Semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan can remotely disable their chip-making machines in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan can remotely disable their chip-making machines in the event of a Chinese invasion.
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142 comments
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i assume by disable they probably mean, something along the lines of irreversibly contaminating the whole of the assembly line.
I'd be curious to know how specifically they're going about this.
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Ok winnie the pooh, like they are going to tell you
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i mostly asked because other people would almost certainly have better ideas.
Besides, if whatever they're doing wouldn't stand up to "being public knowledge" it's not a very sound plan lmao.
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"The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
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no, you're thinking about it wrong. The whole point of a doomsday machine is useless if it's countered by simply being known about.
China knowing how TSMC has their delete key working, shouldn't make a fucking difference, on whether or not it works. If it does, it's not a very good delete key, because china probably already knows how it works, as well as the US.
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You need to watch Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Stanley Kubrik friend.
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probably, i'm just repeating standard rules of security practice though. If it's only secure because someone doesn't know about it. It's not secure.
I highly doubt TSMC is doing anything less than the state of the art practices with regards to this problem.
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Or, this sounds like tactical planning in case of an invasion, to prevent access of valuable resources to the invaders. Making it "need to know" makes perfect sense.
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yeah but that's the problem though. It shouldn't matter, why do you think the US is public about where it's nuclear reactors are located?
Why do you think every country with nuclear weapons is open about having them? It's not because it's a detriment if others know about it, it's a detriment if others have them.
China knowing about it merely makes it a MAD system. China knowing how it works would ensure that it's almost impossible for them to actually take over the plant, assuming TSMC isn't hiring idiots to run opsec.
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Probably wiping process control code from the systems that contain tons of fiddly hard to find constants and other information.
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Well that's less fun than detcord or mission impossible style self-immolating electronics.
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Yes, but Taiwan is not China and they need to be able to do that even if there are people in the building.
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i wonder if this also includes trying to physically damage the machinery in order to ensure one hell of a time getting it back online, because theoretically once you wipe it, you can just start smashing shit together that shouldn't be smashed together lol.
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What would be better is polluting the software with invalid but still plausible constraints, so the chips would seem OK and might work for days or weeks but would fail in the field... especially if these chips are used in weapon systems or critical infrastructure.
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this is, decent. The problem here is that it's almost always easier to reverse engineer a system that's partially constructed, than it is one that's completely deconstructed.
You would ideally want to delete ALL software, and ALL hardware running that software, that would be MUCH harder to reverse engineer. Or at the very least, significantly more expensive.
although i imagine building chips to fail is almost an impossible thing. Cpus almost never die, unless you blow them up with too much power lol.
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I'm really hoping for thermite. A lot of thermite.
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thermites a good one, not quite instantaneous, but still pretty good.
Would certainly be a good counter for hardware.
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They could probably overload the circuitry to make it unusable. Or use like, IDK, mini explosives?
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true, you could just blast the ever living shit out the circuitry, rendering it completely non functional. That's another good one for sensors and shit as well.
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I would like to think we're further away from losing most modern technology than the world's only chip factory getting struck by lightning but the world is a fickle place I guess
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There are something like a hundred chip factories across the world. TSMC itself has around 20 (mostly in Taiwan). One dying would definitely raise prices, but we won't be losing 'most modern technology'. And of course they'd have lightning cables; they aren't idiots.
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They develop IC on iPhones?!!
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Yes, TSMC makes the chips for iPhones, as well as Snapdragon processors used by many (but not all) high-end Android phones. Samsung has their own factory in South Korea, and Huawei has theirs in mainland China. Further, low-end smartphones and most dumbphones use Unisoc chips that are made in China.
As for desktop computers, Intel has factories in the US, and AMD (GlobalFoundries) in Germany and Singapore.
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they almost certainly have lightning prevention measures on those fab buildings. It'd be stupid for them not to, stupid to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars, and a global collapse of the chip market.
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First of all, it's not the "world's only chip factory". Maybe for some bleeding edge node like 2 nm, but most photolithography systems use larger feature sizes. Secondly, lightnings haven't been an issue anymore for more than a hundred years now.
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servers generally aren't a fan of high temperatures, and soot. So yeah, that would make sense.
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Probably wipe the firmware of the machines so they can't be used.
(Fun fact: FIRMware is the in-between of HARDware and SOFTware.)
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moderately chubbed ware
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As someone who spends a lot of their job testing and implementing firmware upgrades... I will do my utmost to slip this into at least one meeting.
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thank god, my stupid internet comments are finally going somewhere important.
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What happened if... purely hypothetically... China develops competitive chip fabrication plants that exports at scales rivalrious to Taiwan.
And then fear of an invasion provokes detonation of Taiwan's own facilities.
