Author: Rong ping source: official account: Rong Ping (id:rongping898) has been authorized to reprint
The U.S. government recently received a policy proposal on chips. The report was written by two people. One was Graham, director of the center for international affairs at the Kennedy School of government at Harvard University Alison, you may not be familiar with this name, but you must have heard of the thucydide trap of World War I in a big country. Alison is the proponent of the theory!
Graham Allison
Graham, 2010 Based on the history of the Peloponnesian War written by Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, and based on the study of 12 of the 16 groups of imperial hegemonic changes in modern western history, Allison came to a conclusion that almost subverted Sino US Relations: an emerging power will inevitably challenge the status of a conservative power, and the conservative power will inevitably take measures to contain and suppress it, The conflict and even war between the two. Therefore, China and the United States cannot escape a war!
Graham After Alison’s thucydide trap theory was put forward, it caused a great sensation in the American elite! The reason is simple: whether from the bloody history of colonial prosperity in Europe and the United States or the exquisite egoism of white supremacy, Thucydides’ core idea of respecting the strong in the trap of zero sum game is very appropriate to their mainstream values.
And that year, it happened that the output value of China’s manufacturing industry reached the peak again. The sense of anxiety and crisis permeated the whole American society from the industrial circles to the political circles and then to the military circles. There is no doubt that Thucydides trap provides a reasonable outlet for their hostility to China.
Remember Obama’s famous saying:
If 1.4 billion Chinese people are allowed to live like Americans, it will be a disaster for the earth.
In a sense, Obama pursued the Asia Pacific rebalancing strategy of blocking and encircling China in his second term, which was more or less affected by the thucydide trap.
The other is Eric, the former chairman of Google Schmidt, he also has another identity. He is the founder of CSG, the China strategy group, an American think tank. According to his name, this think tank specializes in our China.
CSG and Eric Schmidt’s background is not simple. The former is composed of a group of top scientific and technological, diplomatic and national security personnel, who form a perfect division of labor system: scientific and technological experts conduct a detailed analysis of the current situation of science and technology and industry in the two countries, and formulate specific action plans; Diplomats put forward relevant foreign affairs suggestions on the plan, because the foundation of the U.S. scientific and technological war against China is alliance; National security experts evaluated the risk coefficient of the relationship between the two countries under the competition of the scheme and the emergency plan after the accident.
Eric Schmidt
And Eric Schmidt is a top student in computer science at the University of California, belick. His resume is not only Google, but also served as a director of apple. His rich professional knowledge and career in basic technology, supply chain, platform terminals and other fields have made the U.S. government deeply realize that this unprecedented competition between China and the United States has an extraordinary important role!
Biden came to power a few days ago, Eric Schmidt led his CSG to submit a 33 page, nearly 100000 word strategic report on coping with China’s scientific and technological competition to the White House.
The solution given in the report is alliance War:
The T-12 forum is composed of Japan, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, India, Israel, Australia and other countries.
And this T-12 forum is essentially an inclusive ideology
Geopolitics
?
Super Anti China Alliance in the three core competitive areas of the scientific and technological battlefield. The above 12 countries are all countries with democratic values; Japan, India and Australia are the supporting points of India Pacific strategy; Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Finland and Netherlands are important countries in all links of the Western semiconductor supply chain.
From Graham Alison and Eric Schmidt’s background clearly shows that this policy proposal is not a simple scientific and technological issue, but a lot of geopolitical issues between China and the United States.
The proposal responded positively to the industry’s concerns about the resumption of chip manufacturing in the United States at the beginning!
Zhang Zhongmou, founder of TSMC, said that the United States spent more than $50 billion in subsidies to help them become industry leaders is expensive, wasteful and futile. As a Taishan figure in the chip generation industry, Zhang Zhongmou has repeatedly criticized the United States. It seems that he sentenced the death penalty on the industrial side for the vision of reshaping the chip manufacturing industry in the United States. At least most people in the industry agree with him.
We have analyzed this topic many times before for the following reasons: first, the chip manufacturing industry is an engineer intensive industry, and the number of stem graduates in the United States can no longer support the huge demand for talents in the industry; Second, the chip manufacturing industry is infrastructure intensive. The water and electricity required for one day’s production is the consumption of ordinary cities and towns for one year. The infrastructure in the United States is too sprawling to keep up with high-intensity sports; Third, the geographical location of the United States is far from the mainstream chip supply chain, downstream terminal manufacturers, and consumer market, which is completely inconsistent with the efficiency driven and cost driven principles of commercial investment!
Graham Allison did not make a positive response to this, but pointed out from a geographical perspective that completely relying on Taiwan in the field of advanced chips would endanger the national security of the United States because
92% of the advanced chips needed to manufacture smart phones, laptops and ballistic missiles are made by TSMC!
