Focus:
- 1 Looking back at the history of the development of the semiconductor industry, the first thirty years were dominated by US imperialism, and after the seventies, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan undertook technology spillover and transfer from Silicon Valley, attracting their own talents in the United States to return and seize the golden opportunity.
- 2 While the U.S. semiconductor industry was running wild under the guidance of Moore's Law, the Soviet Union took the wrong direction in the most important technological revolution of the 20th century. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no decent semiconductor industry, and the chips needed by the Russian electronics industry were almost all imported.
- 3 The strategy used by the Japanese in semiconductor technology research is: integrate resources and concentrate on big things. In the face of Japanese semiconductor companies that launched an offensive with a national system, Intel founder Noyce led the establishment of the American Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) to lead this chip war with the Japanese, and the United States dealt with Japan in the past: sanctioning Japanese head companies, imposing anti-dumping duties, and launching a trade war.
- 4 With Japanese companies as a lesson in the past, Samsung launched a powerful lobbying offensive against the White House, parliament and trade departments of the United States, emphasizing that if they fall, Japanese companies will once again monopolize the market, which is not good for the United States. Samsung, which handed over the "letter of submission", has a Wall Street capital platform behind it, and there is no need to worry about causing US sanctions,
- 5 The "Ten Emerging Industries Development Strategies and Measures" issued by Taiwan in 1991 listed the ten emerging industries such as semiconductors, consumer electronics, and precision machinery as development goals, and the electronics industry gradually became the largest pillar of Taiwan's economy, which continues to this day.
- 6In the field of chip design and packaging, Huawei HiSilicon and Changjian Technology have risen rapidly, and it only took more than ten years to enter the first echelon in the field. However, in the most complex and difficult chip manufacturing field, China's semiconductor industry has experienced bloody storms and is still facing a stuck neck crisis.
- 7 To develop a world-class semiconductor industry, we need long-term government support with strategic planning, we need soil that encourages innovation and tolerates failure, we need to continuously expand cutting-edge first-class universities and research institutes, we need entrepreneurs who can endure loneliness and sink into research and development, and we need top engineers with an annual salary of millions, which is a hidden war at the national level.
"The triumph of silicon over steel"
In the early morning of January 17, 1991, when the first US missile crashed into Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, who was awakened from his sleep, was not very alarmed.
In the past few months, the United States has been busy deploying troops, and three aircraft carrier battle groups have been assembled in the Gulf region, but Saddam Hussein has fully demonstrated his true colors of not being afraid of arrogance, in his opinion, he has millions of troops under him, wants people to have people, must be equipped with equipment, and is not afraid to fight anyone.
The spirited Saddam Hussein is now two meters tall in the grave grass.
On paper alone, the Iraqi army's conventional weapons and equipment at that time were stronger than the Chinese army at that time. Saddam's wishful calculation was simple: the Americans could not accept many sacrifices, as long as they dragged the US military into the quagmire of war, sooner or later they could drain the patience of the Americans and then retire. Wasn't that what was the Vietnam War?
But this time, the script changed.
The Iraqi army, which was waiting for it, did not see the expected enemy, and flew towards them with more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles from US warships, code-named "Desert Storm" military operation officially began.
For more than a month, the Iraqi army saw no enemy, and only thousands of missiles fell from the sky, destroying Iraq's defenses. Unlike the usual carpet bombing, this time it was replaced by surgical, precision strikes:
Air strikes on the Iraqi staff, bombs drilled directly and accurately through the chimney; In the bombing of hangars, the US military first blew open the gate, and then sent missiles to the hangar; The AWACS aircraft, equipped with advanced sensors, allowed the Iraqi plane to be detected and shot down as soon as it took off, and there was no chance to take off.
The whole world was stunned - it turns out that a war can still be fought like this?
Later, the ground war was much the same, and the seemingly powerful Iraqi million-strong soldiers, under the blows of various high-precision weapons of the multinational force, were destroyed like devastation and decay. After this battle, less than 200 soldiers died in the US military due to the war, which taught the world a lesson in what high-tech war is.
The Tomahawk missile that showed great power in the Gulf War
At that time, the Cold War was nearing its end, and many countries, including China, still had a combat mentality stuck in World War II, believing that victory could be achieved by relying on the torrent of steel and the tactics of the sea of people. It wasn't until the Gulf War that times changed.
At that time, the Iraqi army was equipped with a water of Soviet-made weapons, of which the performance comparison between the T-72 tank and the US M1A1 tank became the focus of worldwide attention.
In the tank battle south of Basra, the US army completely annihilated more than 200 Iraqi tanks at a cost of almost 0 and achieved an overwhelming victory.
The T-72 and M1A1 are both third-generation tanks, why is there such a big difference?
