Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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Westeners like to laugh at Chinese on "saving face". Apparently their faces matter, too. #WestenFacesMatter, #MeToo.
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I think process is more important than the equipment in this case.
Either way, think the density at 7 nm says a lot about how precisely they’ve been able to control the transistor shaping and growing process.
At this point I'd like to remind everyone that nm is just a marketing term now. It's used as a shorthand for transistor density. The reality is whatever SMIC is doing is getting results that are close to what people call 5nm. Likely achieving it next year for whatever Huawei wants to release.
The simple reality is, the sanctions have completely failed in their purpose no matter how you look at it. The stated goal was to cut China off from advanced chips for military. No matter how you look at it now, there is no cutting China off from any chip it wants for military. The sanctions serve no official purpose. The only way to look at the sanctions now is that they're designed to keep US businesses ahead. And day by day that looks less and less likely.
Not quite. It’s specifically referring to feature sizes, especially wrt to gate and pitch lengths. It’s not a measure of density. The reason why the critical parameter is gate pitch and length is because the base factor being measured is transistor performance not density. So no, I don’t think we can say this is close to a 5 nm process if the transistors don’t perform like 5 nm transistors.
The biggest "shock" is probably achieving 5nm level capabilities with a 7nm node. It shouldn't be possible (if you ignore all the articles on advanced packaging and other alternate ways to squeeze out performance industry experts have talked about for the last 5 years)
What was meant to happen was the rapid sanctions would cause a general collapse of the industry with money pulling out, everyone resigning from SMIC and other sanctioned companies because they would be doooomed. Progress on catchup R&D stalls for years and years, turning a 10-year lead into 20-year lead. Hi-silicon shouldn't be able to maintain any sort of leading edge R&D at all for Huawei to remain competitive following that logic.
The BIS wonks obviously missed something, or talked to the wrong "experts" and created an echo chamber. Novel sanctions are called novel, for a reason.
Kirin 9000 power consumption and efficiency is probably not at 5 nm level. Seems like it’s close but not there.
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