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 that's on par with ASML is just an engineering challenge. One that's been solved once already by ASML, whose to say it can't 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 I'm not sure about which ones are and which ones aren't
Things can be done a lot quickly if you are given an unlimited budget. Consider how quickly NASA got from nothing to landing on the moon, vs how long it is taking now with their much more limited budget.
Yes, but it was the "next thing" since research started in like the 1980s
It's actually harder to do than landing on the moon.
Yeah fuck that. As a Dutch citizen it should be up to our government to decide whether we let ASML export. But no, it's got to be the Americans.
that's a micron of the boot the global south are feeling daily. They have not even outright taking your stuff while forcing you to pay for the gun they pointed at your face yet
The US sold patents to ASML under the condition that they would listen. The patents are from US publicly funded universities. Invent your own tech and you can export it anywhere you want
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 gov't.
That's easier said than done when you have a proverbial gun pointed at your head https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act
$100 says this is a rebranded chip from something else, just like with the Powerstar P3-01105 CPU.
Doesn't seem like it. The chip supports SMT aka hyperthreading with 8 cores and 12 threads, which is not something you see on a typical mobile ARM* SoC.
edit: I missed a word.
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.
They were going to figure it out eventually anyway. It buys some time I guess. I don't know what for, though.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In another Global Times publication, Chinese analysts labeled N+2 as SMIC's 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, SMIC's 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.
Huawei's HiSilicon is China's most successful chip designer that has used to adopt TSMC's leading-edge fabrication technologies.
After Huawei lost access to American technologies in 2020, HiSilicon could no longer work with the world's 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 SMIC's 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%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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 what's 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
Doesn't it make you think those people were probably wrong? Far too many people base statements like that on assumption. From the article I read they're using a different method to fabricate them and they're 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.
I doubt it. Ten years ago when I was in college I attended a presentation of a researcher who was working on lithography methods at the 9nm scale and the challenges that came with it. A country doesn't go from making 40nm chips to making 7nm chips in less than a year. It's simply not possible. If it was that simple Taiwan wouldn't be geopolitically important, where all of the silicone fabs capable of <7nm are located and how they supply literally all of the world because no one else can. India tried started an industry and failed. The US is now spending billions of dollars to open up fabs in the US and its going to take them way more than a year or two.
It's like the development of the hypersonic missile, you simply cannot develop it overnight. So when China or Russia says they have it I'm skeptical, and with Russia it turned out that they really didn't have a true hypersonic missile as was shown in Ukraine.
As I understand it, the sanctions against China were not against the chips, but the manufacturing equipment for making the chips which China does not know how to make and its the part of the intellectual property that the US controls. Like I said, I think they circumnavigated sanctions to get this equipment, and probably got some workers who knew how to work them. That is if the headline is true.
China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the "02 Special Project" 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 world's largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
It's 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 isn't 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 "7nm" 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. It's only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
According to this links the SSA/800-10W is a 28nm lithography machine:
https://techwireasia.com/2023/08/the-first-28nm-lithography-machine-in-china-this-year/
I also read this article about the 02 Special Project and SMEE in it doesn't mention anything below 90nm:
https://equalocean.com/analysis/2021062316392
The experts I listened to mentioned that China cannot go below the 20nm regime, that's specifically the bottleneck they are dealing with right now. And if even everything you say is correct and China supposedly has this capability, it doesn't take away that China still has not made sub 10nm chips with home brew equipment.
There are special difficulties that come with entering the 10nm space. As I mentioned in another comment, I attended a presentation by researcher about developing lithography process in the sub 9nm scale, this was only 10 years ago and it shows how slow development is.
Also, I don't think China is shy about replacing a foreign product with a domestically produced product. If they indeed had 7nm and 5nm capability as you mentioned, based on their history, they would have subsidized and made it work regardless of market forces.
28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.
The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren't sub 9nm. TSMC's 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven't matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.
SMIC, Huawei didn't get to where they are by compromising. They never would've bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn't matter in this industry, what they're looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn't compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.
The amount of copium in this thead from triggered Americans is over 9000.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