He also quoted former US Defense Secretary Robert Walker as warning:
Our chip capability has changed from two generations ahead to two generations behind. There is only 110 miles between us, that is, the distance from the mainland to Taipei.
what do you mean?
The United States cannot solve industrial problems by industrial means, but must solve industrial problems by national will.
After giving the general outline of action, the proposal did not rush to list specific action plans, but first threw out a set of data to illustrate the urgency and seriousness of solving the problem: from 1990 to 2020, China built 32 super factories producing chips, while the total number of factories in other parts of the world is only 24. If the U.S. government does not make adjustments, the mainland will become the world’s largest chip manufacturer as early as 2025!
In addition, the proposal also has strong concerns about China’s influence in the semiconductor supply chain. In the upstream raw material field, China produces 70% of the world’s silicon, 80% of tungsten and 97% of gallium; In the downstream packaging field, China supplies more than half of the world’s circuit boards.
American think tanks are particularly worried that our chip development will follow the manufacturing path of the year: that is, by combining the cluster layout of various parts and components with the huge consumer market, we will firmly control the dominance of the international supply chain!
Exaggerating how powerful the opponent is and how big the threat to the United States is seems to have become a useful trick or technical operation method used by American think tanks in writing the report, which in fact reflects the absence of the White House in science and technology affairs.
As we all know, since the third industrial revolution, the United States has been ahead of the world in science and technology for a long time, and few countries can catch up with it. This person will certainly have a numb mentality after staying in a superior and comfortable environment for a long time. Over time, the American elite will naturally think that Lao Tzu is invincible, and others are all garbage. As a result, there are fewer and fewer technical bureaucrats proficient in science and technology in the White House staff team.
During Obama’s second term in office, the president’s science and Technology Advisory Committee submitted a science and technology industry report to the White House, saying that the development of China’s semiconductor technology had threatened American chip manufacturers and American national security, and suggested that Obama take practical actions to suppress the rise of China’s semiconductors. However, at that time, the Democratic Party was busy with the election and did not pay attention to the report at all.
Look at Biden’s staff team, nine members, either lawyers or politicians, none of whom is technical or has relevant experience. Admittedly, the absence of technical bureaucrats in the White House advisory team has slowed down the response of the US decision-making level to the scientific and technological war to a certain extent. If we can successfully pass the mid-term elections, we should strengthen team building in this regard.
After saying how much progress China’s chip manufacturing industry has made and how imminent the crisis facing the United States is, Graham Alison and Eric Schmidt finally gave three practical countermeasures.
The first two countermeasures are quite old-fashioned. First of all, we should strengthen the connection between R & D and manufacturing, because during the period of mass production, new processes and materials need to be used to continuously improve the performance and adaptability of products, so as to lead the technology to a higher field of innovation. The current dilemma of the United States is that its R & D base is in North America and its production base is in East Asia. The cross-border separation of the two has seriously damaged the sustainable innovation ability of its enterprises!
Secondly, we should take advantage of the geographical influence of the United States in East Asia, that is, the presence of the U.S. military in Japan and South Korea, and first divert part of Taiwan’s chip production capacity to South Korea to prevent it from being used in one pot.
The real big trick is the third one. The proposal clearly points out that the white house absolutely does not need to ask TSMC to transfer production lines with processes below 7 nm to reshape its high-end chip manufacturing industry, but should vigorously develop ordinary chips with low processes!
Schmidt is indeed a top practitioner who once led two ICT giants, apple and Google. This policy proposal is enough to demonstrate his precise strategic vision.
After the White House’s ban on Huawei came into effect, the vast majority of people believed that the victory or defeat point was in the field of advanced manufacturing processes with semiconductors as the core of the Sino US science and technology war. But in fact, the chip battlefield below 7 nm is only an important battlefield, not a decisive battlefield.
The reasons are as follows.
First, Moore’s law has reached its limit: Moore’s law is the basic theory of the semiconductor industry, which means that the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double almost every 18-24 months, and the corresponding computer performance that can be bought for every $1 will double every 18-24 months. This law perfectly explains the progress rate of IT technology.
Simply put, the lower the chip process, the more transistors it can accommodate, and the better the performance of the corresponding processor. In the past 50 years, thanks to the scale of process nodes and the progress of semiconductor equipment, the number of transistors on each chip has increased by more than 10million times, the processor speed has been increased by nearly 10000 times, and the annual cost has been reduced by more than 45%. This is the fundamental reason why human beings can transition from a huge brick machine to a smart machine and popularize it to the whole society!