The reason is that there is a huge gap between the two in the degree of informatization. The M1A1 is commonly equipped with thermal imagers, advanced sensors, and computerized fire control systems, enabling U.S. forces to detect and fire before the enemy.
This war, later dubbed by the media as "the victory of silicon over steel".
This is because many high-tech weapons used by the US military, from missiles, early warning aircraft, electronic jammers, stealth fighters, to the GPS system behind the scenes - all these high-tech equipment, the core technology behind it is semiconductor chip technology.
Behind all these advantages is the developed semiconductor industry in the United States.
The stagnation of Soviet semiconductor technology has made the third generation of Soviet-style equipment and the US military have a significant performance gap: the Su-27 is equipped with a fire control radar, the calculation speed is only 170,000 times / second, while the US F-15 of the same generation has reached a staggering 40 million times / second. The Soviet missile hit rate had an error of 60 meters, while the American missile was only 15 meters.
This gap, traced back to its roots, comes from the different choices of the two countries in semiconductor technology routes over the past half century. Every sudden change in history is often hidden in inconspicuous details.
II "The most important invention of the 20th century"
In 1947, at Bell Labs, the world's most powerful corporate laboratory at the time, William Shockley and two other physicists co-invented the transistor to replace the vacuum tube of the past as a signal amplification element. By the way, for the invention of the transistor, the dude later won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
However, at first, no one expected that this little invention would later be called "the most important invention of the 20th century", and the semiconductor technology revolution triggered by it completely changed the face of the future world, and the competition, competition, and conspiracy around it affected the entire geopolitical pattern of the future world.
The world's first transistor
In today's semiconductor industry, the competition between countries is fierce and abnormal, but in the first three decades of the birth of transistors, the entire semiconductor industry can be said to be completely dominated by the United States.
Bell Labs gave birth to the first transistor, Texas Instruments built the world's first transistor radio, Fairchild Semiconductor invented integrated circuits, IBM launched the first integrated circuit computer that spanned generations... Savage growth, yet vibrant.
In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders, published an article in the journal Electronics predicting that the number of transistors integrated into the chip would double every year. At that time, no one expected that this 36-year-old young man accurately predicted the course of the human information revolution in the second half of the 20th century.
Looking back at the history of semiconductor development, all the most important ideas, technologies and products in this industry were born in the United States of that era, especially Silicon Valley.
After the end of World War II, a report called "Science, Endless Frontiers" was put on the desk of US President Harry S. Truman, which hoped that the United States could encourage scientists to explore cutting-edge science and technology through huge financial support, and encourage enterprises to transform scientific and technological achievements into applications.
In 1957, the Soviet Union was the first to launch the first artificial satellite, and the United States shocked the whole country, calling it the "Sputnik moment." In order to catch up with its opponents, the United States has increased its investment in the space race and used silicon transistors in space electronics as much as possible.
The most important driving force for the industrialization of semiconductor technology in the United States at the beginning was the military demand of the United States. In the fifties and sixties, the US military's purchase orders provided 70% of the research and development funds for the nascent semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley. In the early years of the invention of integrated circuits, 70 percent of government funding came from the Air Force.
On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon, and human civilization took a big step towards space. In this unprecedented grand plan, a total of 1 million chips were used.
In the early sixties, there was little discernible difference between the Soviet Union and the United States in the field of cutting-edge science and technology. At that time, the Soviet Union launched mankind's first artificial satellite, launched a sea trial nuclear submarine, and mastered 100 million tons of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missile technology. In his speech, Khrushchev arrogantly said to Western diplomats:
"We will bury you."
Electronics and computers were still new industries at the time, and the Soviets followed suit. Thanks to the efforts of Soviet scientists, the Soviet transistor came out only a few weeks later than the United States, and in 1957 the Soviet Union produced its own transistor radio.
But later historical trajectories proved that the Soviets made wrong judgments on the most important technological track of the 20th century.
III How the USSR missed semiconductors
On September 6, 1976, several MiG-25 fighters of the Soviet 11th Air Army were participating in exercises in the Far East. As the plane approached the coast of Japan, the MiG-25 piloted by Captain Belenko in the formation suddenly turned, pulled down to avoid Soviet radars, and directly broke into Japanese airspace.
The U.S. planes immediately took to the air to intercept them, only to find that the MiG-25 had landed at a civilian airfield in northern Japan — the plane had actually defected. The US military stationed in Japan immediately took control of the plane, and then unloaded it in eight pieces as quickly as possible. The secret of the MiG-25 has been bothering them for 9 years.
Developed by the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau, the MiG-25 debuted in 1967 specifically to intercept U.S. bombers. As soon as it came out, the MiG-25 set new world records, becoming the tallest and fastest interceptor flying at the time, and even made the feat of throwing off incoming missiles at high speed during the Fourth Middle East War.
