Chips, Silk and Paper: You Can’t Keep Secrets Forever
The Huawei semiconductor breakthrough is just part of a long history of the spread — or theft — of what we now call intellectual property.
A Kirin 9000s chip fabricated in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.
Photographer: James Park/BloombergChina appears to have built a chip that matches some of the West’s most advanced semiconductors. While it may alarm US defense experts and sanctions proponents, the development shouldn’t have been too surprising. Industrial secrets are impossible to keep for long, as the Chinese themselves know from millennia of what we’d now call intellectual property lost by way of trade, theft and war. No one has a monopoly on innovation.
The progress toward parity with the West was revealed in a teardown conducted for Bloomberg News of the latest smartphone from Huawei Technologies Co., which utilizes 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 7 nanometers, it will soon be outdistanced by the even thinner 3-nanometer chip that Apple Inc. will use in its next iPhone. Still, it reflects a porousness that lets knowhow slip through stringent US sanctions.