Opinion | America's tech war on China: Why it could backfire

By Gerry Brown, financial adviser

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Washington stopped NASA from cooperating with China on space exploration. After four decades of hard work, Beijing sent a probe to the far side of the moon, and one is on its way to Mars. Ditto the embargo on military and dual-use technology by the West on China. The Chinese by themselves developed supersonic Dongfeng ballistic missiles including the intercontinental DF-41, which can reach America's heartland in 30 minutes.

The same fate awaits Washington's ban on the supply of advanced logic chips to Huawei, and EUV lithography equipment to SMIC. True, the moves will delay China's becoming 70% self-sufficient in semiconductors by 2025, and keep Huawei out of the high-end smartphone market for a few years. But it will not kill China's semiconductor industry.

The embargo on EUV lithography equipment to Chinese chipmakers only affects the production of logic chips. Flash-memory chips and DRAM are not affected because they don't require EUV lithography. Yangtze Memory announced in June that it had developed manufacturing capability for 128-layered 3D flash-memory chips and would start mass production this year.

And this month SMIC revealed that it had completed a tape-out test for 8nm-equivalent logic chips using N+1 technology, which does not need EU-lithography machines. Moreover, Japanese media reported that Huawei had been in talks with Canon and Nikon, two major non-EUV lithography machine makers. The goal: to develop the next generation of lithography equipment, which taps 3D technology (like flash-memory and DRAM chips) and skips EUV.

Give it another seven to ten years, China will become self-sufficient in all types of semiconductors, and in the entire supply chain from chipmaking equipment and design to foundries. Chinese chipmakers are also poised to replace silicon with more efficient carbon.

The unprincipled US crackdown on Chinese technology has set in motion a wholesale restructuring of the global tech ecosystem. It will be very different in a decade. The Americans may not like the way it looks.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.