From Bloke on M4 as was:
So instead of blocking China from making chips, they’ll still be able to do that. Plus, they’ll now also be competing with the USA on the software to make chips, as the USA has given Chinese companies space to grow within China.
Deliberately creating the market for rip offs might not be wholly wise.
Aren’t you essentially saying that nature abhors a vacuum and when there’s a requirement for something it will be filled somehow?
China wants chips, so one way or another it’ll get chips. Something similar is happening in Russia with the “Russification” of their aerospace industry. They’re flying prototype twinjets made exclusively with Russian components, getting rid of the Western bits including the really difficult bit, the engines. And people said that the aerospace supply chain was irreversibly globalised and autarky was impossible.
That Russia builds only a handful of twinjets a year and no-one seems to want to buy them is neither here nor there, of course. China has built a creditable A320 copy; the only thing holding it up is international certification which of course is deliberately being held back.
It’s not as if they can’t get Western EDA tools anyway. That high-priced design software is prime territory for hackers to break the licence locks and it’s been going on for ever.
As I’ve been saying regularly on here. Trump’s America First policy has bought wholesale into the “not invented here” fantasy that the rest of the world are ignorant savages that can just be cut off from their generosity.
And – here’s the point – the timing is terrible, since China has been building for this sort of confrontation for the last few years, long before Trump came into power. They’re ready for this, whereas American companies are still trying to figure out what the changes mean.
Even before the reproduction of the PC BIOS described in the article, the USSR was awash with home-cloned PDP11s and Z80s. As Norman said, if somebody wants something and can’t get it from outside, they will build it locally. Knowing it exists makes it impossible to prevent its creation, and once you get one RT11 system boot disk, you have an infinite supply of RT11 system boot disks.
– That Russia builds only a handful of twinjets a year and no-one seems to want to buy them is neither here nor there . . .
It is very much relevant. Reducing the capacity to mass produce is a major part of tariffs and sanctions (and bombing runs).
@PJF
On the bright side they consume a huge amount of resource better directed at drones and missile systems
Norman,
Quite. Much of the thing of using imports is that they’re better, but often, that’s a small margin better. I’m sure the homegrown software won’t be as good, at least at first.
TG,
I don’t know this software at all. And I’m guessing a lot of companies like to have support. Maybe the replacement will be some open source software, and companies selling support.
jgh,
And the thing is, knowing what little I know about reverse engineering chips and fabricating them, it always seems a lot more challenging than software is. But maybe that’s because I work in software.
There are three levels in preventing technology leakage, secrecy, sanctions, and process. These work together to stop an adversary from acquiring new technology.
Secrecy means that no one knows you’re developing it. The spy game is the way to break this, both at the government and corporate level. Toy companies protecting their designs had the best security I’ve seen
Sanctions work by keeping the design out of the hands of the adversary. They know you can build something, but not how you did it. Reverse engineering chips is a difficult and time consuming task, and will only tell you the physical details. Only one company in the world makes the deep UV equipment for making state of the art chips. It took decades to figure out how to do it. I’m sure the Chinese are desperately trying to replicate it. And they still can’t produce a competitive jet engine.
Process is the hard step, especially for chips. There are thousands of process steps in making modern semiconductors. To replicate the process, you need to know things about what temperature, how long, composition of gasses, at what pressure, what etching solution, cleaned with what? The company producing those chips has done thousands of runs honing those processes. So unless they can hack the computers to get the process information, it is a long and expensive process to duplicate it.
Yes, the Soviets were able to duplicate the functionality of Western computer chips, but designs were larger, slower and more expensive. And several years behind the West. This is also where the Chinese have their problems.
PJF – It is very much relevant. Reducing the capacity to mass produce is a major part of tariffs and sanctions
That was the theory. What actually happened was that the sanctions reduced the West’s capacity to mass produce (can’t mass produce what you can’t afford).
Russia is easily outproducing the whole of NATO in artillery shells and tubes, drones, armoured vehicles and missiles. They’ve also increased – not decreased – production of planes. Futhermore, unlike Western militaries they have no recruitment crisis.
I see Germany’s Cunning New Plan to defeat Russia involves triple-dog sanctioning NordStream 2 again. Because deindustrialising Germany will show Putler!
Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes, all the way down. We’re 3 and a half years into the proxy war: where are all the new factories NATO would need to rearm?
Re Russian airliners that no one wants to buy.
It would be interesting to see how they compare to the ongoing crisis & myriad late deliveries, software failures, missing bolts holding doors in place etc etc at Boeing.
That’s without mentioning the 737 meets ground thing