It was only a matter of time before the Chinese started ramping up their own semiconductor capabilities. With all the inevitable industrial espionage involved, I wonder if the west really has that much of a head start in chip design.
Design? No
Fabs? The advantage is insurmountable as long as the US keeps preventing ASML from exporting EUV to China
Making a lithography machine thatâs on par with ASML is just an engineering challenge. One thatâs been solved once already by ASML, whose to say it canât be solved again by someone else, especially if they can copy bits of the design.
It took them almost 20 years to make EUV machines that do it at scale. Canon and Nikon gave up on it.
They also have many suppliers like Zeiss that may not be allowed to export to China, but Iâm not sure about which ones are and which ones arenât
Yeah fuck that. As a Dutch citizen it should be up to our government to decide whether we let ASML export. But no, itâs got to be the Americans.
The Dutch government is ultimately making the decisions, they could remove all export restrictions if they wanted but that would really sour its relationship with the US govât.
except for the US, Israel, Ireland. Maybe you count Japan and South Korea as western and that number grows more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants
$100 says this is a rebranded chip from something else, just like with the Powerstar P3-01105 CPU.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In another Global Times publication, Chinese analysts labeled N+2 as SMICâs 5nm-class production node about a year ago.
Yet, there are independent proofs from TechInsights that SMIC produced MinerVa Semiconductor Bitcoin mining ASICs on its 7nm-class N+1 technology.
Meanwhile, SMICâs Twinscan NXT:2000i deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography scanners can make chips on 7nm and 5nm technologies, so that the company may have developed a 5nm-class fabrication process.
Huaweiâs HiSilicon is Chinaâs most successful chip designer that has used to adopt TSMCâs leading-edge fabrication technologies.
After Huawei lost access to American technologies in 2020, HiSilicon could no longer work with the worldâs largest contract maker of chips, and it is believed that the parent company helped SMIC to advance its fabrication processes.
Huawei has not commented on the matter, and even state-ran Global Times does not explicitly say that the HiSilicon Kirin 9000S uses SMICâs 5nm-class process technology but prefers to call the information a rumor.
The original article contains 574 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 74%. Iâm a bot and Iâm open source!
I am not sure if American legislators realize that all these trade restrictions are only accelerating Chinese domestic chip development. The restrictions have the same effect as import tariffs, which is exactly what a government would do if it wants to protect and/or develop its own fledgling industry.
This is definitely real and not propaganda because the Chinese economy is in a huge downturn.
tomshardware.com is [checks notes]⌠Chinese propaganda.
The cope is unreal
My only surprise here is the turn around. According to the people I listened to China was nowhere near the 7nm range, at all. Sanctions were put place no less than half a year ago, so for them to have figured it out this quickly is whatâs making it look sus. It takes nations years if not decades to get to thus point, and countries have failed trying too. My money is they are using western manufactured lithography equipment.
Edit: From the South China article:
TechInsights said SMIC used existing equipment and its second-generation 7-nm process to manufacture the 5G-capable Kirin 9000s for Huawei
Huawei was known to have been stockpiling chips from its HiSilicon unit before TSMC cut ties to comply with US sanctions
Doesnât it make you think those people were probably wrong? Far too many people base statements like that on assumption. From the article I read theyâre using a different method to fabricate them and theyâre very different to other chips on the market - china have a huge engineering sector and have been investing heavily in chip r&d for a long time.
China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the â02 Special Projectâ all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the worldâs largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
Itâs an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isnât going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.
5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the â7nmâ Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.
Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.
TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. Itâs only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
