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The US Plans To Block Sales of Older Chipmaking Tech To China (protocol.com) 40

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
The Biden administration will attempt to roll back China's chipmaking abilities by blocking tools that make a widely used type of transistor other chipmakers have employed for years. From a report: The Biden administration has for several months been working to tighten its grip on U.S. exports of technology that China needs to make advanced chips, with the goals of both hurting China's current manufacturing ability and also blocking its future access to next-generation capabilities. According to two people familiar with the administrations plans, President Joe Biden's approach is based around choking off access to the tools, software and support mechanisms necessary to manufacture a specific type of technology that is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern microchips: the transistor.

To achieve its objectives, the administration has elected to work to block China's access to transistors that use a specific design called FinFET. The plans include blocking domestic exports of tools that are capable of printing chips with FinFET transistors, while also preventing the tool makers -- such as Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA -- from servicing or supporting equipment they have already sold to various Chinese companies, according to the sources. Big chip manufacturers achieved high-volume production of the transistor technology targeted by the Biden administration roughly eight years ago, but it is still widely used today to manufacture advanced chips designed for servers and iPhones alike. China's largest chipmaker, SMIC, disclosed in 2019 it recently began high-volume production of FinFET-based chips.
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The US Plans To Block Sales of Older Chipmaking Tech To China More

The US Plans To Block Sales of Older Chipmaking Tech To China

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  • Horse has bolted (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Finallyjoined!!! ( 1158431 ) on Friday August 19, 2022 @05:45PM (#62805107)

    Better close the stable door...

    • That door has been open for over a decade. I read an article the other day that stated US Corporations are OK'ing 90% of all tech sharing requestst from China and other non-allies or rivals of America.

      • Generally speaking USA stuff is made in China, hilarious calling trade partner of hundreds of billions of dollars "non-allies" or "rivals". So now their military is starting to be threat? Where did they get the money to do that eh?

    • Actually, so long as China isn't producing their own older chipmaking tech, then this will have an minor impact. Basically, it will be a speed bump in which they will need need to move from purchasing to produce their own chipmaking tech.

  • Just makes it more expensive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday August 19, 2022 @06:34PM (#62805193)
    So at the moment, China imports the tech to make these chips because it's cheaper than developing the tech themselves. If the USA blocks the tech & they can't make the chips, what will they most likely do? Develop the tech themselves & the govt will more than likely help Chinese companies to do it, just like the USA is doing right now with American companies to increase domestic chip production.

    So the USA are simply creating more incentives for China to step up their tech R&D game.

    • "Develop" (Score:4, Informative)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday August 19, 2022 @06:56PM (#62805211)

      If the USA blocks the tech & they can't make the chips, what will they most likely do? Develop the tech themselves

      If by "develop", you mean outright steal and copy the plans from somewhere, then yes indeed they will develop the tech...

      Same results, just much faster.

      • It is really not that easy to figure out how to make complex equipment. China has been trying to replicate Russian jet engines for decades now and they are still under-performing and unreliable.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        China will simply buy some of the tech from Europe, where all the best and highest end chip manufacturing gear is from.

        The rest they are developing through heavy investment in R&D, and through luring expertise away from Taiwan with big salaries.

        All the time you concentrate on stopping them "copying" stuff, you are just falling further behind as they put the work in to develop it themselves.

      • Read a little bit and you will find out that our Industrialist heroes did the same thing. They traveled around the world, trying to acquire equipment, machines, and knowledge of new processes by any means necessary, even resorting to bribing, stealing, abducting, and killing. If our government considered it important enough, then it was even willing to forget its ideological values.

        How do you think we managed to get to the moon in such a short time?

        • Didn't Edward Snowden say that ~9/10s of what the CIA does is industrial espionage? And apparently a lot of CIA employees moonlight for corporations & then take early "retirement" to go & work for them full time? Then there's the more senior & entrepreneurial types that start their own "consultancies." I wonder what "value" they're supplying to these corporations? I'm sure there's an "understanding" that you don't do certain things for certain countries but the CIA & former employees do indu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        If the USA blocks the tech & they can't make the chips, what will they most likely do? Develop the tech themselves

        If by "develop", you mean outright steal and copy the plans from somewhere, then yes indeed they will develop the tech...

        Same results, just much faster.

        And the copies are terrible.

        The Soviets did the same thing. Copied western tech but were never able to make it quite as good. They kept using the Rolls Royce Nene design for decades after RR developed better engines like the Avon because we'd pretty much sold the plans to them for the Nene in the 50s (Britain was proper broke back then). They tried to copy better engines and failed. Same with the ICs in the 70's. If it were that easy, China wouldn't be dependent on imports for all it's high tech equipmen

    • Make no mistake China already has plenty of incentives to go full tilt on domestic chip design and production after the success of Western embargo's in shutting down Russian weapon manufacturing. The idea is to slow them down even further by forcing them to start from the bottom instead of giving them a leg-up with our old tech.

    • Biden, or better said his advisors because of the guy's dementia, are getting very aggressive and hell bent on putting the wrench into Chinese fab expansion. Even worse than Trump, in fact.
      But the writing has been on the wall since 2018 (Fujian Jinhua), so Chinese have been working and testing, in parallel, domestic substitutes just in case foreign exports and support are cut off for political reasons.
      As long as ASML is shipping DUVL equipment, it won't make much mid-term difference (since Chinese machines

    • So at the moment, China imports the tech to make these chips because it's cheaper than developing the tech themselves.

      The part that you are missing is the software and support. In the short-term they will be getting stuff from the blackmarket and their software from piracy. This provides an opportunity to sabotage their systems via software, making it possible to ruin the hardware that they have just like they did with Stuxnet.

