Posted on 01/09/2024 4:50:24 AM PST by FarCenter
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. is attempting to reduce its reliance on older-generation semiconductors from China, adding another layer of defense after months of attempting to restrict China's access to advanced chip technology.
The older-generation chips pale in comparison to the most cutting-edge models but are still widely used in everything from dishwashers to electric vehicles.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat and the committee's ranking member, jointly sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Trade Representative Katherine Tai calling for urgent action to stem U.S. reliance on China's less advanced chips by using all means, including potential tariffs.
"We are concerned that [China] is on track to flood the United States and global markets with foundational semiconductors," the lawmakers wrote. Compared to high-performance chips, "far less attention" has been given to the risk that a surge of Chinese-made foundational chips poses to U.S. economic security, the lawmakers said.
While the most advanced chips -- those 8 nanometers or smaller -- that go into smartphones, supercomputers and data centers are mostly produced in Taiwan and South Korea, China is building up its capacity for foundational chips, otherwise known as "mature" or "legacy" chips, which are 28 nm or larger. These chips leverage technology from 10 to 20 years ago but are still used in a broad range of goods, including some military equipment.
A Rhodium Group report in April of last year noted that China and Taiwan together could account for close to 80% of 20- to 45-nm foundry capacity globally over the next three to five years. In the 50- to 180-nm range, China currently controls around 30% and within a decade could control around 46% of global capacity, the group said.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.nikkei.com ...
But weren’t we told the price of cars had to double “because no microchips”?
So i’m sure the free traitor corporate cheerleaders who think free markets rule the day in America, will be explaining now why the price of cars can’t be cut in half and have to stay super high. Let’s hear the excuses, neoCONs!
Here is a concept... Just eliminate the dependency on these. Analog worked fine for those who were not too lazy to turn a knob. We still functioned fine without chips.
Two new megafactory forges for digital chips are nearing completion in Arizona alone.
Another advantage of drones over aircraft carriers.
Let them own the TTL market.......................
It’s more like let them own the 8, 16 and 32-bit microcontroller market. There is no economic reason to fab these on EUV lines. There are probably about 40 billion made annually.
“It’s more like let them own the 8, 16 and 32-bit microcontroller market. There is no economic reason to fab these on EUV lines. There are probably about 40 billion made annually.”
Sounds interesting but I don’t fully understand. For instance, what is an EUV line? Why is there no reason to fab [8/16/32 bit uCtrlr chips] on those lines?
[Older generation CHiPs]
I haven’t trusted Erik Estrada since he was promoting the Psychic Friends Network, decades ago
Extreme UltraViolet lines use a shorter wavelength of light to create the smallest features on the most advanced chips. EUV lithography machines are very expensive, both in capital investment and operating expense, so the price per 12 inch silicon wafer processed is higher than for Deep UltraViolet lithography machines.
While you would get more chips per wafer by shrinking the feature size from 14 nanometers to 5 nanometers, a lot of the wafer is taken up by area for sawing the chips apart and for connectors for bonding the chips to conductors in the finished package. Plus, changing to the finer feature size will require requalifying parts for environmental tolerance, reliability, and in some applications tolerance to ionizing radiation.
So in the end, producing larger chips with a cheap DUV process can be less costly than producing smaller chips that do essentially the same thing with an expensive EUV process.
“Extreme UltraViolet lines use a shorter wavelength ...”
Thanks for the reply.
Do you think 5 NM is as small as it will ever get?
In the late 70’s there was a fear that cosmic rays would interfere with the operation of a chip. I don’t hear of that fear anymore and our chip-filled devices seem to never fail.
Oh, error-correcting memory chips were produced because of that fear. Do today’s memory chips have error correction?
In the past the dimensions such as 135 nanometers actually referred to the dimensions of the smallest structure that could be created. But the recent node nomenclature, such as 14 nanometer, have become detached from reality and are now more marketing terms.
However, the actual dimensions are approaching the size where they are small multiples of the interatomic distance of silicon in the crystal. So Moore’s law has started to fail both physically and economically. There are a couple generations left, and then that’s about it for silicon.
“and then that’s about it for silicon.”
Silicon and other IC ingredients, correct?
What’s to be said about the density of “logic elements” in living organisms? That is, circuit elements per unit of volume?
Today’s memory chips, with dozens of complete circuits layered on a single chip, must pack a huge amount of circuit elements per volume.
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