125
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by CriticalOtaku@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

Lol. Lmao.

In the funniest timeline, the US nationalizes Nvidia to delay China from making chips that work well with LLM's... by a year tops.

Link to original Fortune article the PC Gamer article pulled from, with this juicy relevant quote:

To do that, Raimondo said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which manages export controls for the US, needs more funding from Congress.

“I have a $200 million budget. That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” she said. “If we’re serious, let’s go fund this operation like it needs to be funded.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] WayeeCool@hexbear.net 37 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah. It's actually Russia that is around 10 to 15 years from catching up. I've been following both the Russian and Chinese state firms in charge of developing semiconductor fab tooling. The main Chinese firm is about to make a full two or three generation leap past ASML (the top western firm) in the coming 3 or so years. The Russian state firm in charge of this type of tooling hasn't made anything since shortly before the USSR fell, back when Russia still maintained semiconductor lithography tech parity with the US and only right around the time the Ukraine war kicked off have they started back up their r&d.

The new EUV light source and lithography machines China has going into trial production are more advanced than anything ASML (where TSMC & western fabs get their EUV light source) has in the works. China decided to leapfrog the western firms by skipping the inefficient method of vaporizing tin microspheres with a laser to make pulses of EUV light (extremely inefficient, low quality light) and instead is going with particle accelerators to generate continuous EUV light that is higher quality (greater culmination, narrower frequency range) and higher output (10 to 100 times brighter for given power input) while using less valuable fab infrastructure space. Because a particle accelerator lacks all the moving parts and is mostly solid state, it has many times greater mean time between failure compared to the ASML machines that have duty cycles around only 90% operational uptime and 10% maintenance downtime. Rather than needing to build/buy a dozen or more EUV machines to equip a fab at scale (one ASML light source per lithography station) and have them still be a production bottleneck, you can install a single one of the Chinese particle accelerator light sources to provide EUV light to more than a dozen lithography stations placed around the circumference of its ring.

edit:

another observation. the western lithography tooling firms seem to be at a tech development disadvantage because they make so much of their money from service contracts to maintain the machines they sell. I could never see ASML decide on their own to create the type of hardware Chinese state firms have in the works because the complexity and unreliably of their machines is a major source of revenue after they make the initial sale. Their board of directors and shareholders would never allow it. ASML would also never design a machine that can replace a dozen or more machines of the same cost even if it meant higher quality output for the end user. This is why I can't see them competing in the long run now that China has made development of advanced lithography tooling a national priority with full backing of the state.

[-] WashedAnus@hexbear.net 16 points 11 months ago

Hey, nice to see someone with some industry knowledge posting! I would extrapolate the "service contract" model's inefficiency to the whole industry. It's not just lithography, it's also everyone from etch and defect metrology, to testing/binning and packaging. The big semiconductor names don't build any of the production tools. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and the other fab owners buy all of their tools from other companies, and those other companies sell them service contracts in order to more effectively hoard their IP.

A state-owned enterprise that does all of its own service and R&D would blow the capitalist firms out of the water. I estimate that 80% of the workforce at any given fab is superfluous, and only employed to safeguard each company's IP. All of this increases production downtime, as the manufacturing technicians aren't allowed to know enough to fix problems themselves and have to wait on the service company's service engineers to show up to do anything more than the most basic tasks. On top of the actual manufacturing inefficiencies this model introduces, the capitalists from each company involved are taking their outsized takes from every transaction. Some of it goes to funding R&D, but a state owned enterprise would be able to redirect significantly more profits to R&D.

[-] emizeko@hexbear.net 13 points 11 months ago
[-] barrbaric@hexbear.net 2 points 11 months ago

Googled a bit but I have no idea how they're generating EUV from a particle accelerator. It supposedly "captures the energy emitted by high-energy particles during acceleration", but again, I have no idea how that would work. Are they just phrasing "and then it was slammed into a target" in a weird way?

[-] WayeeCool@hexbear.net 8 points 11 months ago

Here are a few papers on the subject in chronological order:

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) sources for lithography based on synchrotron radiation (2001) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168900201008877

Steady-State Microbunching in a Storage Ring for Generating Coherent Radiation (2010) - https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.154801

Demonstration of a ring-FEL as an EUV lithography tool (2020) - https://journals.iucr.org/s/issues/2020/04/00/ve5121/index.html

Experimental demonstration of the mechanism of steady-state microbunching (2021) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03203-0

A synchrotron-based kilowatt-level radiation source for EUV lithography (2022) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07323-z

[-] barrbaric@hexbear.net 4 points 11 months ago

Thank you, will give these a read later!

this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
125 points (100.0% liked)

technology

23313 readers
75 users here now

On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS