Last i heard, china is also being limited in acquiring advanced electronics :
On October 7, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. The rule also restricts the ability of “US persons” — including American citizens or green card holders — to provide support for the “development or production” of chips at certain manufacturing facilities in China.
It creates advanced electronics in the sense that it assembles them. It does not manufacture advanced or even mid-grade chips though which is the crucial point. That’s all Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA.
I’m not sure that 7nm is not good enough to be called “mid-grade”, but SMIC definitely has the capability of manufacturing chips good enough to get to space.
Advanced stuff isn't necessary for space, most rockets/aerospace worked fine with 1960s tech. Obviously nicer chips can be useful, but it's not like TSMC/Samsung are necessary conditions for getting to the moon or making an ICBM.
SMIC makes 7nm chips, which is considered high-end. It's not the highest of the high end, but it's not far from that, and it's definitely considered high-end.
Mostly assembly with some fabrication. Most semiconductor manufacturing is in Korea and Taiwan, with assembly in China, India, Malaysia, etc. The majority of the design work happens outside of China as well.
> Last i heard, china is also being limited in acquiring advanced electronics :
In the short term, I'm sure China will be able to get whatever chips it needs (for military applications, at least) that are available on the civilian market, they'll just have to setup front companies, etc.
In the medium to long term, this will motivate China to build the capacity it needs. It might ever exactly be cutting edge, but I'm sure they'll get close enough that it won't matter too much.
> In the medium to long term, this will motivate China to build the capacity it needs. It might ever exactly be cutting edge, but I'm sure they'll get close enough that it won't matter too much.
which says to me, that the export bans is a failure in policy then.
The cost of the export ban is a drop in business value for all the companies being banned (and without compensation by the US gov't afaict). The ban isn't really going to prevent china from getting close-to-cutting-edge chips for military applications either. So the ban, and the associated costs, is for what exactly?!
> which says to me, that the export bans is a failure in policy then.
That's going too far. It's almost like saying "don't fight a battle that won't immediately win you the war." It's important not to overstate their effectiveness (an export ban won't hit some Achilles heel that grind their military to a halt), but that doesn't mean the short term effects aren't valuable and the right thing to do. These bans are delaying tactics, they'll make things harder but not impossible for Russia and China to do certain things, and they might have to make unwanted compromises (e.g. force short-term supply chain issues and redesigning using a less robust common civilian grade chip they can get on the grey market rather than the harder-to-get specialized chip they want).
Basically, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
this assumes that the "good" is enough, given just a bit more time.
My concern is that a delaying tactic is insufficient. The bans will force the domestic production, for real this time, in these technologies.
After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. If china was able to buy, at "slightly" elevated prices, western produced chips, the gov't would not really be able to convince businesses to take the hit and pay high capital cost to produce a worse version just as a stepping stone. The investment capital is likely to be wasteful, or misspent - since the "fallback" of western products are available (until they go to war like russia, and the cut off is abrupt and sudden).
A pro-longed ban, like what we see today, without the actual war to trigger it, is likely to give the domestic production the reason it needs to actually get their act together. There's no western "fallback" to make them complacent.
So either they fail miserably, or succeed and wipe the west's technological advantage.
The "good idea", might not be so good if that were to actually happen.
> After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. If china was able to buy, at "slightly" elevated prices, western produced chips, the gov't would not really be able to convince businesses to take the hit and pay high capital cost to produce a worse version just as a stepping stone. The investment capital is likely to be wasteful, or misspent - since the "fallback" of western products are available (until they go to war like russia, and the cut off is abrupt and sudden).
What do you mean? This is China we're talking about. Every major company has a cell of Communist party members. If the government makes a decision, you follow and don't complain too loudly or risk political consequences. And, IIRC, the Chinese government already made the decision to build up their chip industry years ago (Made in China 2025).
IMHO, it's quite plausible that not implementing an export ban would have just allowed them to make the transition to domestic production more cheaply and more smoothly.
