Reply to post: Protectionist Insanity will destroy you... no such thing as military intelligence

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Lordrobot

Protectionist Insanity will destroy you... no such thing as military intelligence

Consider Fab... in spite of the INTEL CEO born again premillennial Carnival Barker, Intel has already failed at 10 nm and spent some 80 Billion in stock buybacks losing every dime and then some. In fact, this new CEO has no background in microprocessors; comes from software. It is highly unlikely the US can build FAB plants or even make them operational.

Try to understand how ARM came to be.It came to be by finding global clients and out-engineering Intel. But now politicians, the intellectual bottom rung want to constrain ARM from China the world's largest buyer of chips. What they can't buy, they will eventually make. This has been shown time and time again. I can give countless examples of chip boycotts by the US politicians OBAMA, BUSH II, Trump and Biden that have resulted in China making their own chips. And for Intel, they missed the handheld market because nobody in Asia wanted to suffer a boycott.

How shocking to find out that Trump's blocking of chip technology demonstrates a capacitive ignorance never before seen. And the point has been brought by other posters that the semiconductor world has been a division of labour shared by many companies of many nations. The US's sudden paranoia over TSCM is a case in point. Attacking FAB and companies that participate in the FAB supply chain. FAB is highly manpower intensive.

Tech has a very short shelf-like, similar to bananas. IF a politician with infinite stupidity blocks chips from China, that chip sits on the shelf gathering dust. That means no sales, then no R&D, and soon you become INTEL in the handheld market, a non-entity. While the US can then send Biden to South Korea and declare a newfound friendship, Samsung is wondering at what point a US politician will boycott chip shales to them. Thus in case you had not noticed, Samsung has begun moving far from Qualcomm and developing its own phone chips.

The entire Thrust of the angry orange American clown was to destroy Huawei. Well, it didn't work. Trump did a far better job destroying the Trump Brand. In the process, Trump and Canada even resorted to kidnapping the Huawei founder's daughter and holding her under house arrest for years. If that didn't work to destroy Huawei, what will? More of the same boycotts and sanctions? Huawei markets are expanding in Asia.

Let's talk about bragging rights. The scale of semiconductors. Just yesterday TSCM, as if fueling the fires of Taiwan Discntentment, said they would be moving to 2nm chips by 2025. Grand. But at present 95% of the semi chip market is chips greater than 14 nm. So all the screaming is over the small stuff and 5% of the global market. Tiny chips for phones make sense but not for cars. And a streamlining of 5G to launch into supercomputer banks may turn phones into mere dumb terminals. No phone will ever have the computational power of a supercomputer. How dare I deprive auto drivers from playing 3D games on their smartphones while racing to Brighten for holiday... Nevertheless, the 5% market is competitive and nearly meaningless at present. And China can do double passes through their old AMSL lithography and achieve 7nm.

As for the sprawl of components for FAB, China has most of the components now thanks to being boycotted by the giants of semiconductor strategy Don Trump and Joe Trump. In boycotting Russian noble gasses, that puts China in the driver's seat as the largest producer of noble gasses used in semiconductor production. Since Trump, Chinese engineering now has ion implanters and ion engines on their space station.

Further, China appears to be moving toward nanoimprint and other technologies to replace ASML EVU. It is only a matter of time. ASML knows this and ASLM knows that at some point, the US and EU politicians may as well take over the business. European businesses should be far more fearful of Joe Biden and his sponge-brained sanctions than China. Because if any nation can become self-sufficient in chips, it is the nation that buys most of them.

The bottom reach is you are not going to stop China and Asia's growth through Nancy Karrigan Knee Capping foreign policies. And the insane propaganda, the oft-repeated mantra that China is years behind in semiconductors is rubbish. One look at Alibaba's server chip where logic and Dram combine is anything but backwoods technology. When you do things the Trump way, you go belly up the Trump way. At present, the US Auto market is in recession for a lack of chips. Trump wanted to make a big splash and scare the global semiconductor market and China anticipated this clown and stockpiled auto chips.

One final note. I know of nobody in tech that doesn't want a RISC-V desktop computer. Once again Alibaba, the stealth chip giant, published the full instruction set for their RISC-V chips. Free from US meddling and with fewer instruction sets than ARM.

Should China invade Taiwan and Take TSMC? Don't underestimate China. Over 45% of residents of Taiwan identify as Chinese Mainlanders TSMC's largest customer is China. And if push comes to shove and all of Asia realizes this Western push is a Race War, then you are in trouble. And before you start counting your chips, better look at the educational trends in China and the US. In the US, males once occupied 66% of all university enrols. Now just 30 years later is just 30% and women are up over 66% and not taking up the slack in the sciences. This has created an enormous swell in uneducated males in the US just as China advanced degree education is exploding. Europe and the UK would do well to decouple from Trump and Biden's incredible semiconductor ignorance.

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