Wouldn't this turn China into a domestically source monopoly of high end chips?
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It's easier said than done. A few key pieces took decades to figure out and even now many can only be produced by one or two companies, like ASML.
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SMIC makes 5nm chips and is on the cusp of 3nm.
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Marketing terms mean nothing. SMIC's nodes are nowhere near the real transistor density of TSMC's or even Intel's.
But what's worse than that are the yields. I don't believe we have public numbers on their newest node yet, but their self-reported yields on their "7nm" process as of late 2022 was a pathetic 10-15%. TSMC's 7nm yield (and you should remember that TSMC's 7nm is vastly superior to SMIC's) was getting over 70% yield when it was in pre-production trialing.
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In that case, I guess there's no problem and Taiwan will maintain semiconductor supremacy forever
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Not what I said, but thank you for contributing that strawman to the conversation.
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The Chinese firms are end running US sanctions with improved technologies and your response seems to be "But their chips aren't as good so it doesn't count".
Nevermind the rapid pace of development or the fact that only TSMC and Samsung seems capable of matching it.
The idea that Chinese manufacturers need Taiwan is demonstrably false.
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No, I was dismissing your assertion that Chinese fab companies are at the same level, or ahead of, TSMC. The truth is they aren't even close. This is something that even China themselves openly admit.
That's a second time you've strawmanned me. I don't appreciate words being put in my mouth.
Samsung? I'm sorry, are you keeping up with the industry at all? Samsung isn't matching shit. They're a node behind Intel and 2.5 behind TSMC. What development are they matching?
And yes, a multitude of Chinese manufacturers do need Taiwan. China in general does. Will that be true in the far future? Who knows. But it's certainly true now and in the short term.
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Samsung? I’m sorry, are you keeping up with the industry at all? Samsung isn’t matching shit. They’re a node behind Intel and 2.5 behind TSMC
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That's not an existing node, but a proposed future one they're branding as 2nm.
Compare nodes that exist. Samsung is pretty far behind right now.
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well for one, it would take probably 10 or 20 years to get to that point in chinas domestic manufacturing. As well as geopolitical situation.
They would have very little reason to invade taiwan at that point. So they probably wouldn't.
And to foil your plan a little bit, the US has spent billions of dollars in recent years constructing new TSMC and i believe intel fabs in america, there's a big one in arizona. And idk where the other one is off the top of my head. But we're already chinas biggest competition in that regard.
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They would have very little reason to invade taiwan at that point. So they probably wouldn’t.
Not about actually needing a reason to invade, it's about the implication
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i guess but even then it would still have massive political implications, including the US, which is incredibly messy. And taiwan itself wouldn't be very happy about it.
Extrinsic factors are the most important ones for this kind of stuff, it's why the vietnam war failed for us.
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The US will rebuild their chip manufacturing somewhere else
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lol, where?
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domestically in the US? We're literally already doing that.
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We are nowhere near supplying chip demands for the US domestically, lol.
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you asked where, not how, when, or to what level.
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They have some parts of the supply chain in ROK, and they could move to Vietnam but they would likely want to be further away from China
It’s extremely inconvenient but it’s more convenient than going to war with China
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They already are, Intel is building new foundries in NA with government funding specifically for the purpose of not relying on Taiwan for chips. The problem though is TSMC has the smallest and most efficient chip dies, so everyone wants those chips, Intel still has a ways to catch up.
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Israel grants Intel $3.2 billion for new $25 billion chip plant
But Intel has long since fallen behind the pack of semiconductor manufacturers. If they could just do their own Taiwanese foundry, they'd have done it by now and reaped comparable boosts in revenue.
As it stands, China is the majority manufacturer of semiconductors - responsible for more than half of all chips produced - because they're building foundries far faster and at higher quality than their American peers at Intel.
Taiwan is the only country keeping pace with China. Losing them would only strengthen the Chinese export market.
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As it stands, China is the majority manufacturer of semiconductors - responsible for more than half of all chips produced - because they’re building foundries far faster and at higher quality than their American peers at Intel.
the reason why they produce half of all semi conductors, probably has more to do with the type of semi conductors they produce, mainly IC chips. As opposed to things like CPUs and GPUs, they've only recently started getting into that space. The intels and TSMCs of the world produce highly optimized designs and fab processes specifically for things like CPUs and GPUs.
A chip with 8 and gates on it is probably vastly easier to produce than an 8088 cpu, for example.
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probably has more to do with the type of semi conductors they produce, mainly IC chips
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yeah, and they've released a couple gpus recently, all of which have been about 10 years behind in technology, and CPUs, domestically manufactured ones, are about 1-2 decades behind. Excluding intels domestic chinese cpus.
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Taiwan is part of the US’s chip manufacturing supply chain
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142 comments