In 2016, Gordon Moore, the founder of Moore’s law, said that it is becoming more and more difficult to continue to push forward new manufacturing nodes. I don’t know how long Moore’s law can last. A year later, Huang Renxun, CEO of NVIDIA, the world’s top semiconductor manufacturer, admitted that Moore’s law was over, because designers could no longer create a GPU architecture that could achieve higher instruction set parallelism. The number of transistors increased by 50% every year, but the performance of CPU increased by only 10% every year.
TSMC, which is at the forefront of the chip manufacturing process, feels this more appropriate.
After TSMC broke through the chip of 14 nanometer process, the R & D team found that the time consumption of each new process they broke down was often several times that of the previous one!
It is predicted that under the existing technological environment, 1 nanometer will be the limit of chip manufacturing process. Now, the manufacturing process of commercial chips has reached 3nm, and that of chips in the research and development stage has reached 2nm, which means that traditional semiconductor chips will not be able to move for at most ten years.
In the past, China was running and the United States was running. It must be very difficult to catch up, but now the United States can’t run. China is still running, and the speed of catching up will only be faster and faster.
In other words, unless the United States can launch a new technological revolution in a short time, China is bound to successfully break through its blockade. Therefore, it is not China that should be worried, but the United States! Since the status quo cannot be changed, there is no strategic significance to cling to the manufacturing capacity of advanced process chips!
Second, the market share of advanced process chips is very small: according to the report of China Semiconductor Industry Association in 2021, the market share of advanced process chips below 7 nm is only 2%, while semiconductor chips with processes of 14 nm and above occupy 70% of the whole semiconductor market. Chips in this range can basically be commercialized and mass produced in China!
In TSMC’s 2022 first quarter financial report, the revenue of 14 nm and above processes accounted for 60%
Third, the downstream market of advanced process chips is shrinking, while the downstream market of process chips above 14 nm is expanding rapidly: high-end chips below 7 nm are mainly used in consumer electronic products, such as smartphones and tablets. In the first quarter of this year, the shipment of smart phones in China was 33.022 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 17.7%; Contemporaneous
The global shipment of smart phones was 308million, a year-on-year decrease of 12.9%. Calculated from the first negative growth in 2018, global smartphone shipments have shrunk for four consecutive years!
Smartphone is the largest terminal application provider of high-end chips. Its sales decline is bound to drive the shrinking demand for chips. In recent years, apple, Xiaomi, Huawei and other mobile phone manufacturers have moved to the field of electric vehicles. It is precisely because they see the increasing popularity of the smart phone market and try to open up new growth points.
Chips with a process of 14nm or more are mostly used in new energy vehicles.
We have previously analyzed that in addition to power, the most significant feature of new energy vehicles is high intelligence and electronization, which requires the support of tens of thousands of semiconductor chips. Therefore, under the background of large-scale replacement of traditional fuel vehicles by global new energy vehicles, the automotive industry is emerging as the largest downstream terminal supplier of the chip industry. And China is a well deserved king in this field.
In the middle of this month, the Ministry of industry, trade and resources of South Korea found that the trade volume between South Korea and China had a deficit of more than $1.1 billion in May, which made them very surprised and shocked, because this was the first time that the trade deficit between China and South Korea had occurred since August 1994. After a detailed investigation, they finally found the root cause: the problem appeared in semiconductors!
In South Korea’s trade structure with China, the number one imported and exported goods are semiconductors. Last month, the semiconductor exports from South Korea to China increased by only 11%, but the semiconductor imports from China increased by 40.9% over the same period last year, and the semiconductor imports most is vehicle semiconductors!
In May this year, the proportion of commodities traded between China and South Korea was South Korean exports on the left and South Korean imports from China on the right
Among them, semiconductors occupy the first place
On June 24 local time, Wall Street institutional analysts wrote in the Financial Times:
China is trying to position itself as Saudi Arabia in the field of new energy technology hardware, becoming the lowest cost supplier and gaining the highest market share.
From Allison and Schmidt’s policy recommendations to the Wall Street article, it shows that the American policy elites have reacted that things are wrong: China is determined to acquire the technology and process of advanced process chips, but it has never been the main force, but a feint force that attracts the attention of the United States. China’s real main force is the “backward” chips with processes above 14 nm, which is a strange force, He will drive the rapid expansion of China’s semiconductor manufacturing market through China’s full industrial chain advantages and export advantages in the field of new energy vehicles. After obtaining monopoly advantages,
Then, with the momentum of besieging the city, launch encirclement and suppression against the high-end chip positions held by the United States!
Four years!
The United States finally realized that it had been lured away, so it hurriedly redeployed troops back to defense, but now it is too late