I've been thinking IF SMIC do achieved equality with TSMC in advance node in 2028, will China invade? cause by that time China is producing 2nm chip while the US in TSMC Arizona is at 5nm 2 generation behind.
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China Braces for Worst as It Becomes Punching Bag in US Election
Bloomberg) -- With Beijing already becoming a top target in the US election campaign, ’s government is resisting any move that could backfire on the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s restraint was on display last week after President blasted Beijing as “xenophobic” and vowed to triple tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum exports, during a campaign stop in a swing state where rust-belt jobs are on the line.
On the same day, Washington opened a probe into its rival’s shipbuilding sector, causing stocks of Chinese firms in that industry to tumble. Congress also fast-tracked efforts to force TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd., by bundling the decision into an aid bill that passed Saturday.
China’s response to all this has been relatively muted. In a largely symbolic measure, Beijing imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on propionic acid, an export market worth $7 million to America last year, according to customs data. Officials brushed off the shipping probe as being about “domestic politics,” and deflected criticism of their immigration policies, asking if Biden was really talking about the US.
You missed the point. The US out-innovated China because it is counting sanctions as an advancement. The US is the global leader in applying sanctions. Sanctions will form the foundation for future renewable energy, EV, semiconductor, etc. discoveries for sure, somehow...
Why do people think chips are some kind of prelude to invasion? The advanced node chips are only a small part of the global market in general. Invading over 3nm/2nm chips is basically starting a war over nVidia GPUs and iPhones. Why would anyone do that?
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Raimundo's an idiot and her interview was made to sway the ignorant. When the chip war started, China was doing 90-135nm and the leading global standard was 7nm with the leading standard moving faster than China. Now, China's doing 5-7nm and the leading standard is 3-5nm with China moving much much faster than the leading global standard. Those are the net effects of the sanctions. If anybody points that out on live Air, Raimundo is going to soil her pants thinking of a response and it'll have to cut to a commercial break due to "technological difficulties."
And all this is only compared to the leading global standard, which is a cooperation between mainly the Netherlands (with parts from the US and many other countries) and the ROC. America is just a cheerleader in this competition; it's not even a qualified competitor.
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This isn't true. SMIC had a 14 nm FinFET process way back in 2019. Several companies had 28 nm processes before that like SMIC and Hua Hong.
A lot of people also talk like the HiSilicon Kirin 9000S is the first Chinese FinFET processor that Huawei used in a smartphone. But that isn't true either. They produced the HiSilicon Kirin 710A with 14nm FinFET in 2020.
The big difference here is that the Huawei Mate 60 is an actual 5G smartphone. To do this they had to also produce a 5G modem with SMIC. But I think the biggest challenge was actually producing the other components in the RF and antenna modules in China. Most of those components used to be monopolized by the US and Japan.
The Kirin 9000S is basically a tour de force by HiSilicon. They not only designed a better high-end ARM CPU core than their competition, they also designed their own 5G modem, their own GPU. Since Huawei has their own OS as well, they could just change from ARM to RISC-V, or whatever other architecture as well. And the end users would probably not even notice it.
This is fairly important as that could be part of the next round of sanctions. The UK already sanctioned Russia so they can't use either ARM processor core licenses or even the architecture license. You can't be sure the same thing won't happen to China eventually as well. This was the whole deal behind the creation of ARM China in the first place. To insulate from such things. But I wouldn't be that sure about it providing effective insulation.
Had US sanctions never happened, I think SMIC would have got its EUV machines and would likely be with the 5nm process by this time. But they would likely have a single new small 5nm EUV fab which would have cost several billion. Instead they used that money to like double their existing production. Which I think will be a much bigger threat to the US semi sector. Particularly the critical semiconductors used by the US military and the automotive sector all use so called legacy nodes. Because of competition from Chinese fabrication you can pretty much bet a lot of these US factories, like GlobalFoundries, will probably go bankrupt.
That is true. You can tell this in pretty much all supposed claims of major industrial sector wins the US makes. Like their claim they are independent in oil production again. This is only true if you count Canadian oil as part of US production.
The chip designers will be close to where the major clients are. China's chip market is just simply huge. So you can pretty much bet the entire industry will move there eventually.
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manqiangrexue
Brigadier
1. Were they producing anything to market?
2. I count it as China making it only if it can do so indigenously, or at least that it has security over the foreign contribution so that it can't be sanctioned. As far as I know, the 90-135nm chips were secured for military production and use and that was the most advanced totally Chinese or at least secure process.
3. I think this tech war started in 2016 with the ZTE sanctions, not 2019.
Wellllll, I wouldn't count that at all. There are far too many holes in that line for it to be even worth having. Too many things can be sanctioned and cut off; it would be like a printing business buying its printers and ink and following instructions on how to use them to create product. It's top-heavy and easily pushed over. Now, China's making the printers itself, formulating the ink, doing everything bottom up so that it's truly Chinese and can never be pushed over by foreign threats.
I have no doubt that China would be even further ahead if it was in an environment where it could rely on the existing fundamental tech and just build upwards but this has no security at all and is thus not worth having. China's eyes are now opened to this reality.
I think it should be noted that Huawei already had the first 5G integrated SoC with Kirin 990 in 2019. Apple despite having the best ARM performance, was not able to achieve this even in the intervening years. So technically this is not "new".
The second point is actually not trivial as well. Having OS control allowed Apple to span 3 architectures as technology evolved (PowerPC, x86, ARM). This was hand in hand with how personal computing has evolved (Desktop > Laptop > Handheld, PowerPC was not able to scale down to Laptops, x86 did not scale down to Handhelds), and it was pretty much seamless for 90% of users.
The fact that she is still spouting nonsense on public air after the brutal pimp slap from Huawei/SMIC last year is proof that shame culture, not Tiktok is what America needs from
China.
I think that Mate 60 Rogue Ad campaign really broke her, some US politicians are too thin skinned.
Huawei sold the Honor 10X Lite with it.
This was back when Huawei still owned Honor.
Also the Huawei Y7a.
And many others.
This was important to validate that you could make an SoC with SMIC's FinFET process. It was probably a lot of work to get it to be produced reliably. I remember reading back then that Huawei offered a smartphone with the processor in it to each of the SMIC workers at the factory which made the chips.
You can pretty much bet the 7nm FinFET process from SMIC right now is still using imported equipment. We still have no confirmation of the 28nm process being fully made with Chinese machines. Let alone more advanced processes. Although it should be close.
Back then the 28nm process was available.
Yes. This is the major change. Now the Chinese chip sector will irreversibly move towards self-reliance.
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