and experts to create it.
The tools for Chip production are created by specialized companies because every single part is extremely expensive. For example, even the US uses photolithography machines from ASML. China is forced to copy these machines now because of the sanctions and it's just a matter of time until their machines are even better than the original. Maybe 5 years, but maybe just 2 years.
Long time ago they have sent their best to universities in the US. But now, only the ones who cannot get a place at the Chinese universities come to the US.
Yes, the precision equipment has been withheld from China. Steppers, sputterers, etchers, etc. Then there is the sort, packaging, testing, etc back end. Dialing in fab parameters with ET testing. Characterization/qualification of fab processes and die products. Water deionization, chemical purity, lots of items unavailable in China. I seriously doubt China can improve on Western quality, they have been unable to meet western quality in any other industry to date. Their strength is cheap labor. If China needs TSMC to get a foothold in the bleeding edge race. USA has very few fabs that have attained TSMC level quality. It is faster and cheaper to go fabless and send their designs to TSMC to manufacture the chips.
I'm old enough to remember how Japan was underestimated, then South Korea, and then China. China delivers exactly the specified quality, this is not a matter of luck like with Indian suppliers.
They not only copy but optimize things. That's why Haier could buy the appliance division from GE, they have the fresh ideas. That's why they have hypersonic missiles: they not only stole the fluid dynamic computations from the US but built the shockwave tunnels to adjust the computer models to reality. They never stop with just doing the same the West can do.
What are you talking about, tsmc has 4nM up and running...
Last I heard they hoped to get their 6nM process running in 2021.Then I'd say they are ahead of Intel (7nM) and US based fabs AFAIK. When I left the semi biz 19 years ago, TSMC was working on dialing in their I've been talking about how far behind Chinese semiconductor tech is compared to USA and Taiwan's TSMC.
(post is archived)