In January last year, the United States set up a "special committee on the China issue" for the purpose of studying China's security, technology, economic progress, and competition with the United States. In the committee's first hearing, a U.S. congressman named Gallagher went to great lengths to portray China as an extremely formidable enemy.
But what slaps the cheek is that during this hearing, there were frequent protesters who said "stop hating Asians", and even one protester directly wore the words "China is not our enemy".
But this committee has already been formed, and even if there is opposition, the United States will never abolish it. Since the establishment of this committee, what it has done has been either "picking a bone in the egg" of China's behavior, or blowing the wind at the root of Biden's ears to increase sanctions against China. No, this committee has been again recently.
According to the Observer, the Wall Street Journal said that although the United States has imposed multiple rounds of semiconductor restrictions on China, China has not been affected in the production of mature process chips. In light of this, the China Commission, a group of senior bipartisan officials, stressed in a letter that China is increasingly leading the manufacture of mature process microchips that are critical to multiple U.S. industries, and that the U.S. government needs to take stronger steps to curb the situation.
According to the report, Republican China hawks Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin and Democratic leader Raja Krishnamosi from Illinois sent a letter to senior business and trade officials in the Biden administration on January 5, calling for new measures, including tariffs, to avoid over-reliance on China for mature process chips.
In order to get Biden to agree, these officials even said in the letter that if China becomes the dominant player in the mature chip process, it will use this advantage to punish "foreign competitors", and the foreign competitors among them are naturally the United States itself.
But what they say is quite a bit of a "thief shouting to catch a thief", who in the world today does not know that the United States is now using its hegemony to impose sanctions on various countries, Japan's Toshiba and France's Alstom are all victims, and now the target has been replaced by Huawei. But Huawei is not as easy to deal with as they imagined, and after fighting again and again, Huawei has stood up again and again. So they began to get angry and splashed dirty water on China.
But they're smarter, because they're finally coming back to their senses. It turns out that the key decisive point of the chip war between China and the United States is not high-end chips, but mature process chips.
Moore's Law is an observation and prediction made by Intel founder Gordon Moore in 1965, which states that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months or so, while its price remains the same or decreases. In other words, Moore's Law predicts that the integration of chips will grow at an exponential rate.
However, as chips become more and more high-end, 7nm, 5nm, 3nm and even 2nm, Moore's Law gradually fails, and various countries are racking their brains for breakthroughs, but in fact, they will find that the more high-end the chip manufacturing process, the more difficult it is to break through. And now the chip manufacturing process has even come to 2nm, although it is difficult to break through, but they can break through in ten years at most.
But what is the use of such a breakthrough? Not only will it cost the people and money, but the actual benefits will not be great. Because most of the electronic products on the market now do not need high-end chips, drones, electric vehicles, etc., as long as the chips with mature processes are good. Even military chips don't need such high-end chips.
Therefore, in fact, those who have a mature process win the world.
China is the country that has been deeply involved in the mature chip process for decades, and the United States has been working high-end chips in recent years, but it has just let go of the mainland's development in the mature process. The United States has now realized that it has "fallen into the scheme," but unfortunately it is too late.
Although the United States has imposed several rounds of restrictions on China, restricting the export of chip-making equipment to China, China is still investing heavily in expanding the chip industry.
According to estimates by the International Semiconductor Industry Association (SEMI), 18 chip manufacturing projects will be put into operation in China this year, and chip production capacity is expected to increase by 12%. Chinese companies bought more than $30 billion in chip-making equipment last year, a record high, accounting for about one-third of total global purchases. China's new chip factories are mainly focused on producing mature process chips, which are not affected by the current restrictions in the United States.