forget 2005. SMIC was founded in 2000 and India still doesn't have a domestic commercial fab. SMIC started at the 130 nm (0.13 um) node and India still only has 90 nm at an R&D facility. So India is technically not even as good as 2000 China.
Chinese semiconductor industry
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I know of zero Indian companies in the semiconductor supply chain. I don't think they have a presence at all.
antiterror13
Brigadier
And also, India has zero capability in producing indigenous lithography machine.
So I don't see India is matter at all in Semiconductor industry
Starting at 130nm is super impressive, are you sure?
Haha..you're right but the thing is something that is less capital intensive like a fabless company we see india still unable to produced globally successful fabless company. For a country that claimed(from their meity) to be global centre of chip design, over 2000 chips designed annually, and even claimed most of the chips in this world were designed in india bla..bla... yet there's no domestic champion in chip designing after a decades of being a global designing hub. Seems Something isn't right here.
About damn time. This will allow Huawei to differentiate their product perhaps with packaging that is slimmer or better at dissipating heat in small confines of smartphone equipment. Instead of using mass market packaged chips.
I stand corrected, they started at 250 nm in 2000. Thanks for pointing out my mistake. Here's the sources.
Industry state of the art in 2000 was 180 nm. 130 nm at the time was still in IMEC experimental stage. SMIC reached 180 nm in 2002.
So China was only 2 years behind in 2000. China's method of mass importing over indigenous creation must have been one of the greatest mistakes post Deng. Perhaps nobody could have foreseen how important and complex semiconductors would evolve to become, but this seems like a massive oversight.
Actually, the big break between SMIC and state-of-the-art was very recent. Up to 2015 SMIC was catching up extremely fast.
For example SMIC was on 28 nm in January 2014, having completed 28 nm R&D in 2013. TSMC was also on 28 nm in January 2014 and was planning on transitioning to 20 nm at the end of the year.
So at that point SMIC was just months behind the state of the art.
Qualcomm (!!) was fabbing with SMIC as a leading edge fab in 2014.
However the big problem was finFET which TSMC got first but took SMIC 4 years to figure out. Then the really big break was with EUV enabled nodes which SMIC was denied due to political tricks.
So it wasn't due to incompetence at SMIC - they were closing the gap from 2 years to mere months with the leading edge, but then got hit with a paradigm technology shift AND a tool shift at the same time.
Why did SMIC's market share increase from 2015 to 2020 though? If in 2014 they were near the top, and in 2020 they are a generation or two behind, shouldn't we see the opposite trend?
Not saying you are wrong, perhaps SMIC was still trailing TSMC in terms of mass production of chips?
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