      So the USA are simply creating more incentives for China to step up their tech R&D game.

      Absolutely. Doing so creates the opportunity for say, the NSA to disrupt their progress in a similar manner that Stuxnet slowed Iran from refining uranium.

      Do you not remember Stuxnet?! :D

      • Yes, Stuxnet was an act of cyber-terrorism by one nation state (Israel) against another (Iran). Iran was a soft target; easy to abuse & get away with it. You think the USA would do something like that against China? Do you know how closely interdependent the USA & Chinese economies are, e.g. how much trade they do & how many American dollars China holds? And you know they've had nuclear weapons since 1967, right?

        • Stuxnet was an act of cyber-terrorism by one nation state (Israel) against another (Iran)

          LOL @ "cyber-terrorism". If you think preventing a nation from being capable for building a nuclear weapon is "cyber-terrorism" then sure.
          Anyway, it was both the US and Israel working together. It's not a secret.

          You think the USA would do something like that against China? Do you know how closely interdependent the USA & Chinese economies are... And you know they've had nuclear weapons since 1967, right?

          Absolutely, yes, yes but not the exact year.

          China hacks the US, the US hacks China, both deny it and we move on without any nuclear war. You clearly don't realize just how normal these kind of attacks are.

          • I don't use the term cyber-terrorism lightly or exaggeratedly. Israel's acts were cyber-terrorism because they resulted in actual material damage to the target installation, i.e. destroyed some centrifuges. This would most likely have resulted in radioactive contamination & maybe injured or killed staff. We're not talking "attack" metaphorically here, it was a physical act of war, like dropping a bomb. Again, this isn't simply hacking, it's cyber-terrorism.

            BTW, the USA were implicated in the attack be

            • This would most likely have resulted in radioactive contamination & maybe injured or killed staff.

              LOL! Your lack of knowledge on the subject is amazing.

              BTW, the USA were implicated in the attack because they provided the malware to Israel & probably intelligence too but it was Israel alone that carried out the attack

              Provided the malware? The NSA worked out how to wear out and even knock over the centrifuges. Having them fall over was intentional and considered a great success. We didn't just hand it over either, we built most of Stuxnet including the 0-day attacks while Israel modded and deployed it. This was a joint venture and claiming anything different is stupid.

              • You're talking as if Israel did a good thing. You know it was a crime under international law, right?

                • How was slowing down Iran's nuclear ambitions a bad thing? Seriously, "Death to America" isn't just a chant of extremists, it's a slogan promoted by their leaders. Do you not recall that they back Hezbollah which would not hesitate to detonate a nuke? I don't see how enabling Iran to have nuclear weapons could possibly do anything but harm. Israel and the USA absolutely did a good thing.

                  • Perhaps you'd like to read this report from the CIA, which is based on declassified CIA national intelligence reports & estimates stretching back years: https://www.cia.gov/static/a6c... [cia.gov]

                    tl;dr - The Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment programme did nothing to halt Iran's nuclear weapons programme because Iran hasn't had a nuclear weapons programme since 2003.

                    Iran has also ratified international treaties against nuclear weapons (the non-proliferation treaty), chemical weapons, & biologica

                    • tl;dr - The Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment programme did nothing to halt Iran's nuclear weapons programme because Iran hasn't had a nuclear weapons programme since 2003.

                      That is a report from 2007. Furthermore, the International Atomic Energy Agency was unable to conclude that their nuclear ambitions were entirely peaceful. But wait there's more.

                      As of 2021, Iran has reached a 60% enrichment level. In May 2021, the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, stated that "only countries making bombs are reaching this level".

                    • You're citing hearsay & conjecture. So you're arguing a legitimate response to hearsay & conjecture (not actual intelligence) is an act of war? Leaders are tried at the Hague for things like that. No wonder the USA got Israel to do it.

                    • If you think Stuxnet was an act of war then you should know that the whole world is at war right now. Since you have nothing to add to the conversation, I bid you a good day.

                    • You're unable to distinguish between hacking & acts of terrorism/war. You also appear to understand little about international law, the Geneva convention, etc.. Those are your problems, not mine.
  • I really don't see how this does anything but encourage China to take actual control of Taiwan. ...Unless, maybe that's the goa. l I wish it were more obvious to more American's just how hard our government is currently working to start WW3
  • 1.4 billion people who on average are per-capita similar to Americans or Europeans.

    What I mean is that in each profession, China has about the same spread of professions as the US or Europe. So if the US as 350 million people and there are X percent of semiconductor technology engineers, then China will have approximately 4 times as many.

    It took the rest of the world decades to learn to make these technologies because they lacked a foundation to copy from. When a new process node requires a gamble of $10 bi
    • There are many types of Supercomputers. A large number nowdays are simply cluster of commodity computers ( think standard-issue PCs) that are connected by high-bandwidth low-latency local area networks. They are easily scaleable to whatever PETAFLOPS you can imagine but the type of problems that they can solve efficiently is rather limited.

      The fancy ones are using (ASIC) Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, Gravity Pipe for astrophysics, MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure computation and such.

    • 1.4 billion people who on average are per-capita similar to Americans or Europeans.

      What I mean is that in each profession, China has about the same spread of professions as the US or Europe. So if the US as 350 million people and there are X percent of semiconductor technology engineers, then China will have approximately 4 times as many.

      This is complete hogwash, though. You've asserted some nonsense. Noice.

  • Perfect plan. But I guess it may I have some consequences on other non-burgerland countries. Any plan to address this?

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