[_ph_]

This is a disaster and can get ugly very quickly. Whatever the concerns of the USA against Huawei are, trying to destroy the company by pressuring international companies in severing all ties is an extremely hostile movement.

Next step, as China has already hinted towards, is actions in China against Apple. And we don't know how further the escalation will go. So far, any ambition of China towards Taiwan has been limited by the fact that China depends quite on Taiwanese fabs. Remove that, and accidents might happen... which would harm the whole world.

[someperson]

This won't kill Huawei at all, and instead of manufacturing chips with TSMC, won't they'll just switch their HiSilicon Kirin chip manufacturing to SMICs' 14nm process? I know it's no longer useful to compare process node sizes between companies anymore, but for what it's worth Intel is still stuck on 14nm and they're still considered by many a competitive chip-making titan.

Also remember when United States pulled a similar stunt on ZTE a few years ago (banning us of American parts), only to reach an agreement and walk back the decision?

[londons_explore]

> his won't kill Huawei at all

The goal isn't to kill Huawei... it's to make sure that Huawei 5G tech is delayed by 1 or 2 years. Banning their already-designed chips from shipping is a good way to delay them by a year or two.

Most of the USA doesn't even have 5G deployed yet, and the US is hoping local manufacturers will get the local market as well as lots of the world market.

[magicsmoke]

US 5G manufacturers are already screwed due to US spectrum allocation, according to this DoD report.

https://media.defense.gov/2019/Apr/03/2002109302/-1/-1/0/DIB...

TLDR: US spectrum allocation forces US 5G suppliers to design products primarily for the mmWave portion of the spectrum, which suffers from more technical problems such than the sub-6 GHz spectrum that Chinese products are using. The reason why the US didn't allocate more sub-6 GHz spectrum is because those frequencies are used by the US military.

[jessaustin]

It seems kind of silly that USA military would use tech that needs a pristine frequency band in the first place. During a war, are their opponents going to be super-polite about interference? Or, are they going to look at FCC regs when deciding which frequencies to jam?

[effie]

Of course I have no idea about the real capabilities of that 6GHz equipment to use different bands in case of interference, that is most probably classified info. But economically, it would be silly to have all military equipment in continental U.S. work nominally on many different frequency bands. Likelihood of effective jamming of 6GHz bands in the U.S. is quite small (island with large area far away from enemies, low effective range of 6GHz radiation). Some systems have to be resilient against radio interference, such as attack warning systems or government - military com systems, but there is lot more in military - support systems, test systems, research systems, training systems and god knows what else.

[_ph_]

I don't think Huawei is going to be killed at all, the state will intervene if necessary. The newer Kirin chips are fabbed on TSMC 7nm as far as I am aware, so switching them back to some larger process isn't really possible in a practical sense. But Huawei will find a solution. I am far more concerned about the globel impact of such a nasty trade war. And anything harming TSMC will harm us all, as too many things depend on their 7nm process.

[_-david-_]

>So far, any ambition of China towards Taiwan has been limited by the fact that China depends quite on Taiwanese fabs. Remove that, and accidents might happen... which would harm the whole world.

China was already planning on working more and more on their own fabs.

China spent over $6 billion in 2017 and over $10 billion in 2018 on fab equipment. I am not sure if they are on pace but they wanted to produce 40% of their chips by the end of this year and 70% by the end of 2025. These plans were created years ago before all of this started happening.

The worst case scenario is this just expedites any issues between Taiwan and China as TSMC becomes less important to them. With TSMC getting more cozy with the US it may actually benefit Taiwan. The US will be more likely to consider them to be a vital country worth going to war to protect because of TSMC.