The Americans are sitting on pins and needles, but they have never been able to figure out how the performance of this aircraft is done.
A generation of legendary MiG-25
Belenko's defection made the US military like a treasure, but the dismantling results of the US military engineers surprised the entire Pentagon. The Soviets' technology was surprisingly outdated in many ways, most notably the MiG-25's electronics used not transistors and integrated circuits, but bloated vacuum tubes like bunches of grapes.
The Soviets did not lag much behind in the field of semiconductors at first, but the problem was that Soviet leaders regarded preparing for World War III as a top priority, and they found that in nuclear explosion tests, transistors were easily burned, and tubes were much more resistant to interference, so the decision-makers then slapped their heads and decided to take the road of vacuum tube miniaturization.
In this way, when the semiconductor industry in the United States was running wildly under the guidance of "Moore's Law", the Soviet Union chose the wrong direction in the most important technological revolution of the 20th century.
At that time, the Soviet Union attached importance to basic education, trained twice as many scientists and engineers as the United States, and had obvious advantages in concentrating on scientific research. However, the planned economic soil of the Soviet Union is naturally incompatible with the evolutionary law of the semiconductor industry.
In 1967, a semiconductor plant in Belarus broke a medium-voltage circuit breaker and needed to be reinstalled, and the deputy director made a request at the party committee, and after discussion, reported it to the Minsk City Administration of Electronics Industry. Because it was unplanned, the demand was reported to the Municipal Planning Commission and the Belarusian Planning Commission, and then approved and allocated funds to a circuit breaker manufacturer. By the time the factory finally got the circuit breaker it needed, three months had passed.
So while the Soviets were catching up under such a rigid system, engineers in Silicon Valley were doubling the density of transistors every 18 months, throwing their opponents so much that they couldn't even see their own taillights.
In the late 60s, Soviet scientists began to realize that the gap between the United States and the Soviet Union in the field of computers was widening, but it was difficult for them to change the overall situation at their own level. The thinking and model of the planned economy has been rooted in the blood of this country.
The Soviet Union missed semiconductors, and thus the later computer revolution, and the Internet revolution.
This difference was not noticeable in the sixties and seventies, when the Soviet Union's GDP at its peak was close to 70% of that of the United States in the 1970s, but was later further and further distended by rivals. Thirty years later, when the United States entered the information society, the Soviet Union as a whole remained in the industrial society, creating a generational gap with its opponents.
Dr. Wu Jun believes in "Top of the Wave": "The fundamental reason for the backwardness of the Soviet Union is that it missed the information revolution around semiconductor integrated circuits for half a century. ”
This influence continues to this day. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no decent semiconductor industry, and the chips needed by the Russian electronics industry were almost all imported. During the Russian-Ukrainian war, the missile crashed by the Russian army was found, and the circuit board installed in it turned out to be from Wenzhou, China.
"Can Japan say no?"
The Gulf War shocked the whole world, and as the younger brother of the United States, Japan also seemed to feel "honored" and burst with self-confidence. At that time, Japanese right-wing representatives Shintaro Ishihara and Akio Morita co-produced the book "Japan Can Say No", which said that "without Japanese chips, the United States cannot win this war." ”
The high-tech weapons used by the U.S. military in the war do make extensive use of semiconductor chips imported from Japan, and Americans are beginning to worry that dependence on Japanese chips will bring national security. At this time, the Japanese stood up and punched their eldest brother in the face uninterestingly: "If Japan sells chips to the Soviet Union instead of the United States, the military power of the United States and the Soviet Union will soon lose its balance." ”
He almost shouted at his eldest brother: "Take two steps, take two steps without illness!" ”
However, Americans can't complain about others, because the rise of Japan's semiconductor industry was all supported by Americans at the beginning.
After Japan's surrender, the United States intended to completely deindustrialize Japan and eliminate its war potential, but unexpectedly the outbreak of the Korean War and the continuous influx of military orders into Japan, which led to the recovery of the Japanese economy.
Texas Instruments invented the transistor radio, but it was Japan's Sony that sold the radio to the world.
Akio Morita founded Toyo Communications, the predecessor of Sony Corporation, in the ruins of World War II. He decided to develop semiconductor technology and went to the United States to learn from experience, hoping to buy a patent license for the production of transistors from Western Electric in the United States. In the United States, he looked at the Empire State Building in New York and could not help but sigh:
"How reckless it is for Japan to go to war with such a country!"
At the beginning of the Cold War, Japan was on the front line, so the Americans were quite tolerant of Japan's development of their own semiconductor technology, and even generously transferred hundreds of technologies such as televisions, tape recorders, and calculators to Japan. At that time, almost all Japanese companies were eager to import technology from the United States and learn to digest. Americans made fun of the speech, and every page of PPT turned on stage would cause the Japanese in the audience to scramble to take notes.
