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Dutch government to ban ASML from servicing installed wafer tools in China
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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People here (including the US govt apparently) acting like it's actually going to take China a decade to figure out how to run a wafer machine bruh.
Not only do they probably already have the procedures written down and kept safe, they've been already been experimenting with having to run the entire supply chain on their own for years now. Hell they're even the ones basically carrying RISC-V development right now because they barely have OEM access to x86.
And that's all without the assumption that China hasn't stolen some key trade secrets that would give them a head start. I highly doubt this equipment will actually go offline besides some practice runs and research application which they have likely already done without telling anyone.
Pakistan's entire nuclear arsenal only exists because one talented due working at URENCO (also coincidentally Dutch like ASML) took a few hundred documents and his years of work experience back to his home country. If broke ass Pakistan could figure out how to make fissile material and nukes in their backyard, China sure as hell gonna figure out how to fabricate chips without any external suppliers or contractors.
It needs a special kind of technical illiteracy to think those two things are in any way comparable.
China can fabricate chips, all on their own alright, they have home-brewn equipment. So can Russia, and the chips you get out of that suffice for military use. It's like 90s tech. Russia doesn't have scale either that's why they're buying Chinese.
Enriching uranium and making nukes, in comparison, is banging rocks together.
Also I don't think the US is involved in this, at least not directly: The US hold license for the tech underlying EUV lithography, but this is about servicing DUV machines. You can get that kind of machine from e.g. Nikon, It's just as likely that this is the Dutch still being mad over MH-17 and want to pressure Xi to pressure Russia.
It's not 90s tech though, especially for China.
Their latest x86 CPU is comparable to Kaby Lake in cycle speed which is only 8 years old, except it comes with more cores and supports DDR5 so it might as well be a first gen ryzen 7.
They still haven't revealed how they fabricated it or what process they used, probably because they want to keep the production chain and size a secret.
No it isn't, especially for weapons grade Uranium. Look at Iran, they've been perpetually "10% away from a bomb" for more than 20 years and still haven't succeeded.
The ridiculously high precision required to make the centrifuges, and then the scale required to make hundreds of thousands of them per plant just to reach 20% enrichment is insane.
Reaching 90% is like taking all that and ramping it up several hundred times.
The only reason Pakistan succeeded was because they got (stole) the critical design parameters needed for the centrifuges to work, and a rather brilliant metallurgist who took several years to figure out how to manufacture the centrifuges consistently at scale. Plus an entire set of physicists just to figure out the centrifuge physics in a way that would allow them to maximize refinement with dozens of design variables. It still took them a decade, but they eventually got it.
It's a pretty good comparison to lithography machines which requires similar dead precision with each decreasing size of transistor requiring an order of magnitude more precision in quality engineering.
I doubt it because they've been making it a pretty big deal for the past 4 years. Tons of Chinese tech OEMs are blacklisted, and the trade war keeps escalating with new bans/tariffs/exclusions every year. Plus they dumped billions of dollars into intel and TSMC in a desperate attempt to make a fab on the home front.
It doesn't matter that it's DUV, they just want to ensure they make it harder for China to catch up, so even last gen tech is on the line because they believe it can be studied and reverse engineered.
imo it's a stupid shortsighted policy, but it's nothing new for the US pulling these types of moves. I just wish for once they'd see that it'll only delay the inevitable, and maybe they should put that effort into actually making quality products at home instead of throwing money at chip OEMs and expecting them to move out of Taiwan overnight.
You're confusing process nodes and chip design, here. Chinese indigenous process tech is on a 90s level, or at least the most behind parts of it are (e.g. they may have good domestic sputterers but their lithography lacks behind). They're using off the shelf DUV for the bulk of their chip production, bought from Japan, the Netherlands, etc.
And they're good at DUV. Taiwanese and western producers switched over to EUV to achieve better nodes, China couldn't get at EUV machines and is squeezing the last nanometres out of DUV. Still not using domestic machines, though. Those DUV machines are what the Dutch are threatening right now.
They probably either a) already have but aren't telling anyone or b) strategically kneecap the programme and use it as a political pressure tool. Like the deal they made, remember. Iran is practically uninvadable also without nukes and everybody knows it.
On the other side of the spectrum, both when it comes to "actually really, really wants to have nukes" and "barely past stone-age": North Korea did it already, the tech is bulky but also very well understood and comparatively primitive. Yes, more complicated than a washing machine, but nowhere close to chip making.
50 years ago.
The US don't have legal means to stop the Dutch doing DUV anything. They have for EUV because they developed that tech, but not DUV. Which means it would need to convince or strong-arm the Dutch government, which has larger implied political costs and would only make sense if they're also doing it with the Japanese. We'll see whether that happens.
They very much like to protect Intel, yes. The issue with Intel isn't their fabs or processes (the occasional hiccup nonwithstanding) it's their complacency in design. As a pure-play fab Intel would be neck-by-neck with TSMC.