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Chips, silk and paper: You cannot keep secrets forever
China’s Huawei breakthrough is just part of a long history of the spread – or theft – of what we now call intellectual property.
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It is possible that the Chinese are not yet able to make advanced chips in quantity.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Howard Chua-Eoan
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China appears to have built a chip that matches some of the West’s most advanced semiconductors. While it may alarm US defence experts and sanctions proponents, the development should not have been too surprising. Industrial secrets are impossible to keep for long, as the Chinese themselves know from millennia of what we would now call intellectual property lost by way of trade, theft and war.
The progress towards parity with the West was revealed in a teardown conducted for Bloomberg News of the latest smartphone from Huawei Technologies Co, which utilises a chip made by Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. The Kirin 9000s chip is still two generations behind the most advanced Western products. At seven nanometres, it will soon be outdistanced by the even thinner three-nanometrer chip that Apple Inc will use in its next iPhone. Still, it reflects a porousness that lets know-how slip through stringent US sanctions.
