Beijing’s success in making advanced 7-nanometer (nm) semiconductors will likely result in Washington further tightening its tech export restrictions on China, experts say, as the current curbs have failed to prevent Chinese firms from finding loopholes.
Apparently made using less-advanced Western lithography machines, the silicon chips powering Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone series represent a jump forward in China’s domestic chipmaking capability as the country boosts efforts to catch up with the U.S. and other rivals.
“Huawei’s new phone demonstrates that China is figuring out ways to limit the impact of sanctions, and this will necessitate tactical changes in U.S. export controls and other restrictions to achieve the same strategic goal,” said Matthew Bey, an analyst at U.S.-based geopolitics and intelligence firm RANE.
Why do we give a fuck about Chinese smartphone chips? I’m fully aware that they could be used in more than smartphones, I’m just not sure why this is such a big concern for the US.
They don’t want China to steal semiconductor IP because that would enable them to equal or possibly better the US; giving them an economic, military, and intelligence advantage. Big tech companies are all US based, and US military allies design and build the most advanced computing components. This gives them a lot of leverage and an enormous attack vector to spy on the global population via hardware backdoors (in addition to the software backdoors). If China beat them at semiconductors then much of the developing world would buy components from China instead, probably killing a lot of the US’s intelligence capability, as well as increasing China’s.
That makes sense. The way these articles are written makes it sound like it’s about smartphones. Thank you.
point that he didnt cover : the US’s EUV comes from TSMC, a taiwanese company. If china domestically achieves EUV, all they have to do to monopolize it is drop a few bombs.