China’s SMIC Is Shipping 7nm Foundry ASICs | Hacker News Reader

China’s SMIC Is Shipping 7nm Foundry ASICs

semianalysis.substack.com

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I consider this very good news.

US companies have a monopoly in highend logic chips (Intel, AMD, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm).

Would the US be able to maintain this by its crazy sanction policy, the whole tech sector would suffer.

high end chip “manufacturing” pretty much were monopolised by TSMC which is a Taiwan company, Samsung didn’t come close as second.

It's not that easy, who owns the most shares, where do the materials come from, where in the equipment do the core components come from. Usually those supply line disruptive component come from the US.

I know that the light source that ASML uses in their EUV equipment is created by US based Cymer. So if ASML doesn't do what the US says no more EUV for ASML.

Honestly it's just a matter of time until China eats the rest of the world. They are razor focused with a long term plan. The politics in western countries, I know of, is all about short term band aids to look good enough to get reelected. Instead of actually having a plan.

Probably not. This process is based on DUV so it requires multiple patterning. That didn’t work out great for Intel. No information on yields listed.

Also, DUV equipment is about to become restricted for sale to China, which means they can’t scale the fabs.

Tsmc 7nm doesn't use EUV and is fantastic

It uses EUV.

> 7nm FinFET plus (N7+) technology entered full-scale production in 2019 and delivered customer 7nm products to market in high volume. N7+ technology is the first commercially available extreme ultraviolet EUV-enabled foundry manufacturing process

https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...

It looks like there was a 7nm SRAM process in 2016 that only used DUV, but I'd be surprised if more than, say, 1% of "7nm" mentions over the last few years were intended to refer to the 2016 process rather than the 2019 process.

That is N7+, normal N7 was without EUV

According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process , mass production with N7+ which uses EUV was ramping up from 2018 to 2019. It seems that the Apple A12 as well as some Ryzen chips were using the N7 DUV process.

They've been running production for probably more than a year according to the article, so they are likely already done scaling.

If they have enough spare capacity from building supercomputers and military chips to make bitcoin ASICs they are probably already at a good scale.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/07/08/us-pushes-for-expanded-ba...

I wonder what SMIC's contingency plans are for this. China is going to need to move into the semiconductor equipment space.

China already moved in the Semi conductor equipment space years ago during the trump trade war phase. From what i gathered they have secured 28~14nm nodes with almost complete domestic components and materials and non sanctionable component and materials.

Great, but what about 7nm?

Turns out democracies are kind of ineffective

China is on the verge of massive collapse of its financial system due to the real estate bubble. Not to mention the demographic crunch from its one child policy.

The comparison Obama made is between a speed boat vs an ocean liner. Democracy doesn't move fast but that prevents some incompetent like Trump from driving the country off a cliff. Meanwhile whoever wins the power struggle after Big Daddy Xi can careen off the bridge faster than Louis Hamilton, because there is no system to prevent such realised incompetence in an autocracy. We will see.

It is remain to be seen. China is complicated, and from outside, can be fooled seen as having "long-term plan". Both China and the U.S. have elements that deeply short-sighted and anti-intellectual. For one example on why it is really not "long-term plan": the current Chinese leader doesn't hold any STEM degrees, unlike the ones before him.

Xi actually does have a STEM degree as a chemical engineer, though there are rumours he didn't really earn it (I don't know if they are justified)

famous pig story: Xi PR try always to enfatize his humbling beginnings, [forced to] go in a remote village and be a pig hearder [due to MAO policies] ,he later got a scholarship? for chemical engineering. This image is a problem when people doubt his skills (skills = academic ability = cramming singe childhood). so the propaganda office has to balance the "humble" xi

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