Germany Carl Zeiss, heart of Dutch ASML Lithography Equipment.
- Thread starter tidalwave
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You are assuming 5nm is economically feasible.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Hi I am a long time lurker here and this is my first post
What I wanted to say is that this key components graph for this Huawei phone is not very accurate because it says HiSilicon made the processing and modem chip and antenna switch and it counts it as "sourced from China" but in reality they are fabless and only designed the chips. TSMC probably manufactured these components and these components will get affected by the new restrictions imposed by the US. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong
Not all chips require 7nm technology to manufacture.I doubt that TSMC manufacture the radio chip or modem chip. China has up to 14 nm technology to manufacture chips So the production can be transferred to SMIC or other FAB
As a counter measure China should announce importing all kind of software and hardware including chips from USA needing license as well as their usage inside China needing special license with security inspection. The policy guidelines should be product manufacturing inside China with USA made software and hardware and chips for re-export purpose world be allowed for time being but with strict monitoring but usage inside be discouraged gradually and overtime banned. With this licensing mechanism China can still permit USA made software, hardware and chips when there is deficiency of sufficient quality of those products while encouraging local manufacturing to catch up.
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antiterror13
Brigadier
without Chinese market 5nm wouldn't be feasible
I wouldn't bet against it, the pricks at TSMC and ASML always seem to find some way to make it work; but there is a much more important and fundamental barrier than economics: physics. Physics is on China's side. A silicon atom has a diameter of 0.2nm. Instead of thinking of feature sizes in terms of manometers, lets think of them in terms of silicon atoms. 14nm would be 70 Si atoms, 7nm would be 35 Si atoms, 3nm would be 15 Si atoms, etc. I admit that I'm not a technical expert in the field, but it seems obvious to me that if you want to build a transistor out of silicon, you need at least one silicon atom!
If we take Moore's law of halving the number of atoms every two years, from the current production of 35 Si atoms we have a little more than a decade to reach the ultimate physical limit. This will signal the ultimate development of the silicon semiconductor and no one will be able to surpass that limit. This is what happened with clock speeds, if they kept growing as the were before they hit fundamental thermal limits we would have 20 GHz processors.
This is not unusual in technology, we have had radios for more than a century yet no one has surpassed the fundamental limit of the speed of light in transmitting radio waves! Of course radios today are far more sophisticated than they were 100 years ago, but in our analogy that would be increased sophistication in chip design, not smaller feature sizes.
I think the best retaliation strategy is to make life an absolute hell for any foreign chips China can produce for itself (14nm and soon 7nm) and to only allow chips that China can't yet produce.
If TSMC can not sell chips to Huawei, then China should make sure no else can buy chips from TSNC either, just bomb that factory in Taiwan. To build a new factory in USA will take yea,rs by that time global tech industry will go down to hell.
I willing to make the bet that post coronas virus world, its not economically feasible to make 5nm chips especially if China market got taken away. 5nm is significantly more expensive than 7nm. The 5nm plant alone in US cost $12 billion..wow.
Economic cost is huge factor that TSMC and ASML absolutely got no control over. They need all the market share to make it happen.
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