US China Taiwan Chip Angle
Summary: As US restricts chip related knowhow from China, China will try to catchup using its domestic research. While it will not be easy, it is about 1 generation behind when it is being cut off. This also means that China has less incentive to keep intact TSMC foundries in Taiwan as it is already cut off from the latest being produced there. Question is if that increases the risk of a US-China conflict over Taiwan.
Full article: Stratechery behind paywall. Excerpts below.
Chipmaking history:
TSMC and ASML were already close, in part because both were part of the Philips family tree (Philips was the only external investor in TSMC, which licensed Philips technology to start, and ASML was a joint venture of Philips and ASMI). What was more important is that both were ignored by the dominant players in the industry: the big chip makers, from Intel to Motorola to Texas Instruments, were matched up with Nikon and Canon; the former didn’t want equipment from a new entrant, and the latter didn’t have capacity for a foundry that was not only working on low margins but also, as part of its cost consciousness, wanted to learn how to service the machines themselves (the Japanese companies preferred to deliver black boxes that their own technicians would service).
Cutting edge chip technology:
A generator ejects 50,000 tiny droplets of molten tin per second. A high-powered laser blasts each droplet twice. The first shapes the tiny tin, so the second can vaporize it into plasma. The plasma emits extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation that is focused into a beam and bounced through a series of mirrors. The mirrors are so smooth that if expanded to the size of Germany they would not have a bump higher than a millimeter. Finally, the EUV beam hits a silicon wafer — itself a marvel of materials science — with a precision equivalent to shooting an arrow from Earth to hit an apple placed on the moon. This allows the EUV machine to draw transistors into the wafer with features measuring only five nanometers — approximately the length your fingernail grows in five seconds. This wafer with billions or trillions of transistors is eventually made into computer chips.
An EUV machine is made of more than 100,000 parts, costs approximately $120 million, and is shipped in 40 freight containers. There are only several dozen of them on Earth and approximately two years’ worth of back orders for more. It might seem unintuitive that the demand for a $120 million tool far outstrips supply, but only one company can make them. It’s a Dutch company called ASML, which nearly exclusively makes lithography machines for chip manufacturing.
Will China be able to catchup?
That said, the country does have three big advantages:
First, it is much easier to follow a path than to forge a new one. China may not be able to make EUV machines, but at least they know they can be made.
Second, China has benefited from all of the technological sharing to date: Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) has successfully manufactured 7nm chips (using ASML’s immersion lithography machines), and Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE) has built its own immersion lithography machines. Granted, those 7nm chips almost certainly had poor yields, and the trick is for SMIC to use SMEE on the cutting edge, but that leads to the third point:
China has unlimited money and infinite motivation to figure this out.
TSMC and its importance to China
What, though, if TSMC were taken off the board?
Much of the discussion around a potential invasion of Taiwan — which would destroy TSMC (foundries don’t do well in wars) — centers around TSMC’s lead in high end chips. That lead is real, but Intel, for all of its struggles, is only 3~5 years behind. That is a meaningful difference in terms of the processors used in smartphones, high performance computing, and AI, but the U.S. is still in the game. What would be much more difficult to replace are, paradoxically, trailing node chips, made in fabs that Intel long ago abandoned.
My worry is that this excerpt didn’t go far enough: the more that China builds up its chip capabilities — even if that is only at trailing nodes — the more motivation there is to make TSMC a target, not only to deny the U.S. its advanced capabilities, but also the basic chips that are more integral to everyday life than we ever realized.