https://medium.com/@matrixainetwork/peoples-daily-s-interview-with-steve-deng-1c23d30214c7

In the past year, the ZTE incident and the trade war between China and the US has aroused various social circles’ reflection on China’s current development and also backwardness in high-tech fields, in particular, the fields of chips (integrated circuits) and artificial intelligence. For this, Steve Deng indicated during a recent media interview that in such fields as integrated circuit design and core components manufacturing, it may take several generations of unrelenting effort and accumulation for China to keep up with European countries and the US. But in the field of chip manufacturing, where sensors are combined with intelligent processing, China has obvious advantages, and the future looks bright.

“The ZTE incident has sounded an alarm for China’s domestic chip R&D, and also exposed the differences between China, Europe and the US in high-tech fields such as chip manufacturing,” said Steve Deng. The manufacture of integrated circuits is divided into such processes as designing and manufacturing. It is often that there are billions of transistors on an integrated circuit. The designing of integrated circuits is now totally accomplished through automatic tools, but these mainstream design tools all belong to the US, none of them is owned by China. In some senses, the differences in terms of manufacturing is even bigger. For example, so far, China still cannot make photo-etching machines, which is the core equipment needed for manufacturing integrated circuits. Although the government has given lots of support and input to many projects, it can still be said to be in a relatively primative state.