Chinese semiconductor thread II

[sunnymaxi]

Software update you can do without but what about spare parts.

All American Non-litho tools have been stopped include maintenance and repair since October 2022 sanctions.. most of companies laid off the Chinese staff in mainland as well ..

SMIC has no problem to maintain and repair those tools.. its been 17 months already.

Local companies and institutes stepped up in this regards. whether you called this reverse engineering or something else. but everything is going well so far.. Chinese companies climbing up the value chain in semiconductor industry so maintain those American tools shouldn't be the problem.

NAURA/AMEC/King semi have tools for 7nm too ..

 

[gelgoog]

They stopped giving away the theory, but they still sell lithography machines to SMIC and their team in China still maintains the equipment.

There seem to be separate provisions for some SMIC fabs. Only the FinFET fab is under the deepest level of the sanctions.
This does not seem to be the case for fabs making planar transistors up to 28nm process.

 

[european_guy]

There seem to be separate provisions for some SMIC fabs. Only the FinFET fab is under the deepest level of the sanctions.
This does not seem to be the case for fabs making planar transistors up to 28nm process.

I guess you agree that all this is pretty temporary and can change (and will change) in the future. US export bans are a one-way direction, don't turn back.

The real litmus test is if SMIC can increase 7nm capacity. If they are able to do this now, they will not have any problem in the future, when ASML will extend service ban to the full range of machines, first only for SMIC and other "lucky" ones, then for all China. It's written on the wall, I'm amazed that after 5 years of ongoing US sanctions some people still cannot figure out the pattern here.

US wants to decouple semiconductors, like they did with space industry in the past: first they stopped collaborating with China on space, then forced Europeans to do the same, although it took them many years due to ITAR-free, ect...(but mainly because at the time Europe had more sovereignty than today).

This is a formula that proved good during the cold war, and because US top leadership (not only their senile president) formed and grow up during the cold war and have a cold war mentality, they are very determined to apply it to China too. It does not matter if China is totally different from Soviet union, and if also the whole world is totally different today. They don't care: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

 

[olalavn]

that means ASML IP is forfeit.

not by decree, but because of 2 simple factors:

1. to service wear components, some degree of reverse engineering will be necessary, if only to get the dimensions right.

2. if ASML can neither sell nor service Chinese equipment then it will be forced to pull out of the market, giving it no options in seriously retaliating.

I guess they have made conditions with China, or they still have the guts to want to make money in China, but still threaten China's semiconductor industry.

 

[chgough34]

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Alleged Chinese government procurement ban of Intel and AMD. I feel like I’ve seen this story before but still notable nonetheless

 

[gelgoog]

The Chinese government just formalized this decision. Remember that a couple years ago the Chinese government even had to ban export of Chinese processors like Loongson just to be able to satisfy internal demand. They were already replacing government computers with locally made alternatives. The Russian government complained about this since they had been locked out of Western processor supplies and couldn't get Chinese alternatives. There might not have been a total ban on imports of Western processors for Chinese government computers back then, but this policy of import substitution was already being strongly implemented. I think the current US policy of yanking exports of chips whenever they feel like it only accelerated this. Remember that Obama banned sales of Intel chips for Chinese government supercomputers after these sales had already been approved.

China, India, Russia, all have programs for sovereign computer infrastructure to a lower or higher degree. Even in the EU such policies have been put in place I think.

You can bet this Chinese government ban on US technology in government computers was only put into place after they decided the local suppliers could fully meet the demand.

 

[Arij Javaid]

Can someone tell me how far Nvidia is ahead of China in A.I chips?

Don't they have advantage of having access to TSMC and ASML??

And when do you think china can develop its own EUV machine?

 

[tphuang]

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I hav to look at this more closely later, but this is from YMTC CTO on various technical aspects of 3D NAND

 

[measuredingabens]

Can someone tell me how far Nvidia is ahead of China in A.I chips?

Don't they have advantage of having access to TSMC and ASML??

And when do you think china can develop its own EUV machine?

We don't know Huawei's roadmap beyond the Ascend 920, though it's likely the chip has similar or superior performance compared to the H100. Huawei does, however have a large advantage in comms and networking and thus can hit above their weight with regards to raw chip specs.

The pull of Nvidia's Cuda ecosystem is immense and one of the biggest reasons of their dominance. While Nvidia has the advantage of having access to TSMC, I would argue that their chip design prowess is another large factor; they're staying with N4 out to their GB200 and are still seeing very large performance gains.

The consensus of this thread is that it's likely that China will have its first working prototype in testing either late this year or next year.

 

[antonius123]

We don't know Huawei's roadmap beyond the Ascend 920, though it's likely the chip has similar or superior performance compared to the H100. Huawei does, however have a large advantage in comms and networking and thus can hit above their weight with regards to raw chip specs.

The pull of Nvidia's Cuda ecosystem is immense and one of the biggest reasons of their dominance. While Nvidia has the advantage of having access to TSMC, I would argue that their chip design prowess is another large factor; they're staying with N4 out to their GB200 and are still seeing very large performance gains.

The consensus of this thread is that it's likely that China will have its first working prototype in testing either late this year or next year.

They have B200 now, with performance 30x Nvidia H100 / Huawei GPU

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