However, Americans will soon stop laughing.
As catch-up, the Japanese adopted a strategy that has been repeatedly proven effective in semiconductor technology and is being used today, that is:
Integrate resources and concentrate on big things.
In 1974, the Japanese government formulated the "Ultra-Large Scale Integrated Circuit Plan", smashed 72 billion yen, integrated the resources of the national industry, academia and research circles to focus on tackling key problems, and it took only 6 years to capture 30% of the memory market in the United States.
What makes Americans even more suffocating is that Japanese products are not only low in cost, but also in quality beyond similar products in the United States. HP Computer found in the memory procurement bidding that the products of Nippon and Toshiba far exceeded those of Intel and Texas Instruments.
In 1983, Intel, which started with memory chips, was forced into a corner by Japanese companies, and President Andy Grove had to give up the memory chip business that had no advantages and fully turned to integrated chips before coming back to life.
By 1986, 6 of the world's top 10 semiconductor companies were from Japan, and the top three were monopolized by Nippon, Toshiba, and Hitachi.
What is even more intolerable to Americans is that Japan's Fujitsu has proposed to buy the American company Fairchild Semiconductor. In Silicon Valley, Fairchild Semiconductor is a god-like existence, and the founders of Intel and AMD have worked at Fairchild.
Before the 80s, American semiconductor companies were basically in a state of laissez-faire. At that time, the mainstream idea in the United States was free competition and rarely interfered in business operations. But now, in the face of the Japanese semiconductor companies that launched an offensive with a national system, the Americans finally can't sit still.
Intel founder Noyce stepped forward and led the formation of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) to lead this chip war with the Japanese.
But Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who used to have little dealings with politicians in Washington, are industry leaders with few connections in politics. The Semiconductor Association's lobbying didn't work much until they first offered a tried-and-true trick: national security.
At this moment, the fire was finally fanned.
Today's United States, from the president to the media, is hyping up the China threat, but if you go back to the 80s, you will find that the newspapers are full of Japanese threats. Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recalled in his memoirs:
Japan in the late 80s of the 20th century was the first time since the "Sputnik crisis" that the United States felt so strongly threatened by foreign countries.
The "Japan threat theory" intensified, but at this time, the Japanese right-winger, who did not know how to do it, declared that Japan could say "no" to the United States. American politicians on the other side of the ocean quickly told the Japanese with actions: No, you can't.
The iron hammer of US imperialism soon hammered on the heads of the Japanese.
On June 30, 1987, three Republican congressmen from the United States came to the Capitol, each carrying a large hammer in his hand, followed by a large group of journalists, obviously to get things done.
These politicians in suits put a radio made by Toshiba on the steps of the Diet building, and then you smashed the radio with a hammer, and the accompanying reporter raised his camera to record the moment.
The next day, a photo of a lawmaker with a sledgehammer made the front pages of major newspapers.
The direct trigger for the radio smashing incident was the "Toshiba Incident" that occurred not long ago, that is, Toshiba violated the "Batumi" ban and exported several advanced CNC machining machine tools to the former Soviet Union. But the larger background was the heating trade friction between the United States and Japan at that time, especially the fierce competition in the semiconductor field.
The way the United States dealt with Japan in the past sounds as familiar as ever today: sanctioning Japanese leading companies, imposing anti-dumping duties, and launching a trade war.
For example, in June 1982, the United States discovered the "IBM commercial espionage incident" through phishing law enforcement, arrested Hitachi and Mitsubishi employees suspected of stealing IBM technology, and sanctioned the two companies.
The Reagan administration sent a man named Lighthizer as the chief general of trade negotiations with Japan. Remember the name, and in 30 years, the hawk known for his tough character will be at the negotiating table again, only with China.
Although the United States and Japan are negotiating, Japan has no confidence to say no, and finally has to sign the "US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement" with the United States. According to the agreement, Japan must stop chip dumping and sell chips at a "fair" price according to the accounting costs of the United States, while ensuring that the share of American semiconductors in the Japanese market is more than 20%.
Japan's monthly magazine "Choice" recalled this unbearable history and wrote ruefully:
After the Toshiba incident, Japan learned the consequences of angering the United States, and the Japanese semiconductor industry began to restrict exports to the United States, slowing down research and development and investment, and entering a recession.
Japanese companies, which once dominated most of the world's top ten semiconductor companies, fell to 3 by 2005, and by 2016, only Toshiba was struggling.
However, the accumulation of the past three decades has left a rich legacy for the Japanese semiconductor industry, and Japanese companies still have an absolute advantage in upstream materials and equipment - this advantage can also be converted into weapons if necessary.
