US blocks shipments of semiconductors to Huawei

Chinese government hacking and Huawei hacking are one and the same as the end result is Huawei benefitting from the stolen information.

Had Nortel not been hacked they wouldn't have had to deal with their competitors ripping off their products and out manoeuvring them in their business deals.

The article I linked to cites an ex senior security advisor at Nortel stating that the hacking dated back to 2000, before the tech bubble burst.

Instead of being swept under the rug the demise of Nortel due to hacking should be a case study in why computer security needs to be given a lot more attention even if it is at the expense of convenience.

Nortel expanded massively during the dot-com bubble, and went on a nearly $20 billion acquisition spree that caused it to lose money every quarter for years, even while its stock price was driven up by unrealistic expectations. Then the dot-com bubble burst, at which point these expectations were tempered and people began worrying about Nortel's unprofitability. The stock crashed, raising capital became difficult, demand for Nortel's products (and all telecommunications hardware) plummeted, and the company had to lay off 20% of its workers. At this time, Huawei was a tiny player outside of China. Nortel's major competitor was Cisco.

In 2003, for the first time in years, Nortel finally posted a quarterly profit, but then came under investigation from the SEC over suspicions that it was fudging its numbers (specifically, the accusation was that executives shifted revenue in time in order to meet targets that earned them bonuses). The SEC charged top Nortel executives with fraud, and the case was eventually settled, but Nortel had to change out its top management. Nortel was also sued by shareholders, to whom it had to pay billions of dollars in a settlement. There were layoffs and downsizing throughout this entire period.

To look at that history, and then to claim that hacking that might have helped one of Nortel's several competitors (and not even the largest, by a long shot) is the reason for Nortel's demise just seems completely out of left field to me. To be honest, it sounds like a batter yelling at the ump about being distracted by a fan after he strikes out 0-3.

Basically, though, a process flow is deposition, track, litho, etch, clean, deposition, cmp, metro, inspect (lots of steps vary, but these are the basics)

You need each of these to work. Deposition: Lam, Applied, TELand then Wonik, ASM, and others Track: TEL Litho: ASML Etch: Lam, Applied, TEL CMP: Ebara, Applied Metro: Onto, KLA, Hitachi Inspect: KLa, Applied

There are more, and I missed a bit, but basically, you need to tick off each of these layers, and quite often with the best at each.

ASML cannot make wafers for anyone without someone doing all the other parts. And really, that is true for all these companies. There is a best of breed and selection bias that makes each system imperfectly interchangeable.

But you can also see that ASML is the sole true monopoly. So if they are out, nothing works. There are plausible workarounds otherwise.not always easy or cost effective, but plausible in most cases.

ASML needs the rest of the infrastructure to sell tools. And likewise, everyone needs ASML to deliver, or there is no new node....