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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

If China's already at 5nm, they're getting close. Smallest in use now is 3nm, I think.

This poses the question, how long until China can achieve its goals without Taiwan and TSMC?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I imagine they will be able to produce bleeding edge chips within a year or two tops. What's even more interesting though is that China is now producing chips on different substrates like gallium that don't have any equivalents in the west. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3323448/luo-weiwei-former-nasa-scientist-who-became-chinas-semiconductor-trump-card

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Idk about 2 years, but they can definitely do it by 2030.

    It took TSMC a while to get to that point if I'm not mistaken, so even with all the financial might of the CCP, I still doubt it will happen THAT quickly.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago

    Sure, it's hard to predict exact timing on these sort of things, so another 5 years is a plausible timeline. It does tend to be easier to do things the second time around. When you're doing something from scratch then you don't know what the right approach will be, you're going to have false starts, and so on. When the general idea has been proven, it's much easier to replicate because now you know what the general direction to pursue is.

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  • [+] -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I always saw it as TSMC potentially being a key reason for China to invade Taiwan so they get their hands on semiconductors, with this being LESS likely now, instead of more, because China no longer needs TSMC and their research.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Because it is. They've also made it very clear that they intend to follow a path of peaceful unification and the only reason that hasn't happened already is because of US meddling and military threats.

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    [–] -1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The challenge more is that even if they can produce the chips, the machines they are using they can't get parts for. EUV is still out of reach. Probably another 5-8 years.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    It's kind of funny how you just confidently pull a number out of your ass here. On what basis do you think China is 5-8 years away from making their own EUV machines exactly?

    The reality is that China is already starting to experiment with their own EUV approaches. A lot of the complexity in ASML machines comes from the fact that they need to be compact enough to ship around the world. China is looking at the approach of using an accelerator instead.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    I've been following this story for 5 years. There's lots of hopey articles like this over that time. SMEE was supposed to release a 28-nm DUV machine last year in 2023, then 2024 summer, then 2024 December. To date no release. Most of these innovations by thr Chinese are academic discoveries that will take years further to productionize. Generally if the Chinese say they will do something new-technology-wise next year, it will happen 2-5 years after when they say it will.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I find that generally we tend to see tech progress in China outpace predictions. For example, nobody expected China to start producing 7 and 5nm chips by now, nobody thought Huawei clusters would be able to compete with Nvidia, etc. Of course, doing new things is always tricky, and 2-5 years certainly sounds plausible to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    They're producing these 7 nm and 5 nm chips on ASML machines they bought or smuggled into the country. The problem is they can't fix them on warranty if they break and they can't figure out how to reverse engineer them yet. I'm hopefully but I'm realistic.

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