Speaking at a business forum, Putin said that “truly revolutionary,” “enormous” changes would lead to the creation of a new, “harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe” world order. In this new epoch, “only truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics,” he said.
By the term ‘sovereignty’ the Russian president means “freedom of national development, and thus of each person individually,” as well as “technological, cultural, intellectual, educational viability of the state” and a “responsible, active and nationally minded, nationally oriented civil society.”
Such a state, the president said, will serve as an example for others when it comes to “the standards and quality of people’s life, the protection of traditional values and high humanistic ideals.”
This kind of world is in sharp contrast to the Western-dominated unipolar world order, which, in Putin’s words, is “becoming a brake on the development of our civilization.”
He accused the West of being “racist and neo-colonial,” saying that its ideology “is becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism.”
The president argued that despite attempts by Western elites to preserve the existing world order, the changes are “irreversible.”
Putin has been discussing the end of the “unipolar” world for a long time. In his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, the Russian president said that “the unipolar world that had been proposed after the Cold War did not take place.” He explained that a world of “one master, one sovereign” is destructive not only for everyone within the system but also for the sovereign itself. He accused the US of neglecting the “basic principles of international law” and stressed that “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” had never solved any problems.
In May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed hope that his country’s military offensive in Ukraine, when completed, would force the Western nations “to stop promoting the so-called unipolar world under the dominance of the United States and its allies.”
Former British finance minister Rishi Sunak – a frontrunner to become Britain’s next Prime Minister – has family ties to a technology partner of the World Economic Forum that has advocated for a Chinese Communist Party-style economy complete with trackable, digital identities and currency.
Sunak, who topped the second round of voting by Conservative Members of Parliament (MP) in the Tory leadership race on July 15th following Boris Johnson’s resignation, is widely considered the “neoliberal” or “globalist” candidate.
The father of Sunak’s wife Akshata Murthy is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that provides services to a host of Fortune 500 companies and banks. One of the company’s leading services is Finacle, a digital banking platform. Murthy remains a foreign citizen with “non dom” i.e. non UK tax-paying status despite her husband’s work as Britain’s most senior finance chief, and expectation of becoming Prime Minister.
Infosys is listed as an official partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has been accused of seeking to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global “social credit score” system.
Social credit scores have been used by authoritarian regimes to deny rights and restrict the movements of individuals who fail to comply with diktats. For the World Economic Forum, social credit priorities would likely focus on left-wing social issues like climate change, diversity, and equity.
Klaus Schwab’s Candidate.
Far from being a silent partner, InfoSys has earned praise from the WEF, being dubbed a “global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting.”
“With three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, it steers clients through their digital journey by enabling them with an artificial intelligence-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change…”
– WEF on the Sunak-linked InfoSys
Several Infosys executives have also contributed articles to the WEF website, including the company’s Global Head, President, and Chief Compliance Officer.
Infosys President Mohit Joshi has penned articles for the site in favor of digital banking, which provides the technological framework for the “social credit score” system the WEF has come under scrutiny for attempting to effectuate across the world.
“What is clear is that the crisis of COVID-19 presents many challenges – but also a unique opportunity to rethink how money is managed and used in our society,” he asks.
“There also credible concerns that paper money can transmit the virus,” he claimed before asking:
“Who then can blame the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) when it announced in February that it would be destroying cash collected in high-risk environments, such as public transport, markets or in hospitals?”
“Digital currencies could remove the cumbersome operational and security apparatus which surround conventional forms of money transmission,” continues his article, before claiming “there are political and social benefits as well.”
China’s Candidate.
“The potential for China here is immense. If the e-RMB is adopted broadly as a system to streamline trade and reduce risk, China could become the world’s trade banker, as well as its factory. Yet the bigger goal for China is actually more local, and relates to financial inclusion. Digitising the RMB will grant access to financial services to hundreds of millions of citizens, including some of the most disadvantaged. This benefit is something that can be applied to any country across the world,” continues the article, which also revealed that Infosys is contributing to digitization efforts.