In the political conflict between Japan and South Korea in 2019, Japan restricted the export of raw materials such as photoresist and high-purity hydrogen fluoride to South Korea, resulting in the almost stoppage of South Korea's semiconductor production line, so that Samsung executives rushed to Japan to dredge relations.
It is no wonder that the road to the fall of the Japanese semiconductor industry, although mainly from the suppression of the United States, but the South Koreans digging and trapping, but also really played a "contributed" role, the rise of the South Korean semiconductor industry, the fall of the Japanese semiconductor industry, it is difficult not to cause various resentments from the Japanese.
Wu Korean attack
Today, South Korea's per capita GDP has exceeded 30,000 US dollars, which is a proper developed country. But if you push back the clock to the 60s, South Korea is still poor, and the standard of living of its northern neighbors is much higher than that of South Korea.
In the 70s, the South Korean government saw that Japan was making a lot of profits by exporting semiconductor products, and decided to learn from Japan and develop the semiconductor industry.
In 1983, Samsung built its first semiconductor factory. At this time, the United States, the semiconductor field is being defeated by Japan, and they are in need of supporting a little brother to help snipe Japan, and they fancy the thick-eyed Samsung at a glance.
The Americans are generous and give blood transfusions to Samsung with full horsepower. They supported Samsung's establishment of a research and development team in Silicon Valley, and more than 300 American engineers joined it, enabling Samsung to master the key technology of 256K memory in only 3 years.
But at that time, the leading companies in the semiconductor field were basically in Japan, Samsung could only eat on low-end chips, and the mid-to-high-end market was still firmly controlled by the Japanese.
In 1986, Samsung invited the head of the Japanese business department, Kawanishi to visit Samsung, and Kawanishi did not want to go at first, and then he couldn't get rid of it. He was greeted by a dazzling reception of VIPs, beautiful women performing traditional programs, and even a monument dedicated to the friendship between Samsung and Toshiba.
In a series of psychedelic formations, the South Koreans asked Kawanishi to see their semiconductor factory, and then, after Kawanishi reluctantly visited, they asked to visit Toshiba's Oita factory, which was the most advanced chip factory in the world at the time. As a gift in return, Kawanishi just agreed.
The Japanese will soon appreciate the bitter consequences of this.
Soon after the visit, Samsung poached the production director of the Oita plant and built a factory that was almost identical to the Oita plant.
More important than building a factory is to recruit people.
At the end of the 80s, when the Japanese economic bubble burst, a large group of employees who had worked at Toshiba were poached by South Koreans, including 57 senior consultants alone. Japan's NHK TV later also approached the person to ask about the treatment, and learned:
The salary is about three times that of Japan.
In addition, each Japanese consultant was given a four-bedroom apartment with a secretary, limousine and driver. ——No way, people give too much.
In this way, in the early 90s, under the internal and external difficulties of Japanese semiconductor companies, Samsung stepped on the corpses of Japanese companies and strode forward. In 1992, Samsung surpassed Japanese companies for the first time to become the world's largest memory manufacturer, and has since maintained its leading position.
The question is, why were Japanese semiconductor companies collapsed by the United States, but Samsung was unharmed?
On the one hand, with Japanese companies as a lesson from the past, Samsung took precautions and launched a powerful lobbying offensive against the White House, parliament, and trade departments, emphasizing that if they fall, Japanese companies will once again monopolize the market, which is not good for the United States.
On the other hand, in the 1998 Asian financial crisis, South Korea was pressured to open its financial market, and as a result, American capital poured in like hungry wolves and bought shares of South Korean companies at low prices, and Samsung was their primary target. Today's Samsung has long become a US-funded enterprise run by Koreans.
Samsung, which handed over the "name certificate", has a Wall Street capital platform behind it, and no longer has to worry about causing US sanctions, and has since begun to make rapid progress in the semiconductor field. With the rise of the electronics industry, Koreans have completed industrial upgrading and entered the ranks of developed countries.
In the 2021 global semiconductor company ranking, the top three South Korea accounted for two (Samsung and Hineix), looking at the world, in the field of chip advanced processes, Samsung's only opponent, only Taiwan's TSMC.
Lu "Breakfast Meeting" to Decide Taiwan's Fate
The story of Taiwan's semiconductor begins with an inconspicuous breakfast.
One day in February 1974, seven people sat together eating and chatting in an inconspicuous soy milk shop on Nanyang Street in Taipei City.
Among them are Sun Yunrui, "Minister of Economy" of the Taiwan region; Fang Xianqi, director of the General Administration of Telecommunications; and Pan Wenyuan, director of the microwave research office of the Radio Corporation of America. Such a few people sat together, obviously not specially to eat breakfast, they drank soy milk while discussing the future development direction of Taiwan's economy.
