I'm not disappointed... because the Chinese semiconductor industry has a lot of hedge funds corrupting government money.... they have to reset the whole China semiconductor environment... a difficult step. China's tough but ambitious
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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Given a true flagship phone of 2022 would need a 4nm-5nm process, that should be pretty expected.
I don't agree. There are a lot of highly educated people in Russia. Russia is a country of 140 million, and it has a very high ratio of university graduates. The Russian government wasn't able to exploit this, but it doesn't mean the said human capital doesn't exist. The West (except Eastern Europe) will try to get as many of them as possible. The West did that after the fall of the USSR too. Russia's inclusion to ISS, etc., were all for that. So I support Chinese-Russian partnership on semiconductors. Also, cheaper materials will be a competitive advantage.
This Chinese Chip Company Exploits Key Gap In Biden's Export Curbs.
TSMC and Biren concluded the new Chinese chip's specs fall just short of Biden's restriction, according to one of the people, which may suggest Washington's ability to annihilate China's chip industry doesn't entirely limit all alternatives to Nvidia's hardware.The gap in new restrictions was also pointed out by Bernstein analysts led by Mark Li in a note to clients:
Bernstein's analysis shows that Biren's flagship BR100 falls just under the connectivity speeds and operations per second of the restrictions. In the meantime, Biren may continue developing its high-end semiconductors that are alternatives to US chips though Washington's curbs are capping its technological process.
Russia also has strengths in mechanical engineering as an old industrial power, and lots of mechanical engineering just outright requires experience, you can't derive it easily from basic physics and chemistry. There's a reason why transmissions are so hard when to a layman it's just a bunch of gears rolling around a box, and gears have existed since the 400 BC. Russia is one of the few countries that can build good engines of all sorts.
For semiconductor, I think something mechanical like wafer stages are also something that Russia might have some expertise in.
The 710A was already supposedly printed by smic a couple years ago . Would a pretty lackluster "return" to use the same chip
I think they can make it reasonably competitive with smic n+2 process and stacked. Maybe the energy consumption will be a little higher, but that can be overcome with better battery technology. That will probably have to wait until 2024.
The one next year will probably be a first step for Huawei to get back in the 5g game.
This is what I have been about. All these Twitter know it all's just assume asml won't be able to sell to china and domestic chip designers won't be able to get their chip produced by tsmc and Samsung. Companies will try their best to get around government sanctions. The only ones that got fully knee capped are the American companies because they won't even be able to service any Chinese customers. Other foreign companies will find ways to get around these sanctions. Maybe asml will have to replace light source with Chinese or Japanese ones. Maybe tsmc will have to setup a 7nm line without American suppliers. Given the current market downturn, even tsmc and asml will work hard to fight for last piece of business.
Now, I do think these "loopholes" will get closed soon enough, so biren should mass order and stock up as many of these chips as possible. At the same time, they will need to prioritize working with smic on their n+2 process. I also think smic should try to get gigaphoton on their asml duvs so they don't get hurt by the foreign product rules.
The 2 main concern I had were asml machines and advanced chips not being able to get produced. And now, neither are problems. Life is more difficult for ymtc and cxmt, but smic and other fabs didn't get hurt all that much. The domestic chip designers for ai and server CPUs can all keep getting their chips produced. The people that have been celebrating for the past week are going to be very disappointed in a year or two.
The next thing to watch out is smic's q3 earnings call. If they say something along the line of "impact is minimal", then this is close to being the best case scenario for Chinese semiconductor industry.
So far we have not seen any large N+1 chips made at SMIC. There is an in depth circuit analysis look at some kind of crypto chip but it has a really small die area. In contrast SMIC were able to mass manufacture the HiSilicon 710A chip at 14nm just fine.
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