Another op-ed by Joshi – “Digital identity can help advance inclusive financial services” – advocates for granting every person a “unique digital identity” to conduct financial transactions. He points to the Chinese Communist Party as a successful example of this policy:
“The Chinese government in Zhejiang Province has developed an “enterprise digital code” for just this purpose, responding to small and mediums banks (SMBs) with easy-to-access financial resources. MYBank, a subsidiary of Ant Financial, the Chinese Big Tech firm, collaborates with the Chinese government through this scheme to provide cheap loans and other financial products to SMBs.”
He also calls for the creation of a “digital stability board” to regulate all payments.
“This “digital stability board” would give members the platform to share best practices and monitor risks in digital commerce and health care, for instance. With this board in place, data trusts could be built to manage individuals’ and SMBs’ data,” he explains.
Infosys is also a member of the WEF’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI), which includes cross-industry representatives from the world’s largest corporations. The National Pulse recently exposed how the initiative, which purports to fight for transparency in business practices, is the former CEO of Reuters who now serves as a board member at COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer.
Its leaders are also involved with different WEF sub-groups, such as the Global Head of Sustainability and Design Consulting Services Corey Glickman, who is a member of the WEF Pioneer Cities working group.
Sunak himself has a history of being soft on China, telling the Telegraph that he wanted a “complete sea change” in relations with the Chinese Communist Party in favor of increased trade ties and economic collaboration. China, in turn, has endorsed Sunak’s candidacy.
One out of six Americans trust the newspapers and just one out of ten trust television, according to a recent Gallup survey. These are the lowest numbers since 1973 and 1993, respectively, representing a drastic drop over the past year. There is also a widening gap in media trust between Democrats and the rest of the country.
Only 16% of respondents said that they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers, the first time this number went below 20% since Gallup began tracking data in 1973, while 43% said they had “very little” trust in the press.
Things looked even worse for television, with only 11% – the lowest percentage on record since 1993 – having a great deal of confidence in TV news, compared to 49% with “very little” trust.
Overall trust in both newspapers and TV news has dropped significantly since 2021, by five percentage points in both cases. While the trend has been uniform across all political persuasions, the poll revealed considerable gaps.
Despite a three-point loss, 35% of Democrats still trusted the newspapers, compared to just 5% of Republicans and 12% of independents. Democrats’ trust in TV news dropped by six percentage points to 20%, while independents slid five points to just 8%. Meanwhile, Republicans actually began trusting TV news slightly more than in 2021, going from 6% to 8%.
The overall decline of trust in the media was part of a trend with most major American institutions, Gallup found.
“Americans are less confident in major US institutions than they were a year ago, with significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any,” Gallup said, commenting on the result of the survey. It involved 1,015 participants, polled between June 1-20.
Trust in the US Supreme Court slid by 11 points overall, going from 31% to 13% among the Democrats and from 40% to 25% among the independents in the aftermath of controversial rulings on abortion and gun rights, while gaining a mere 3% among the Republicans.
Confidence in the military was down by 10 points among Republicans and up by four points among the Democrats. Americans of all political stripes lost trust in the police, with a pronounced 11-point loss among Republicans.
Losing faith in the White House under President Joe Biden, however, seemed to unify the country. While Republican trust in the presidency was down ten points to just 2%, it collapsed among the independents (from 31% to just 18%) and was in free fall among Biden’s fellow Democrats, going from 69% in 2021 to just 51% today.
Olaf Scholz, Federal Chancellor of Germany, grandson of Fritz von Scholz, SS Gruppenfuehrer
If the European Union hopes to compete in global politics, it can no longer afford to allow individual member states to veto the bloc’s actions, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in an article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper on Sunday.
Arguing that the bloc should become a geopolitical actor, the German leader highlighted the importance of unity in Europe in light of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. He insisted it was time to put an end to the “selfish blockades” of EU decisions by individual members. “We simply can no longer afford national vetoes, for example in foreign policy, if we want to continue to be heard in a world of competing great powers,” he wrote.
Under current EU rules, any policy decisions must be approved by all 27 member states. However, after countries like Hungary and Slovakia held up the implementation of the EU’s sixth sanctions package against Russia due to energy concerns, some have called for the bloc’s principle of unanimity to be abandoned.
Last month, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Politico that the union should ditch the unanimity requirement in matters of foreign policy and should move to qualified majority voting. She noted that “the speed at which things happen” was too slow and that it was important for the “European voice” to be heard and seen without one single member being able to block it.
