Thread by @wmhuo168

PART 3: Moore’s Law is dead. China’s not mourning—it’s moving on.
While the West clings to silicon and EUV, Beijing is building a post-silicon future—with light, atoms, and brains.
If you thought atomic memory was scary… wait till you see what’s next.
Thread:

Most people think chip wars are about EUV, 3nm, and NVIDIA.
That’s yesterday’s game.
China’s playing on a different board now: Post-Silicon Computing.

Photonics

Neuromorphic chips

Spintronics

2D materials
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Why ditch silicon?
Because physics won’t play ball anymore.

We hit atomic limits

Heat throttles performance

Quantum effects break transistors
Silicon is choking. Moore’s Law is over.
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China saw this early.
Instead of racing TSMC to 1nm, it’s building alt-tech ecosystems:

Memory from 2D crystals

Processors that use light not electrons

AI chips that mimic the human brain
All skirting U.S. sanctions.
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Example: Photonic Chips
Light-based logic, no heat, near-infinite bandwidth.
Tsinghua + Huawei built photonic tensor cores for AI—10x the speed at 1% power.
No EUV. No Intel. No problem.
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Example: Neuromorphic Computing
Think chips that think like brains.
China's Tianjic and Darwin chips use spiking neural networks—ideal for edge AI and robotics.
Forget GPU farms—this is on-device intelligence.
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Example: Spintronics
Using electron spin instead of charge.
Fudan and CAS are prototyping memory and logic devices with zero leakage, zero volatility, and atomic scale density.
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And it all connects to the memory bomb we dropped in Part 1 & 2:

2D memory = foundation

Photonics/Neuromorphics = compute layer

All built without TSMC, ASML, or Arm
China’s breaking the U.S. tech siege by jumping over it.
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Why this matters:
The West has bet everything on scaling silicon and squeezing EUV.
But China is building a parallel ecosystem, born in national labs, designed for strategic decoupling.
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Western analysts dismiss it as “not ready.”
That’s what they said about:

Chinese EVs

5G

Solar

Drones
Now those industries are owned by China.
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And while the U.S. throws $52B at TSMC Arizona delays, China is:

Publishing thousands of post-silicon papers

Funding 100+ new labs under “863” and “Key R&D” programs

Launching “More than Moore” pilot fabs
This is national strategy, not startup vaporware.
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Even Huawei—banned, sanctioned, bleeding—just released AI chips rumored to contain photonic interconnects and 2D SRAM.
They didn’t die.
They evolved.
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Remember this:
The U.S. controls the past of computing.
Silicon Valley is named after a dying substrate.
But China may control what comes after—and it won’t be built with silicon.
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You don’t need to beat NVIDIA.
You just need to make NVIDIA irrelevant.
China’s post-silicon roadmap is a bet against the status quo—and it’s accelerating.
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Next up (Part 4):
If China controls post-silicon computing, who controls the new standards?
Quantum encryption, chip-to-chip photonics, edge AI models—
The next war isn’t on the chip.
It’s on the protocol.
#MemoryWars continues.
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