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.
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.
The Chinese chip manufacturing industry is still a laughing stock, and many generations behind. The new Huawei phone is using components from 2018 that they obtained before the sanctions. There won’t even be a next generation after this. They’re not even close to Intel despite what claims they make.
Just as the USSR had computers but they literally got nothing out of it in the end.
It does not matter that they can produce chips if there is no way to utilize it. They dont have market value for the most part.