They produce 90% of the world’s advanced chips more out of systematic neglect than out of any technological gap.
Intel floundered years of technological supremacy because they were run by an incompetent manager type. They refused to run a foundry model for decades.
Samsung has completely lost competitiveness and the South Korean government is happy to let them do whatever because South Korea is more like the Samsung government of Korea.
SMIC can’t get access to EUV machines, but even then they’re already knocking on the doors of Intel’s current process.
Can I read more about this somewhere? My understanding was that it would be extremely difficult to the point of impracticality to compete with TSMC or would at least take decades to match them in terms of process and scale. I don’t really know much about chip manufacturing though.
China isn’t held back by personnel. Intuitively, this makes sense even if you subscribe to the Western idea that Chinese people can only copy things: Taiwanese people can easily work in China because of trade/border agreements, China isn’t a poor country, and TSMC employs a massive number of highly experienced engineers. The Taiwan/China culture war is really a Western construct and many TSMC engineers are happy to take jobs in China. SMIC has already shown 7nm DUV capability (comparable to state-of-the-art by Intel).
The only thing holding back Chinese semiconductor capability in terms of hardware is the lack of EUV machines, which are only made by ASML. There are rumours spinning around in Chinese circles that Huawei has an EUV prototype in the debugging stage with a tentative release target of 2025.
If anything, China is far more constrained in terms of software (in a market dominated by Cadence and Synopsys), but this is much more easily circumventable with enough resources. The only reason Cadence and Synopsys haven’t had much competition is because it’s really expensive to develop and doesn’t have that much competitive edge, but that equation changes for China given how happy the US is to slap export restrictions everywhere.
Yeah I guess China firing missiles around Taiwan was just a western construct too I guess. Come on, I’m interested to learn more about chip manufacturing and the practicality or otherwise of someone competing with TSMC and thought you might have interesting sources I hadn’t read.
You could also argue that the U.S isn’t constrained by population and they also have access to the technology and even buy in from TSMC but they haven’t managed to kick start chip manufacturing there yet either unless there are developments there that I missed.
For now, doesn’t seem like the situation is going to be changing anytime soon.