Sun Yunxuan, a native of Shandong Province born in 1913, graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Harbin Institute of Technology, and later retreated to Taiwan with the defeat of the Kuomintang, and remained the minister of the "Ministry of Economy" of Taiwan Province, once regarded as the successor of Xiao Jiang. In the sixties and seventies, he presided over Taiwan's "Ten Major Construction Plans" and completed Taiwan's infrastructure construction.
Since the 50s, Taiwan's economy has gradually developed from labor-intensive export substitution to capital-intensive export expansion, and has reached a certain height in the 70s, but what next? No one had an idea.
Pan Wenyuan, who has worked in the United States for many years, has a better understanding of the development of high-tech industries in the United States, and he proposed that semiconductors are the core part of the electronics industry and should be used as the development direction of Taiwan's industrial upgrading. This proposal was echoed by others, and several people discussed the feasibility of importing technology from the United States.
The "breakfast meeting," which cost only NT$300, inadvertently decided the future of Taiwan's economy.
Soon after, the Taiwan Institute of Technology and Research established the Institute of Electronics Industry, and the idea was roughly: Taiwan authorities funded, the company system operated, and high-paid professionals were hired. The patented technology, purchased from the American Radio Company, became the initial source of Taiwan's chip technology.
In 1976, before the mainland could escape the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Taiwan's first 3-inch wafer fab was erected. They advanced so fast that they made chips for electronic clocks, surpassing the American Radio Corporation in less than a year in yield, so much so that they offered to buy the factory.
This kind of acquisition or joint venture routine is not uncommon, and for latecomer economies, their own industries are easily controlled by foreign capital in this way. Fortunately, the Institute of Technology and Research knew that this factory shouldered the mission of driving Taiwan's industrial upgrading, and rejected the proposal of the Americans, which preserved the fire of Taiwan's chip industry.
In 1982, Sun Yunxuan, who had a discerning eye, recruited another senior expert from Texas Instruments, and later became a key figure in the development of Taiwan's semiconductor industry. After returning to Taiwan, this person founded a semiconductor company called "Taiwan Semiconductor Circuit", which today is commonly known as TSMC. That expert is Zhang Zhongmou, known as the "godfather of Taiwan's semiconductors".
Looking back today, the Taiwan authorities are quite forward-looking, and the "Ten Emerging Industries Development Strategies and Measures" issued in 1991 listed the ten major emerging industries such as semiconductors, consumer electronics, and precision machinery as development goals, and the electronics industry has gradually become the largest pillar of Taiwan's economy, which continues to this day.
At its peak economy in the 90s, Taiwan's GDP alone accounted for 43.8% of the mainland's GDP! At that time, the monthly salary of female textile workers in Kaohsiung exceeded 10,000 yuan, while the monthly salary of employees in Shanghai was only a few hundred yuan, and the gap between the two sides of the strait was more than ten times.
For Taiwan, the biggest source of wealth is not finance and real estate, but solid industry. The most important of this is the electronic information industry with semiconductors as the core, including a number of world-class manufacturers such as TSMC, UMC, MediaTek, ASEGUANG, Hon Hai, and Pegatron.
In 2018, Huawei was sanctioned, and the most critical link in the "stuck neck" was the inability to obtain advanced process chips produced by TSMC. In fact, TSMC is not only stuck in Huawei's neck, but also in the neck of the global semiconductor industry, in 2021, Taiwan's semiconductor industry occupies 64% of the world's production capacity, many consumer electronics, automotive brand giants, are dependent on Taiwan's chip supply.
Once a conflict breaks out between the two sides of the strait, not only Chinese mainland, but also the global electronics industry supply chain will be seriously disrupted, bringing us more external pressure. It is precisely for this reason that TSMC is regarded by some as Taiwan's "sacred mountain to protect the island".
At present, SMIC, the most advanced in the mainland, has just completed the mass production of the 14nm process, while TSMC has already entered the 3nm process, with a gap of at least five years. In 2021, TSMC's revenue exceeded SMIC's revenue by 10 times, and in a short period of time, we will not be able to see mainland semiconductor companies catch up with TSMC.
Looking back at the history of the development of the semiconductor industry, the first thirty years were dominated by US imperialism, and after the seventies, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan undertook technology spillover and transfer from Silicon Valley, attracting their own talents in the United States to return and seize the golden opportunity.
But unfortunately, due to various reasons, we missed the early golden age of the development of the semiconductor industry, and when we finally began to look up at the world, we found that the mountain of the semiconductor industry had been planted with red flags.
