So essentially the playing field summary (for my non-familiar pov) of comprehensive semiconductor fab technology and foundry capabilities places Taiwan and South Korea at the top followed by the US and Japan and China trailing those. 5nm, 7nm, and 28nm done and achieved (rest is about scaling which is being done as we speak). China is at 14nm and 7nm at low scale lab level. All these players own and mastered all the tech chains. They can do it all themselves and using equipment, tech, and tooling they have mastered and produce themselves.
Literally no one else in this club. Germany, UK, Netherlands and so on have some niche expertise within a certain part of the supply chain but do not have comprehensive mastery of the entire chain.
India is far behind with only foreign tooling and equipment and that's for 1990s and 2000s era chip fab and without a single mastery of any of the tech where it produces its own equipment that is core to the process as opposed to a rig to handle wafers for example.
On design, China leads with the absolute best of them using universal architectures.
It is estimated by western observers that within 10 years China's own foundries should be at 5nm and it does have diminishing validity of Moore's law working for it.
On the flip side of silicon, China is at the forefront of alternative tech research along with the US and possibly other major players in Taiwan and South Korea.
Taiwan and South Korea are getting forced to transfer tech to the US and build their fabs within the US. Their leaders aren't looking too kindly on this but they have little say in the matter.
So within silicon semiconductors, the top player will be the US within a few years with supply coming from Taiwan reducing dramatically.
China's own sanctioned exporters like Huawei are in a desperate situation for the meantime. They do not have smartphones or computing that can be as competitive once their inventory is depleted. They are diversifying into other industries but Huawei's core of telecommunications is strong and all of it is strong within China except smartphone side of business. They need to wait until the Chinese foundries can provide them with equivalent chip performance which are done on lab level and using alternative technologies which China has been leading such as various stacking techniques (necessity the mother of all invention). But how the gap will be in 3 to 5 years in unknown.
That's China for you. @nlalyst bro stay around there will be more surprises coming in 2022 and we can have a lively conversation cause if you read the past discussion in this thread, most of them had come true while waiting for the result of the remaining next year .
