Yes i believe it will be competitive with the 5nm.
Will go into its Flagship Smart Phone.
Chinese semiconductor industry
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Will go into its Flagship Smart Phone.
The "consensus" (at least when I last checked) is that EUV will be ready by 2025. From recent developments, do you feel that's still on track or has something changed?
I don't think anyone can say that Ren Zhengfei is stupid. He would not keep such an expensive division like Hisilicon up and running if he did not have a few cards hidden up his sleeve.
Either Hiisilicon is helping other Chinese manufacturers or we will hear good news in the not too distant future that Huawei is showing US the middle finger.
The agreement between Hisilicon and Shenzhen JT Automation Equipment is very meaningful. I would bet a lot of money that Hisilicon engineers are working night and day to change their Kirins into 3D chips. That is why Huawi cannot afford to dismantle Hisilicon.
I meant they "could" be sandbagging, but I'm still skeptical despite all these breakthroughs. We need to see these disparate components integrated into a commercialized machine first. If that happens, then this whole story will be inevitable. I have to say, it's really incredible how this is all happening so quickly. Did you see that link @AETHER posted a few messages back? That article stated that Huawei was among Zhichun Technology's customers verifying their 7nm and 14nm equipment. What?
@jfcarli bro when @foofy had stated that Huawei is developing a 14nm 3D chiplet it conjunct nicely with the timeline of domestic 14nm line next year. So that will solve the chip problem for their mid range handset and with @WTAN info about the possibility of a 7NM 3D chiplet, I'm encourage and excited, as our esteem members had stated if you had a establish domestic 14NM line going to 7NM is much easier cause it only required a few adjustment.
Yup your right about Ren Zhengfei, he is a fighter and embodied the ideas of Mao.
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It is unlikely that anyone will achieve a completely 3D stacked SOC anytime soon without decreasing clock rates. Especially, control units and execution units in CPUs are very active circuits which causes them to generate a lot of heat. Less active parts on the chip like L2 and L3 caches, system agent, etc may be stacked though. 3D stacking of less active parts may free more space for active parts like first-level caches, execution units, and control units. This is very important because a larger die always means a much higher price. 3D stacking and chiplets may allow Huawei to incorporate the same or even more number of transistors compared to a conventional 5 nm chip at the same prices while using a larger node.
@BoraTas thanks sir for explaining it in layman terms, I learned a lot, since we are on the subject of 3D chiplets, can it also be done using EUVL? or it will be redundant?
I read somewhere that HiSilicon had around ~12000 staff. Say the salary+support costs to retain all those employees was $100000 USD$ annually. That would be $1.2 billion per year. From what we know, domestic DUV/EUV progress will allow Huawei to return as a major smartphone / IoT vendor sometime between 2024-2027. It actually makes economic sense for Huawei to take that annual loss until then because when HiSilicon eventually returns as a force, all the profits will easily recoup those losses and then become an unsanctionable cash cow going forward. Plus, it's not like Huawei can't source "ANY" chips until it becomes independent and they can still design+fab older nodes for other reasons. So, the annual loss isn't the full $1.2 billion per year but a portion of that.
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Quite frankly, my worries are not so much the money being spent with its engineers and workforce. The biggest problem, from my point of view, is keeping 10 to 12 thousand highly motivated people innactive.
If you don't throw those people very juicy bones to keep their teeth sharpened you are bound to lose them very quickly.
That is why I believe Hisilicon is making those people work double shiifts to circumvent the inexistance of EUV equipment in China, while still making top level SOCs.
That would demand a miracle and is definitely juicy enough to keep any engineer fully motivated. Making miracles is worthy of anybody's efforts and can keep you quite busy and happy with the bone.
Money is not an issue, thanks to Trump, China is now providing unlimited funding for R&D. The true bottlenecks are talent and time.
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