The years have passed
In 1973, on the eve of the Japanese semiconductor industry completing its start-up and about to launch an attack on the American semiconductor giant, a delegation from China quietly arrived. The 13 members of the delegation are all technical experts in the field of semiconductors, led by Wang Shouwu, deputy director of the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wang Shouwu is one of the founders of China's semiconductor technology, in 1950 he gave up his teaching position at Purdue University in the United States and returned to China, and in 1958 led the establishment of China's earliest transistor factory, the 109 factory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Looking at it this way, China's semiconductor industry does not seem to be far from the world trend.
But it is a pity that Chinese semiconductors, which have not lost at the starting line of scientific research, have been thrown further and further in the industrialization competition.
When Wang Shouwu led the delegation to visit Japan, China and Japan were in the honeymoon period, and it was not easy to go abroad at that time, and everyone cherished this opportunity, and they went down and saw Toshiba, Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu and so on. At this point, it was found that the gap is not small, Japan has begun to adopt a 3-inch wafer production line, and the country is still having a headache for the quality of small-scale integrated circuits.
But to the surprise of the delegation, NEC said it was willing to transfer the full set of advanced 3-inch chip production lines to China - if introduced, this production line will be 3 years ahead of Taiwan and 5 years ahead of South Korea. NEC's offer was $50 million.
After returning to China, Wang Shouwu reported the situation to Qian Xuesen, then deputy director of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, and Qian Xuesen helplessly expressed his weakness. In addition to the lack of money, what was more troublesome was the political environment at that time, and the introduction of foreign technology, which was criticized as "foreign slavery" at that time, was a line issue "related to national integrity".
The introduction of technology from NEC had to come to an end, and this was only a very small microcosm of that special era.
When Fairchild and Intel on the other side of the ocean began to emerge in Silicon Valley and new technologies emerged, China was experiencing round after round of "movement": Wang Shouwu was suspended and criticized, and was slandered and slandered; Shahid, who graduated with a doctorate from MIT, was converted into a capitalist roader, and his daily work was to clean toilets; Huang Kun, the Semiconductor Physics Prize, was quarantined and censored and sent to the suburbs of Beijing for labor reform...
The wind and rain are like obscurity, and the rooster cries endlessly.
In the 50s and 70s, domestic turmoil and foreign blockade and suppression, China's semiconductor industry moved forward and struggled, missing the golden thirty years in the early stage of the industry. In 1977, there were more than 600 semiconductor factories in the country, but their total annual production combined was only one-tenth of the monthly output of a single factory in Japan.
In his later years, Qian Xuesen once lamented: "In the 60s, we put all our efforts into two bombs and one satellite, and we got a lot; In the 70s we did not engage in semiconductors, we lost a lot for this. ”
At a deeper level, the traditional manufacturing industry follows the laws of physics, while behind the semiconductor industry is the terrible Moore's Law, which is exponential growth - which means that under the planned economic system inherited from the Soviet Union, there is no market competition for survival of the fittest, and it is impossible to keep up with the rapid development of cutting-edge technology.
After the reform and opening up, after opening the country's door, we suddenly found that China's semiconductor industry has been far behind. What's more serious is that except for a few industry experts, the vast majority of people have not yet realized the large gap and the difficulty of catching up. In 1977, when the Great Hall of the People held a symposium in the scientific and technological circles, Deng Xiaoping asked Wang Shouwu:
"You have to get LSIs up, a year?"
After the 80s, national ministries and commissions have organized three "campaigns" to tackle key problems in semiconductor technology. For example, the "909" project, launched in 1995, invested 10 billion yuan, and Hu Qili, minister of the Ministry of Electronics Industry, personally took the lead.
But unfortunately, the Shanghai Huahong factory encountered a low tide in the industry, and no one in China at that time understood the "counter-cyclical" theory that Samsung was losing more and more to invest, so Huahong was controversial, and finally failed to catch up with the rapid pace of Moore's Law.
This almost desperate catch-up did not finally usher in a turnaround again at the dawn of the new century.
Almost all of the chip companies we know in the media today were founded in the first decade of the 21st century: SMIC in 2000, Spreadtrum Communications in 2001, Zhongxing Micro in 2003, Huawei HiSilicon in 2004... These star companies have brought together a large number of scientific and technological talents who went abroad in the 80s and worked in American chip companies for many years.
New blood, new mechanisms, finally began to inject enough vitality into China's semiconductor industry.
Facts have proved that in any high-tech field, as long as the right environment is given, Chinese will never do worse than others. In the field of chip design and packaging, Huawei HiSilicon and JCET Technology have risen rapidly, and it only took more than ten years to enter the first echelon in the field.
However, in the most complex and difficult chip manufacturing field, China's semiconductor industry has experienced bloody storms and is still facing a stuck neck crisis. Looking back at the bumpy road of the past, and the pressure of Tarzan still reminds me of Bob Dylan's famous song "Blow' in the Wind":
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man.
