alt Hacker NewsFrom a NatSec perspective, TSMC isn't really a bottleneck - most weapon systems use SoCs and microcontrollers that can be fabbed on "legacy nodes" (ie. 28/40/60/90nm) or 14/20/22nm nodes, and compound semiconductors.
The ability to mass produce a Pascal or Volta comparable GPU or Apple A11 comparable SoC is all you need for more cutting edge systems.
Power Electronics and Compound Semiconductors (GaN, SiC) have historically been the biggest bottleneck.
The bigger risk for the TSMC-China aspect is TSMC's planned exit of GaN foundry production by 2027. Most Chinese manufacturers still depend on TSMC-produced GaNs wafers instead of domestically produced GaN vendors due to reliability concerns. China will probably end up matching TSMC's specs for compound semiconductors in 4-7 years, but that implies that the Sullivan Doctrine still holds and is a loss for China.
Every other country with compound semiconductor production capabilities at scale (US, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Israel, Russia, India) either limits their exports or cannot export them to China without facing sanctions from other buyers (primarily Russia as India does not allowing commingling of SKUs for defense vendors who sell to Pakistan/China as well, and Russian vendors are members of India's EW and DEW program).
If a US-China War was to arise, worst case we would probably see a mass reversion back to 2018-22 level technology, which isn't the end of the world.
Additonally, the China-Taiwan situation is orthogonal to semiconductor dependency.
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>If a US-China War was to arise, worst case we would probably see a mass reversion back to 2018-22 level technology, which isn't the end of the world.
It wouldn't be the end of the world if those 2018 chips came at 2018 prices and only impacted commodity stuff like phones, datacenters and laptops, but they'll be at 10x the 2018 price and impact critical stuff like automotive, the cars and trucks that gets your food delivered to the supermarket, and if those become impossible to buy or fix anymore, then your groceries will also get more expensive, triggering an end-of-the-world riot from taxpayers who can't afford food anymore.
People need to view this issue as not just being stuck with 2018 laptops and phones which isn't that bad, but has much wider societal implications.
>most weapon systems use SoCs and microcontrollers that can be fabbed on "legacy nodes"
The argument is that existing weapons systems are essentially old tech, left over from previous wars in previous decades. Many of them are less useful in the modern battlefield, e.g. defense systems built to shoot down missiles are easily overwhelmed by drones.
If there's a real war, it will be fought with next-gen weapon systems - probably autonomous drones that will require high-end AI chips.