This is Philipp Wong, Chief Scientist at TSMC and legendary Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He's undoubtedly one of the, if not THE world's leading scientific figure in the field of semiconductors.

Here's what he says: "Years ago we had technical conferences and we see papers from China. Ah forget it! Just... Quality is so bad it's not even competitive. That was probably in the 80s and the 90s. Now they're better than us. They're better than us! If you look at papers, publications, data from key conferences in the chips business. You basically flipped. Years ago the US had the majority of the papers. I remember there were roughly about 40 to 50% of the papers from the US. And China, maybe 20-30 years ago, they were nowhere to be found. Today, China and Asia, the papers, are more than 40%, almost close to 50%. And the US has steadily declined from 40-50% to 30 to 40%. And the rest of the world, principally Europe and Japan has basically fallen off a cliff. So the research and development, the research capability in Asian countries, China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and so on have really become the strongest region. In terms of producing good quality research. I'm not just talking about quantity, it's quality. The only thing that I see... What the US is still little bit ahead is in coming up with the new ideas. What the Chinese always say: going from zero to 1. Namely starting from nowhere, nothing, and come up with this really new idea. And if I look at what I would call new idea that has not been discussed before, the US still is the principal place where these new ideas come from. But once these new ideas become known, then... I feel it in my everyday research with my students. Any new ideas that we come up, once they become known... that this is a good idea. The next week it will show up in China. It will show up in China, only that they do it better than you. I can't, cannot compete anymore. They have better resources, they have more students. They have more, more funding from the government. I cannot compete anymore. I have to get out of that field!"