Is it harder to make a chip than an atomic bomb?
In April 2020, Huawei's mobile phone business reached its peak, surpassing Samsung for the first time in history and becoming the world's number one. From its rise to the top, it took Huawei more than a decade to get to this point.
However, it is regrettable that only a year later, Huawei, which was sanctioned by the United States, fell rapidly, Glory was forced to sell, and the high-end P series could not continue due to the lack of chips. Ten years of hard work, just like this overnight.
Behind Huawei's global siege, there is a high-tech food chain with a very high threshold.
On this food chain, Huawei is below TSMC, and without the chips produced by TSMC, Huawei's mobile phone business has to be stopped; TSMC is located below ASML (Asmail) in the Netherlands, and without the lithography machine provided by ASML, TSMC cannot manufacture the most advanced chips. The EUV lithography machine required to manufacture chips below 7nm, 100 million euros a piece, queued to buy may not be bought.
What about Asmail, is it already at the apex of this high-tech chain? Still not, Asmail is a system integrator, and above it, there are a group of hidden champions, such as one of them, called Zeiss.
This is another century-old store.
In 1945, near the end of World War II, the American troops landing from Normandy were in full swing, and Nazi Germany's defeat was decided. At this time, General Patton led the Third Army, regardless of the risk of undermining the Yalta Agreement, into the East German area allocated to the Soviet Union, but their target was not a military stronghold, but the Zeiss company in Jena.
Founded in 1846, ZEISS produced telescopes, rangefinders, aerial cameras, etc. for the German army during World War II. By the end of the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union had planned ahead and began to consider robbing Germany of its scientific and technological resources, and Zeiss was listed by the United States as the primary target of acceptance.
After the American army occupied Jena, it was originally intended to use 600 trucks to move the entire Zeiss company, but the Soviet army advanced too quickly, and the Americans were caught off guard, so they could only transport more than 100 employees of Zeiss core to West Germany, where a new Zeiss was built.
Today, the EUV lithography machine required to manufacture chips below 7nm requires extremely precise optical lenses, which only Zeiss can do in the world. Behind this unique skill is ZEISS' century-long experience in the field of optics.
In addition to the optical lens provided by Zeiss, ASML also uses the light source system provided by Cymer in the United States, integrating the top technology from all over the world, it can be said that the lithography machine is the integration of the modern industrial system of the West, and is the crown jewel of the manufacturing industry since the human industrial revolution.
Ren Zhengfei once sighed: Our country has become accustomed to building bridges, roads, and houses, and we just need to throw money, but chips can't just throw money, but we also need to smash mathematicians, physicists, chemists...
Jiu Epilogue
In 1993, Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin came to the Black Sea shipyard in Ukraine to discuss the feasibility of continuing the construction of the "Varyag" aircraft carrier and transferring it to Russia, and the director of the shipyard next to him, Makarov, could not help but interject that "the Varyag is no longer possible", and then he continued to say the famous words:
"If I want the Varyag to be completed, I need the USSR, the Party Central Committee, the State Planning Commission and the Industrial Military Committee, as well as more than 6,000 related specialties and more than 8,000 supporting manufacturers, in short, it takes a great country to complete, but this country no longer exists."
If placed on the chip, this passage may say something like this:
To develop a world-class semiconductor industry, we need long-term government support with strategic planning, we need to encourage innovation and tolerate the soil for failure, we need to continuously expand cutting-edge first-class universities and research institutes, we need entrepreneurs who can endure loneliness and sink into research and development, and we need top engineers with an annual salary of millions.
In a word, this is a real contest of national comprehensive strength, a hidden war at the national level, and its victory or loss is directly related to the well-being of a country's people.
"Because of your vote, your grandchildren will be doing well-paying jobs." This is the slogan shouted by Democratic US Senator Chuck Schumer the other day when he encouraged Congress to pass the "Chip and Science Act". This bill, which the United States plans to invest 280 billion dollars, can be said to be one of the most important bills in the history of the United States.
Whether it is the introduction of the chip bill, the ban on EDA, or the ban on the sale of lithography machines, the purpose of this combination of Americans is very simple: firmly control the top of the industry, ensure that their citizens can continue to drink coffee and get high salaries, and by the way, nail China to the low end of the industrial chain. To paraphrase a sentence from Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem":
Develop yourself and lock up your opponents.
Looking back at the entire history of the development of the semiconductor industry, small chips have laid the cornerstone of the human information age, and also rewritten the fate of some countries and regions, some have caught the train of the times and entered the ranks of developed economies, and some superpowers have fallen into decline.
For our country and this nation, although the road is long and there are many detours, the significance of breaking through the blockade and realizing industrial autonomy is not much more than that of the two bombs and one satellite. Our future will also be answered by this ultimate competition for national fortune.