德国智库Stiftung Neue Verantwortung的技术和地缘政治主管Jan-Peter Kleinhaus说：“魔鬼已经从瓶子里出来了。”。
02 原文
It's no longer just about the Biden administration trying to prevent Beijing from getting its hands on the most advanced semiconductors for potential military use. It's also about who will dominate the booming chip-packaging market. And right now, it's China.
As mundane as it sounds, the business of packaging semiconductors – encasing chips in materials that both protect them and connect them to the electronic device they’re part of – is becoming almost as crucial as producing the component itself.
Beijing sees it as a means of building out its domestic semiconductor capacity. Washington is turning to it as part of its own plans for tech self-sufficiency at a time when much of the work is contracted out to Asia.
“For China, one way around technology transfer restrictions is advanced packaging, because so far it’s a safe space that everyone invests in,” said Mathieu Duchatel, a Taiwan-based China expert who studies the geopolitics of technology at the Institut Montaigne think tank.
Advanced packaging allows Beijing — which has 38% of the world’s assembly, testing and packaging market, according to the US-based Semiconductor Industry Association — to build faster, cheaper systems for computing by stitching different chips closely together.
The US, which accounts for just 3% of the world’s packaging capacity according to Intel, is now looking to compete with China. Jefferies forecasts that the number of chips shipped that use advanced packaging will increase tenfold in the next 18 months, but that could soar to 100 times if it becomes standard in smartphones.
The Biden administration has outlined plans for a $3 billion National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program, which would create multiple high-volume packaging facilities by the end of the decade.
The US needs to ramp up its own advanced packaging capacities, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in congressional testimony, since “chips can only get so small, which means all the special sauce is in the packaging.”
China hasn’t given up on making advanced chips, by the way. The nation’s top chipmaker, SMIC, has broken through a US-organized blockade against its business. After all, it delivered an advanced, 7-nanometer processor for Huawei’s latest smartphone to much domestic fanfare.
SMIC, pronounced “smick,” achieved the breakthrough by stockpiling chipmaking machines for years, including the same models of deep ultraviolet lithography equipment from Dutch company ASML. SMIC made Huawei’s chip on DUV machines from ASML, Bloomberg News has reported.
The question for SMIC longer term is whether it can produce sophisticated chips in volume — or whether the US will kneecap its capabilities. The Biden administration is still calibrating how to react to its cooperation with Huawei, which is also blacklisted.
Whatever happens, SMIC should be able to advance to more powerful 5-nm chips with the ASML machines it already operates, said Burn J. Lin, who championed lithography technology at TSMC, where he was a former vice president.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Jan-Peter Kleinhaus, director of technology and geopolitics at the German think-tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung.
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