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Will our engineering resources become dominated by Chinese design?
Boscoe:
First let me clarify what I mean in the title:
The Chinese economy has grown almost 10 times in the past twenty years. The west has it used as a resource for low cost manufacturing for even longer than that and so a general sense of low quality has been developed around Chinese made and / or designed products. Up until recently we saw China stick to the very low end in engineering develop aka, low cost MCUs or silicon etc. However, nowadays we are seeing the leading edge coming out of China at very high quality - they have the economic scale to support these kind of developments now.
For me, in my daily life, there's a few anecdotal bits that really make me question where the future of engineering is going. This is worrying as it could be very easy for the Chinese to become the dominant designers of our core technologies as well as being their manufacturers. The language is a key issue here, documentation could very easily be not translated to create barriers to access.
Tooling and reliability standards are becoming very good from China.
I know a lot of people feel differently but I believe the ESP-IDF is perhaps the best SW framework around an MCU that exists on the market today. It's clearly been very well thought out and architected, the documentation is fantastic, there are a huge range of examples, modern technologies like python have been utilised etc. I read some docs, look at an example, type the code and it just works. I would go as far as saying the ESP32 MCU and general offering is one of the best conceived products in the market today.
Efinix, another Chinese company, has really modernised FPGA development in my opinion. Again by using modern technologies, embracing software engineering approaches to HW and architecting their products well. Sure, these two examples have the advantage of small scale of products but still it's mighty impressive how good their tooling is - I feel so unimpeded and productive with them.
On the other hand, I'm trying to complete a project where the core of the work is based around a Zynq SoC - this has been nothing but a nightmare. Vivado and Vitis constantly crash, have errors, installation errors, bugs, fail to compile for no reason etc. I'm constantly having to 'clean' projects, restart the program to get things to work. It's extremely hard and frustrating to product good work with these tools, I've spent so much more time trying to get the tooling to be reliable than developing the design. If I had a penny for every time I've had to search google for another Vivado or Vitis issue, well... I've tried with three different versions of the suite on Windows and Linux. 2023.2 took 3 attempts and over 100GB of downloading to finally get it to install on Linux. The new version of Vitis (based on Visual Studio Code) is unable to generate device platform projects (errors out), it's also not possible to import an old design making it useless. Updating Vivado from 2023.1 to 2023.2 broke my HDL project forcing me to have to reimplement it from scratch.
Anyway, you get the idea. Along with these little experiences we are starting to see significant technology come out of China and I think the west's engineering history will follow a similar one to Britain's - it gets too expensive. Britain still has engineering but it's basically nothing compared to what it was and what is there is okay and / or owned by American or Asian conglomerates.
I know this post might be all doom and gloom but I don't think any take over will happen overnight however in 50 years I think there'll be a huge shift in balance to where the technologies we use are developed.
Bicurico:
I visited China 6 years ago (Hong Kong and Shenzhen).
My perception, as a European, was as if I was in the future.
Engineering wise they are on par or beyond Europeans. As an example: I collect TV field meter and have a respectable collection with devices from most manufacturers like Kathrein, Sefram, Televes, Rover Instruments and Promax.
All are European.
But the best field meter I own is the Deviser S7200. It features a full spectrum analyser and has all measurements you can think of, together with the best TS analyser implementation. It is fully developed and manufactured in China.
Now think of Rigol and Siglent. And the upcoming automotive revolution.
What happend is that Europe got lazy and busy with stuff like Gender, socialism and what not, while China was investing in infrastructure and planning ahead 10-20 years. We Europeans are planning ahead in 2 year cycles, to match the 4 year election cycle (2 years to steal all money and 2 years to do campaign for the nex election).
Another reason for our technical failure is the total disinvestment in military forces. As is known, the military application is a driving motor for R&D. We Europeans got lazy thinking that the US, under NATO, will take care of everything.
Europe either changes to a right wing governance and thrives for independence of China, or we are indeed doomed.
magic:
He's talking about Europe west of Odra - you know, half of the continent or thereabouts ;)
jfiresto:
--- Quote from: Bicurico on November 15, 2023, 10:19:18 am ---... Another reason for our technical failure is the total disinvestment in military forces. As is known, the military application is a driving motor for R&D. We Europeans got lazy thinking that the US, under NATO, will take care of everything....
--- End quote ---
Curiously enough, one could argue the problem for the U.S. is the opposite: as things are trending, the total investment in the military complex and the loss of competition and civilian influence.
MT:
--- Quote from: Bicurico on November 15, 2023, 10:19:18 am ---I visited China 6 years ago (Hong Kong and Shenzhen).
My perception, as a European, was as if I was in the future.
Engineering wise they are on par or beyond Europeans. As an example: I collect TV field meter and have a respectable collection with devices from most manufacturers like Kathrein, Sefram, Televes, Rover Instruments and Promax.
All are European.
But the best field meter I own is the Deviser S7200. It features a full spectrum analyser and has all measurements you can think of, together with the best TS analyser implementation. It is fully developed and manufactured in China.
Now think of Rigol and Siglent. And the upcoming automotive revolution.
What happend is that Europe got lazy and busy with stuff like Gender, socialism and what not, while China was investing in infrastructure and planning ahead 10-20 years. We Europeans are planning ahead in 2 year cycles, to match the 4 year election cycle (2 years to steal all money and 2 years to do campaign for the nex election).
Another reason for our technical failure is the total disinvestment in military forces. As is known, the military application is a driving motor for R&D. We Europeans got lazy thinking that the US, under NATO, will take care of everything.
Europe either changes to a right wing governance and thrives for independence of China, or we are indeed doomed.
--- End quote ---
China is in deep financial troubles, so much civil war might occur so better to have a war with USA Xi thinks while USA prints its 10th trillion debt dollar while glorious old Europe fills it self with
Van der Lyings and WEF Schwab nazis. Chinese engineering domination is part of belt and road, so better stop that and let Chinese do the supplying of components perhaps, perhaps not.
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