If months ago we talked about the fact that after the first and harsh US sanctions against China, as well as the restrictions, especially in manufacturing equipment and EDA tools, they had set China back 10 years in chips and semiconductors, now comes the damage control of that. Gerald Yin, President and CEO of Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. (AMEC), puts white on black and confirms the drama: China is 5 generations behind in chips.
The statements are quite forceful and more so if we take into account the weight that Xi Jinping has in the semiconductor industry. Although China is advancing and creating certain technologies, which we have announced to you promptly, the reality is that, for the moment, they are a piece of paper, and today’s also somewhat confirms this.
China is 5 generations or more behind in chips
On October 7, a key date in 2022, where the US brought out its heavy artillery and kept several bombs in its hangar to gradually destroy the Chinese giant. You have to go back to 2019, with Trump, to understand that this is not a matter of one president, two or ten, it is a matter of a country and government that are not going to allow their technology to continue to be copied, used or simply exercised. Inspirational base to strengthen your competition.
Since 2019, more than 15 restrictions or sanctions have been implemented against China, something that Yin highlighted, stating that from that moment on, the US stepped on the accelerator and his country went from being two generations behind to being no less than 5, and this 2023 with Apple’s M3In theory, there will be another one.
And it is that today without these sanctions China could be almost at the same node as TSMC and the West. In fact, Yin assures that it has regressed in these years according to the current from 3 nm to 14 nma sEsports Extrasthat China would have caught the West technologically using its technology and engineers, as well as its tools.
China has to invest more and better in its semiconductor industry
What China did not see coming is that the US was going to block it with all its partners, and technologically speaking it is alone, without equipment, without tools and now without outside engineers. For this reason, there is now talk of an “opportunity” for China to promote growth, but although the intention is good and there are more than 200 companies in betweenthe reality is that they are competing with each other.
A report from a week ago went a bit along these lines, since it was said that they are even dumping prices, stealing engineers, lowering salaries to sell more and a series of techniques that would be anticompetitive here. Therefore, China is wasting time when it no longer has it, and although we have seen advances such as Huawei’s 14+14 vertical packaging, or the manufacturing tools of 7nm (which nobody has seen and they are not working after the announcement), everything seems to indicate that China is going to go backwards.
Because if we have to be clear about something, it is that the US has not yet finished implementing sanctions and restrictions, they remain, at least as far as we know, two packages of measures. A truly complex future awaits China as it has a giant challenge ahead of it. The question is not if they will be able to achieve it, but when. The time factor works against it and every day it gets worse, because the West is stepping on the accelerator like never before, and rightly so.
