• CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    That must mean China is only months away from major breakthroughs that will replace ASML in their supply chains and show everyone that they never needed them in the first place. They only bought from the dutch out of the good of their hearts. Or so they will claim and tankies as well as some tech illiterates tech journalists will gobble that up like they do every time.

  • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    Clearly behind them there’s the USA pushing for that.

    Isn’t this dangerous, like playing with fire? I don’t think that China is going to be “oh no the software license is expire, we give up and close all the factories”, rather going to invest billions to find an alternative and make ASML irrelevant in the country. It won’t be fast to see cloned machines but isn’t it better to keep them tied to licenses and expensive periodic maintenance instead of pushing a temporary roadblock that will lead to the development of workarounds, unofficial cheap maintenance routines and cloned machines?

    • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      I don’t think you understand the mountain of technology advancement that those machines need in order to keep operating. I won’t elaborate since there’s so much on this topic already on the interwebs. Needless to say. The machines can only operate for a few weeks at a time and often require maintenance at that time. So turn off the maintenance and the machines stop working altogether.

      • bruhduh@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        China reverse engineering EVERYTHING if you think they can’t, you clearly don’t see previous history, they aren’t fast but they WILL do it eventually, if there’s enough motivation (sanctions or/and profit)

        • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
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          21 days ago

          They are probably the most complex machines ever created by humanity though, and requires expertise across the whole world to build. Even if they had blueprints, it would take years just to get the manufacturing right.

          • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            Yup exactly. The machine’s serviceable parts need very specific and complicated techniques to produce. Whatever you think China can conjure together, they’re gonna be dancing for around the same amount of time it took the US, Germany and the Netherlands to produce. So about a decade. Sure they got most of the machine already if I understand correctly, but that’s like giving a broken iPad to a monkey. And don’t feel bad if you’re Chinese, it would be the same if any other group of people tried to make it.

            • pop@lemmy.ml
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              20 days ago

              but that’s like giving a broken iPad to a monkey. And don’t feel bad if you’re Chinese, it would be the same if any other group of people tried to make it.

              And this is why they’ve been beating every hurdle the west has put up against them. Keep equating people to monkeys and wait for them to shit you on the face. Fuck the CCP, but there are probably more people than US, Germany and the Netherlands combined working specifically in chip manufacturing in China.

              If you only ever think there’s just one solution to a problem and everyone else are monkeys scratching their ass. You give them more reasons to beat the odds.

              Keep it up though.

              Tech has gotten cheaper since China got into the race and the whining on the other side has only made it more enjoyable.

              • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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                20 days ago

                The whole problem is that every piece of technology China gets is immediately used by the CCP to enslave them better, it’s why they revolutionized omni-surveillance, tracking and biometrics, and their first and strongest application for AI was monitoring their population for anything they consider threatening to their control (ie freedom).

                It’s why everyone hates China and wants to see them fail horribly, but don’t hate India in the same way as they’re nominally democratic.

                Don’t support genocidal fascists and cry like they’re the underdog, nobody in history killed more Chinese than the CCP, not even Genghis Khan.

        • RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee
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          20 days ago

          While they likely do have the capability of doing that eventually, there are only two places in the world that have the capability of doing the super small nm scale chips: Netherlands and Taiwan. These machines are insanely complicated and precise. I wouldn’t be surprised if China was a decade or more away from doing it themselves. I could be wrong, but this scale of chips is an entirely different monster.

          Now, they could be closer, but this particular job isn’t that simple.

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            20 days ago

            there are only two places in the world that have the capability of doing the super small nm scale chips: Netherlands and Taiwan.

            No, there’s only one company in the world that can make these machines: ASML in the Netherlands. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and everyone else buy their machines from ASML, who has a monopoly on the EUV machines necessary for modern semiconductor nodes.

            These machines emit UV at the precise wavelengths necessary by very precisely generating droplets of tin, to be blasted by high powered lasers to create a highly charged plasma that emits UV, then precisely arranged reflectors to focus those beams onto silicon wafers through a mask. Even things like small changes in humidity and air pressure throw off the calibration, so the clean rooms are engineered to keep that constant no matter what the outdoor weather is, and any fab has ultra sensitive seismic detectors to anticipate seismic activity that might affect yields, and the systems have to account for the vibrations generated by human footsteps, fans and other equipment, etc.

            The level of precision necessary for current generation fabs is so far beyond any one company or any one country’s capabilities.

          • Entropywins@lemmy.world
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            20 days ago

            Believe it or not the state of Oregon also…intel is getting their second high-na euv from ASML soon

  • mlg@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    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.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      21 days ago

      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.