Beijing’s success in making advanced 7-nanometer (nm) semiconductors will likely result in Washington further tightening its tech export restrictions on China, experts say, as the current curbs have failed to prevent Chinese firms from finding loopholes.
Apparently made using less-advanced Western lithography machines, the silicon chips powering Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone series represent a jump forward in China’s domestic chipmaking capability as the country boosts efforts to catch up with the U.S. and other rivals.
“Huawei’s new phone demonstrates that China is figuring out ways to limit the impact of sanctions, and this will necessitate tactical changes in U.S. export controls and other restrictions to achieve the same strategic goal,” said Matthew Bey, an analyst at U.S.-based geopolitics and intelligence firm RANE.
It’s only a matter of time before China cracks EUV lithography and can produce sub 5nm-chips, will this have been worth it?
EUV may not even turn out to be a critical bottleneck. It reduces the number of masks you need for some parts of some chips, but using more masks appears to be a feasible approach, and there are rumblings that the advantages of EUV are already plateauing.
It may turn out that the headstart we as the west thought we had in chip tech may not be as large as we thought.
Why do we give a fuck about Chinese smartphone chips? I’m fully aware that they could be used in more than smartphones, I’m just not sure why this is such a big concern for the US.
They don’t want China to steal semiconductor IP because that would enable them to equal or possibly better the US; giving them an economic, military, and intelligence advantage. Big tech companies are all US based, and US military allies design and build the most advanced computing components. This gives them a lot of leverage and an enormous attack vector to spy on the global population via hardware backdoors (in addition to the software backdoors). If China beat them at semiconductors then much of the developing world would buy components from China instead, probably killing a lot of the US’s intelligence capability, as well as increasing China’s.
That makes sense. The way these articles are written makes it sound like it’s about smartphones. Thank you.
point that he didnt cover : the US’s EUV comes from TSMC, a taiwanese company. If china domestically achieves EUV, all they have to do to monopolize it is drop a few bombs.
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Well since the US sanctions started, the chinese semiconductor industry went from being a multi generations late, government funded laughing stock, even for Chinese officials, to something that is now close to the best Intel and USA can make.
Both now are at 7nm non-EUV, only Taiwan is significantly ahead.
If anything the sanctions are counterproductive, instead of crippling the competition, they lit a fire under them.
This is all pure economics the strategic importance of small nodes is highly overrated, even more so than the importance of chip design is underrated.
Sure TSMC leads when it comes to node size, but that node size doesn’t even come close to being optimal when it comes to costs per transistor. No military is prevented from building rocket control systems, no weather service is prevented from building supercomputers, by not having access to 5nm. Certainly no government is prevented from having secure communications, home-brew PCs for civil servant desks, etc, by not having access.
The new plant in Europe that TSMC is building with Bosch, NXP, and Infinion is going to go down to 12nm – about the optimum when it comes to price per transistor. Neither of the three companies has any interest in challenging Intel or AMD on the desktop market, it’s all about automotive and industry applications: If Bosch wants to sell you a thingie with tons of their sensors in it pretty much the only thing they don’t produce themselves right now is a CPU to connect it all up (that isn’t a microcontroller), and 12nm are plenty for such applications. For a sense of scale: The BCM2711, the SOC in a Rasberry Pi 4, is made in 28nm. 12nm is roughly Zen1 or NVidia Turing class (e.g. 2080Ti). Bosch themselves are sticking with much larger nodes because they’re into MEMS and stuff, there’s e.g. basically no smartphone in the world that doesn’t use one of their accelerometers. “Price per transistor” isn’t really the right metric, there, it’s about mechanics, not transistors.
Another thing might play into things: SMIC has been spying on TSMC heavily, it’s kind of like their favourite past-time. They might already have stolen all the knowledge they need to copy TSMC’s newest nodes, the people in charge of deciding these things know, and all this sanction stuff is to keep the Chinese from benefitting economically from that. It might be that neither Taiwan nor the US would care had the Chinese actually developed their own shit – which they’re now forced to do without access to EUV. I very much doubt than small nodes without EUV will be price-competetive, though.
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