Myself, am amused how the translators did not consult English sources and also how the writers of the wikipedia article probably didn’t know about the analogy to immersion microscope objectives. This industry is curiously insular.
a lot people on hacker news believed if you throw enough money into something like China is doing with semi industry that somehow you can get your fab into a leading fab.
you can't just build something with off the shelves equipment. if that's the case then China big fund in 2014 (before trade war, China already pouring money into semi industry) already bearing fruits but SMIC have to poach TSMC engineers to get them into 14nm.
leading foundry like TSMC pour in a lot of money into R&D with their partners. TSMC's ecosystem along is unrivaled. there is also the trust issue. TSMC's main and only business is making chip for their customers unlike Samsung which is a Conglomerate.
what the author said about Apple is true(move away from Samsung's supply chain). that's why Apple is now a core customer of TSMC.
edit: i recall a interview with Morris Chang by a Chinese reporter. she bring up the question about the Chinese big fund. she say if Chinese govrt throw its weight behind the semi industry. it will over take TSMC. Chang said you can't buy "experiences" it will take time for Chinese fab to learn all the mistakes and gain the know-hows. there's a lot going into the production than simply buying semi equipment and somehow magically you can get to the yield level that'll be profitable. Intel's 10nm yield problem is the example of that. sorry, English is not my first language.
The difference being that the US already has companies with experts and institutional knowledge. The fact that China lacks those things is a function of the pace at which it is trying to grow its semiconductor sector. The fact that China is able to collimate spending far better than the US is a function of how bad the US government is at sending money where it needs to go rather than to the Department of Defense.
Everything you are saying is true, but chip fab independence is a national-security priority for China, and national-security priorities aren't constrained by next-quarter-earnings market pressures. The strategy also does not just consist of buying off-the-shelf equipment, but also recruiting experts and specialists and designers.
It may not overtake TSMC next year, or in five years, but I'd be surprised if a Chinese firm does not reach parity in ten years.
China already throw in the big fund back in 2014. i believed they started the big fund II. we'll see how that goes.
>recruiting experts and specialists and designers
they already did that by poaching engineers from TSMC and else where.
>I'd be surprised if a Chinese firm does not reach parity in ten years
that's if the leading foundries just stand still. GlobalFoundries drop out of 7nm. i'll be surprised if the Chinese fabs can catch up in just 10 years.
