LMAO Dylan Patel.
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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It’s just an ASIC chip. Probably a part of the risk production phase. Very normal to do ASICs during the risk production phase as they’re much smaller scale production and sometimes involve less ambitious architectures. But if that’s the case that means N+2 has been in risk production since last summer. Which means they should be ready to take orders for mass production soon if they’re not already there.
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12 nm is probably a progression of their 14 nm line, for customers who want to stay at the price point of the 14nm range. So progressing from 14 nm to 12 nm and 7nm shouldn’t be seen as mutually exclusive, they serve different business segments. Besides, n+1 is probably between 8-10 nm and that was already in risk production back in 2020.
@olalavn bro welcome, your presence will further enhance this forum, regarding Huawei 10nm will they FAB it themselves or do the packaging using unfinished SMIC N+1 chips?
You may have a point but, I am a bit skeptical of these guys, specially in the context how they express themselves politically rather than technically.
All the political commentary is revolving around how it may not be mass production. So what you're seeing in terms of the politics of this is more skeptics trying to maintain deniability rather than people leaping to confirm something that isn't material (leaping to confirm something that isn't material is the political bias of this forum, not of China watching twitter).
In the case of that guy it revolves around the idea of if the U.S. do not sanction SMIC it will make the U.S. look le bad, muh national security and China le bad.
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RSLaser excimer laser:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think this story is a welcome confirmation of things we kind of already knew or suspected for more than a year now. SMIC was already at sub 10nm by the end of 2019 and had a roadmap for 7nm by 2021. But after the US escalated all those tech bans SMIC's entire production reporting from 14 nm on went radio silent. It seems unlikely that they would go radio silent if they weren't also continuing to progress on their roadmap. I don't think it's unbelievable that we're now seeing signs of 7nm SMIC chips out in the wild given that it's 2022. Especially not the *kind* of chip we're seeing. An ASIC from a nobody shop is exactly the sort of chip that would fly below the noses of most reporting outlets. What that likely means is that SMIC's 7nm may be ready but doesn't have any big name customers. Or if they do those customers aren't announcing they've contracted SMIC, and we won't see evidence until their chips go to market and land in the hands of someone who reports on this stuff (which is a far more likely to happen for CPUs and GPUs in the consumer market than it is for chips that are used in industry and server clients). In the meantime I think its pretty uncontroversial to observe that every Chinese firm in the semis space is trying to keep their cards close to their vest just to avoid political risk. Whether western observers believe these developments or not is their problem, and has very little to do with the weight of the evidence.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Well according to this website the 7nm is in production and thru tear down and reverse engineering of sample they determine
it is 7nm
Dylan Patel
2 hr ago
SMIC, China’s largest foundry has slowly been catching up to TSMC, Samsung, and various western foundries in process technology. They are rapidly approaching position as the world’s 3rd largest foundry and have higher margins than the current number 3, GlobalFoundries. SMIC has achieved this through a combination of large subsidies from the state, poaching TSMC talent, and tremendous home-grown expertise. Their chips ship in large volumes to a variety of use cases from smartphones to . The foundry has now quietly released and started mass production of their 7nm process node dubbed N+2.
We say quietly as this didn’t come directly from SMIC, but rather the reverse engineering and teardown firm TechInsights who purchased the chip on the open market and sent it to their labs. SMIC likely has not discussed this publicly on earnings reports as they are afraid of blowback. To be abundantly clear, China’s SMIC is shipping a foundry process with commercially available chips in the open market which are more advanced than any American or European company. While the US has high hopes for Intel to be the savior, there are no Intel 7nm class foundry chips commercially available for purchase currently and they still have to build out their foundry operations. The most advanced American or European foundry produced chips are based on GlobalFoundries 12nm.
SMIC’s 7nm just like TSMC’s 7nm and Intel’s 7nm class technologies does not use EUV lithography. TechInsights has more information in their 3 detailed reports titled “ASIC Digital Floorplan Analysis,” “(SMIC 7nm) Advanced CMOS Process Analysis,” and “(SMIC 7nm) Process Flow Analysis.” We recommend people check those out for more details.
This is a groundbreaking discovery because the US Department of Commerce was supposed to be restricting export licenses for any equipment which can be used on technologies more advanced than 14nm. Of course, the department of commerce handed out export licenses like candy as they always do. Furthermore, almost all equipment that is used on SMIC’s 14nm FinFET can be used on their 7nm process technology as well. While SMIC likely cannot develop beyond 7nm without EUV, they still should be able to ramp their 7nm over time to very large volumes. The US government is asleep at the wheel as Lam Research off-shores production and Intel uses subsidies to import equipment used to manufacturer chips from China. Government policy is why the US will lose semiconductors.
SMIC’s foundry customer, MinerVa states this chip has been in production since July of 2021. On September 22nd 2021, MinerVa’s website was updated with information about the product and the image above. It is a small 19.3mm2 chip used for mining cryptocurrencies, but in the future, this process technology could be scaled up and adopted for high end supercomputer and consumer applications. Their miner ships with 120 chips per board with 3 board per miner and a total power consumption of 3300W.
it is 7nm
China’s SMIC Is Shipping 7nm Foundry ASICs
Dylan Patel
2 hr ago
SMIC, China’s largest foundry has slowly been catching up to TSMC, Samsung, and various western foundries in process technology. They are rapidly approaching position as the world’s 3rd largest foundry and have higher margins than the current number 3, GlobalFoundries. SMIC has achieved this through a combination of large subsidies from the state, poaching TSMC talent, and tremendous home-grown expertise. Their chips ship in large volumes to a variety of use cases from smartphones to . The foundry has now quietly released and started mass production of their 7nm process node dubbed N+2.
We say quietly as this didn’t come directly from SMIC, but rather the reverse engineering and teardown firm TechInsights who purchased the chip on the open market and sent it to their labs. SMIC likely has not discussed this publicly on earnings reports as they are afraid of blowback. To be abundantly clear, China’s SMIC is shipping a foundry process with commercially available chips in the open market which are more advanced than any American or European company. While the US has high hopes for Intel to be the savior, there are no Intel 7nm class foundry chips commercially available for purchase currently and they still have to build out their foundry operations. The most advanced American or European foundry produced chips are based on GlobalFoundries 12nm.
SMIC’s 7nm just like TSMC’s 7nm and Intel’s 7nm class technologies does not use EUV lithography. TechInsights has more information in their 3 detailed reports titled “ASIC Digital Floorplan Analysis,” “(SMIC 7nm) Advanced CMOS Process Analysis,” and “(SMIC 7nm) Process Flow Analysis.” We recommend people check those out for more details.
This is a groundbreaking discovery because the US Department of Commerce was supposed to be restricting export licenses for any equipment which can be used on technologies more advanced than 14nm. Of course, the department of commerce handed out export licenses like candy as they always do. Furthermore, almost all equipment that is used on SMIC’s 14nm FinFET can be used on their 7nm process technology as well. While SMIC likely cannot develop beyond 7nm without EUV, they still should be able to ramp their 7nm over time to very large volumes. The US government is asleep at the wheel as Lam Research off-shores production and Intel uses subsidies to import equipment used to manufacturer chips from China. Government policy is why the US will lose semiconductors.
SMIC’s foundry customer, MinerVa states this chip has been in production since July of 2021. On September 22nd 2021, MinerVa’s website was updated with information about the product and the image above. It is a small 19.3mm2 chip used for mining cryptocurrencies, but in the future, this process technology could be scaled up and adopted for high end supercomputer and consumer applications. Their miner ships with 120 chips per board with 3 board per miner and a total power consumption of 3300W.
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