In his article, Scholz also stated that the EU had been weakened by “permanent disunity” and “permanent dissent between member states, ”claiming that unity was Europe’s most important response to the “change of times.” He suggested that one of the ways unity across the bloc and its allies could be achieved was if Germany “assumes responsibility for Europe and the world in these difficult times.”
Scholz noted that Germany could bring together “East and West, North and South in Europe” since it was located in the middle of the continent and was a country that “lay on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”
The chancellor added that it was important to “close our ranks” in all areas in which Europe has been struggling, such as migration policy, European defense, technological sovereignty, and “democratic resilience.”
This comes only a week after the cauldron around Lysichansk began to close. Until a few hours ago there was still a chance to flee from Lysichansk but the only passable road was under Russian fire. It is not know yet how many made it out or how many gave up and were taken prisoners.Some of those who retreated went to Siversk some 20 kilometer west of Lysichansk. That city will be the next bigger target in that campaign sector.
The speed of this operation was much faster than the one in Mariupol. That points to diminished capabilities and soldier motivation of the Ukrainian forces.
The now much shortened frontline frees up several battalion tactical groups on the Russian side which can now be refitted and rested to then move elsewhere.
In a week or two those BTCs which now rest and resupply will be back. They will create a new cauldron around Siversk and maybe Bakhmut, decimate the Ukrainian forces within it to then capture the whole area.
The artillery preparations for the next push had began immediately after the fall of Lysichansk. The ‘week or two’ have passed and the attack on the next defensive line (yellow line in the east) from Siversk to Kurdiumivka has begun. Yesterday ground fighting was reported within Siversk and Soledar.
In a week or two the line down from Siversk to Krasna Hora will probably be under Russian control. Bakhmut, which is very fortified, may take a few more days to fall.
The battle will then move to the next defensive line further west (also marked in yellow). That line is anchored in the north on Sloviansk which has a railway line (black) coming in from the west. That railway line allows the Ukrainians to supply their current frontline with heavy artillery ammunition and fuel.
Sloviansk will be attacked from the northwest, the northeast and southeast. The force disposition map below shows that the Ukrainian defenses in that area are rather weak.
(The map above uses NATO symbology. The marking within the blue (friendly) rectangles shows the type of the unit. ‘Crossed bandoliers’ are infantry, ‘tank tracks’ stand for armored units, a black dot designates artillery, a combination of tank tracks and crossed bandoliers means mechanized infantry. The marking above the rectangle shows the size of the unit. An X means brigade (3,000-4,000 men), three vertical lines a regiment (1,000-1,500 men), two vertical lines a battalion (300-600 men) and so on. Each unit is ‘organic’ in that its has its own artillery or mortar group and other attached support like transport and medics.)
The Ukrainian lines in the northeast of the Donetzk oblast are held by pure infantry troops of dubious quality (i.e territorial defense brigades). Most of these have already been mauled by Russian artillery attacks and are down to 70% or less of their original strength. They have little capability to withstand the motorized (and armored) Russian forces that are moving against them. The Ukrainians have very few armored reserves behind the front that could intervene and oppose those Russian attacks.
Now let’s look at the bigger picture in east Ukraine. I have marked 5 defense lines (yellow) which all run north to south along major highways or railroads.
The two in the east (right side) will fall within the next two or three weeks. The only really major one of the other lines is in the west (left side) running from Kharkiv through Dnipro down to to Zaporizhzhia in the south. It will be nibbled up piecemeal. Kharkiv, the anchor in the north is already under attack. Zaporizhzhia in the south is under long range artillery fire. The center around Dnipro will be attacked from the east as well as from the west side of the Dnieper river (see below). I believe that the Russian side intends to completely take that western line before the winter sets in.
Now let’s look at the southern front where the Ukrainian forces attempted a counterattack on Kherson. For orientation: This map has Dnipro in the upper right.
Kherson in a major city on the western side of the Dnieper river. If the Russian side holds onto it it can move up to the economically important industrial mining area of Kryvyi Rih and from there launch an attack on Dnipro from a southwestern direction.
This is a major strategic danger for the Ukrainian side. That is why it collected lots of forces around Mykolaiv (Nikolaev in Russian transliteration) and attempted a counterattack on Kherson. On the force disposition map we can see motorized infantry, marine infantry, artillery, helicopter, and missile brigades all positioned in or around Mykolaiv.
