{"id":189904,"date":"2024-05-23T05:23:18","date_gmt":"2024-05-23T10:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/tsmcs-lithography-machines-have-a-remote-kill-switch-in-case-china-invades"},"modified":"2024-05-23T05:23:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T10:23:18","slug":"tsmcs-lithography-machines-have-a-remote-kill-switch-in-case-china-invades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/tsmcs-lithography-machines-have-a-remote-kill-switch-in-case-china-invades","title":{"rendered":"TSMC\u2019s Lithography Machines Have a Remote Kill Switch in Case China Invades"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tsmcs-lithography-machines-have-a-remote-kill-switch-in-case-china-invades3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Over the past few years, there\u2019s been a lot of speculation about what would happen to TSMC\u2019s semiconductor fabs in the event of an invasion by the Chinese military. TSMC makes the world\u2019s most advanced chips at its Taiwan facilities, so the prospect of those fabs being taken over or controlled by a hostile force is not a pleasant scenario to consider. However, now it\u2019s been revealed for the first time that the machines have remote kill switches, which would render them idle in the case of Chinese aggression.<\/p>\n<p>This revelation about TSMC\u2019s machines comes from Bloomberg reporters, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2024-05-21\/asml-tsmc-can-disable-chip-machines-if-china-invades-taiwan\" target=\"_blank\">say<\/a> they spoke with several people \u201cfamiliar with the matter.\u201d Dutch company ASML makes the machines TSMC uses and has built a kill switch directly into the hardware TSMC uses. The report says US officials approached ASML with concerns about Chinese aggression against TSMC, and ASML has assured them it can disable the machines remotely if necessary. The Dutch company has also been running simulated shutdowns on its machines to understand better how such a scenario would play out in the real world and what risks it included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past few years, there\u2019s been a lot of speculation about what would happen to TSMC\u2019s semiconductor fabs in the event of an invasion by the Chinese military. TSMC makes the world\u2019s most advanced chips at its Taiwan facilities, so the prospect of those fabs being taken over or controlled by a hostile force [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}