China Chipmaker SMIC Reportedly Copied TSMC's 7nm Process Node

tomshardware.com

16 points·ItsTotallyOn··4 comments

Ignoring the derogatory words of the article; this is a massive technical feat for SMIC whose business is severely hampered by US sanctions. Also doing double patterning with DUVL, which I assume is the basic technique here, for higher resolution is not something that is unique to, nor owned by TSMC.

American media's obsession with writing about how China copied everything and nothing original gets done there.

FYI, China publishes more research papers and files for more patents than any other country.

Number of papers or patents published is not a good metric. Just look at 5G. Huawei has the most patents but 99% of the patent revenue goes to Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Qualcomm and others because their patents are more foundational and frankly many of Huawei’s patents are trivial.

It’s pretty easy to cybersquat with patent spamming. Likewise, you can publish lots of papers which are small extensions of existing papers but most of the papers that spawned new large scale improvements came out of the West like “Attention is All You Need” which introduced transformer models and is much more important and notable.

Quantity != quality.

Semiconductor tech and fab capacity has become a key strategic asset, especially for China as they are the weaker side and are playing catch-up. So realistically I would expect a "do whatever it takes" approach to gaining advantages.

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