Over the last days those forces used heavy artillery in an attempt to destroy the reservoir dam and river crossing near Nova Kakhorvka on the right side of the above map. This would have flooded the area south of Kherson and would have made its defense way more difficult. But so far all major Ukrainian attacks on the dam and along the southern frontline have failed.
The next map shows the main reasons for that failure.
All the Ukrainian units in and around Mykolaiv have come under very heavy artillery fire by the Russian forces. Major targets were unit headquarters, ammunition dumps and any larger groupings of soldiers. The planned Ukrainian counterattack on Kherson was thereby destroyed even before it took up its starting position. I am not aware of any Ukrainian reserve forces that could be moved there to revive it.
All together the Ukrainian forces are in a dire state. They have little to withstand further moves by the Russian side.
Now let’s look at the U.S. support for the Ukrainian forces.
Next to man portable small arms, Javelin anti-tank missiles and stinger anti-air missiles, a major U.S. delivery has been the 100 light howitzers M-777 and their standard 155mm ammunition. These are rather flimsy guns and slow to redeploy. Some 70% of these have by now been disabled or destroyed.
Those 100 howitzers did not have the digital systems that allows for precision ammunition to be used with them. The U.S. has since send another 18 M-777 howitzer with digital aiming systems and 1,000 rounds of precision ammunition to be used with them. The delivery included three artillery detection radars. Those three batteries, with six guns each, will thereby be used in a counter artillery mission against Russian artillery.
The U.S. has also delivered 18 12 HIMARS long range missile systems to the Ukraine. An additional 3(?) systems have come out of German and British depots. They are the new Wunderwaffe Du Jour.
The Russian side will use the obvious countermeasures against such attacks. Larger depots will move further back, smaller ones more near to the front will be dispersed and camouflaged. Missile and air defenses will be brought up to defend the depots. Special forces will move behind the Ukrainian front-lines to hunt down the HIMARS missile systems. I have seen two videos of such units attacking Ukrainian S-300 air defense systems far behind the front lines with anti-tank weapons and sharpshooter rifles.
Over the last weeks some HIMARS and other systems have been hitting Donetsk city and have caused a high number of civilian casualties. The Russians have launched special counter battery missions which have been successful in hunting some of those units down. Some Russian Tochka-U missiles systems, no longer in service with the Russian forces, have been given to the forces of the Donetzk Peoples Republic to defend their main city. The Tochka has a similar 100+ kilometer reach as the HIMARS but is less precise.
There is no oversight over where the ‘western’ weapon deliveries to the Ukraine go to. Here is a civil car with Albanian number plates loaded with British and U.S. anti-tanks missile. The Ukrainian military has admitted that such transfers are happening. We can only guess where those weapons will end up.
Of the 18 HIMARS the U.S. has delivered two were reportedly destroyed and one, including its ammunition, was allegedly sold to the Russian side. There were also reports that two French Caesar artillery systems have been sold to the Russians. Those will become nice show pieces right next to all those Nazi Tiger tanks that ended up in Russian military museums.
Tomorrow the parliament of the Russian Federation will hold a special session likely about the war in Ukraine. I have seen no hint of what it might decide to do but it will probably enable Russia’s president to use more forces in Ukraine than he currently does.
The Ukrainian side is losing hundreds of soldiers per day which leads to lots of funerals with questionable symbolics (old video).
It is high time for the Ukrainian and ‘western’ side to stop the war and to re-enter into negotiations with the Russian side.
Let me recommend to everyone the speech Michael Hudson has held on Monday for China’s Global University. It digs to the core of the illness that has taken over ‘western’ societies.
The issue is debt which historically was largely forgiven by the king or high priest in case of hard times. But during the time of the Greek and later Roman empires oligarchs took over and demanded to pay back all debt in full and even in hard times. This split societies into a rich rentier class and indebted plebs. Each empire that followed that path, from the Roman to the British one, eventually came down due to over-indebtedness.
Thomas Cole – The Course of Empire: Destruction bigger
The U.S. is the current global empire which is way down on this path. It is hostile to all societies that do not open their financial markets to be robbed by U.S. oligarchs. This is at the core of the current global conflict as China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela developed from different traditions and reject to give in to U.S. demands. The U.S. is used to solve such ‘problems’ by force but is now likely too weak to achieve that.
Naked Capitalism is the first to publish the English language version of Hudson’s speech:
The United States through its New Cold War is aiming at securing precisely such economic tribute from other countries. The coming conflict may last for perhaps twenty years and will determine what kind of political and economic system the world will have. At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony and its dollarized control of international finance and money creation. Politically at issue is the idea of “democracy” that has become a euphemism for an aggressive financial oligarchy seeking to impose itself globally by predatory financial, economic and political control backed by military force.As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been the distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentierclass living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity.
It will be necessary to bring down the rentierclass. To recommit to a strong state that owns the public goods and services and does not hand them over to private interests. The coming malaise may well help to achieve that.
New ‘advanced packaging’ techniques could help China elude bans on selling DUV lithography equipment to its chip makers. Photo: Twitter
NEW YORK – China’s semiconductor industry has lagged the US in patents and lagged South Korea and Taiwan in fabrication, but it hopes to leapfrog its competition by adopting revolutionary new chip design technologies.
Advanced chips used in 5G smartphones and some workstations squeeze billions of transistors onto a fingernail-sized chip by shrinking the dimensions of the transistor itself to 3 to 5 nanometers. Most chips have gate widths of 28 nanometers and higher. Etching tiny circuits on silicon is enormously difficult.
Only the Dutch manufacturer ASML makes the lithography machines that use the short wavelengths at the extreme end of the ultraviolet spectrum to shrink transistors to such tiny dimensions. And the fabrication plants are extremely expensive, costing up to US$20 billion each.
In 2020, the US forced the Dutch government to ban exports of ASML’s most sophisticated lithography machines to China. ASML uses American intellectual property, giving Washington leverage.
But ASML continued to sell its previous generation of lithography equipment, which etches 14-nanometer transistors using “deep ultraviolet” (DUV) light. China bought 81 such machines in 2021 alone.
China’s largest fabricator, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), now produces 14-nanometer chips. With 5% of the world’s fabrication market, SMIC lags its Taiwanese and Korean competitors but it is expanding rapidly.
As Scott Foster and Jeff Pao reported in Asia Times, Washington last month asked the Dutch government to stop ASML from selling the older DUV machines to China as well.
Semiconductor Industry executives told Asia Times that the Dutch would not accede to the American demand. ASML’s China sales exceeded $2.7 billion in 2021, including the 81 DUV lithography machines.
The American intellectual property (IP) content of the older machines isn’t big enough to justify an American ban, analysts and executives say.
In the meantime, chip designers have learned how to build three-dimensional chips using what the industry dubs “advanced packaging.”
In the process, which has been used in various forms in chip-making for decades, layers of chips with larger transistors stacked on top of each other can produce computation speeds equal to one-dimensional configurations of the tiniest chips. Intel has bet the company’s future on recent advancements in advanced packaging. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the industry leader, has likewise invested heavily in newer forms of the process. Samsung has just established a task for advanced packaging, hoping to leapfrog Intel and TSMC, which now account for 32% and 27% respectively of investment in the process.
China, which had little capability in semiconductor equipment before the Trump administration bans imposed on chips and chip-making equipment three years ago, is catching up. In February, Shanghai Micro “successfully delivered the first 2.5D3D advanced packaging lithography machine, which is of great significance to the domestic integrated circuit industry,” according to China’s trade press.
The American tech website Tom’s Hardware explained:
When SMIC was barred from manufacturing tools advanced enough to make chips using its 10nm-class (and sub-10nm-class) nodes in late 2020, the company said it would focus on developing advanced packaging technologies to make sophisticated multi-chiplet designs out of tiles produced on 14nm and thicker nodes. That would enable Chinese chip designers to build sophisticated and capable processors with tens of billions of transistors even without using an advanced process technology.
In addition, the company announced multi-billion-dollar expansion plans that would triple the output of chips made on advanced nodes.
To a large degree, advanced packaging technologies could be SMIC’s way to work around the US export restrictions. As a result, China would gain access to advanced computing capabilities that could be used for military purposes.
The US administration certainly understands SMIC’s options and risks that it brings to America and its allies, so it wants to further crack down on China’s access to sophisticated chipmaking tools.
China won’t be able to produce the 3 to 5-nanometer chips that TSMC and Samsung fabricate in their latest plans, but it may be able to package the older 14-nanometer chips into 3D configurations that achieve the same results – and at considerably lower costs.
The Biden administration’s belated attempt to suppress China’s semiconductor industry appears to have backfired. China has found workaround technologies that bypass the aging American IP that Washington has embargoed.
In 2011 China produced just 12.7% of its domestic chip consumption and imported the rest. By 2021, it produced 17% of domestic consumption and by 2030 it is expected to produce 30%.
China’s chip imports in 2020 totaled $378 billion, the single largest item in its international trade. American pressure has prompted China to push for self-sufficiency, raising the possibility that China’s chip industry may become the world’s dominant producer by the end of the decade.
One of the star performers in China’s stock market this year is semiconductor equipment maker Shanghai Micro Fabrication (HK 1385), with a 25% year-to-date gain while industry leader ASML fell by 45%. Shanghai Micro’s net income rose to 573 million yuan ($85.2 million) in 2021 from 133 million yuan in 2020 as the upstart equipment maker benefited from restrictions on sales of advanced semiconductor equipment to China.
The global chip shortage has turned into a glut with widespread cancellation of orders as most of the major economies are in or close to recession. Semiconductor stocks are among the worst performers year to date, except in China, where geopolitics has given the sector a tailwind.
The Biden administration is considering new measures to prevent China from buying chip-making equipment. This appears to be a response to Chinese advances in chip-making methods, including advanced packaging.
It seems to be yet another effort by Washington to close the barn door after the horse has bolted. China’s chip-making equipment companies are the main beneficiaries of the tech war, and eventually will fill the gap.
Shanghai Microelectronics, China’s leading producer of lithography equipment, can meet the country’s needs in older-generation chips of 90 nanometers and above, and reportedly has shipped its first 28 nanometer machines.
China’s share of world semiconductor manufacturing capacity was 11% in 2010 and is forecast to rise to 24% by 2030. China’s $170 billion National Integrated Circuit Fund accounted for 86% of all government grants of below-market equity to chipmakers between 2014 and 2018, according to an OECD study. Meanwhile, the US Congress has been unable to pass a $52 billion package to subsidize semiconductor production in the United States.
In response to the legislative delay, Intel called off a July 22 groundbreaking ceremony for a chip fabrication plant in Ohio, and TSMC has warned that its projected fab in Arizona may not be built. According to US chip industry sources, Intel is relieved that the Ohio project may be put on ice.
The sudden softening of the semiconductor market and the threat of a chip glut following the global shortages of 2020-21 remove the need for additional capacity. Intel has $10 billion a year in free cash flow and can finance its own expansion – if it has the customers.
The US Commerce Department in early July told the business press off the record that it was considering extending restrictions on semiconductor equipment exports to China to include older technologies that make less advanced chips.
The threat of such restrictions and the important advances in home-grown Chinese capabilities have supported the stock prices of domestic Chinese equipment manufacturers, which also benefit from government subsidies.
China’s SMIC has lost about 8% of its market capitalization during 2022 to date, while TSMC has lost 36%.
A key bottleneck in China’s efforts to achieve a high degree of independence in chip manufacturing is lithography. ASML is the world’s only manufacturer of Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography machines that etch circuits for the most advanced chips with gate widths of 7 nanometers or less.
Only TSMC and Samsung can produce them. The Trump administration banned exports of these chips, shutting down the 5G handset business of Huawei and ZTE, and also persuaded the Dutch government to ban sales of EUV machines to China.
China’s largest semiconductor foundry SMIC has only 5% of world market share, but its revenue has doubled over the past 18 months. It can produce 14-nanometer chips. Except for smartphones and a few specialist applications, chips of 14 nanometers and above make up 95% of world chip demand.
Although Huawei’s 5G handset business collapsed without access to 7-nanometer-and-below chips, China had no problem building out its 5G base station network with wider chips.
But a revolution is underway in chip design, or perhaps several revolutions. New technologies, including new forms of “advanced packaging”, provide an alternate path to ever-smaller gateway width and at possibly lower costs.
