News on China's scientific and technological development.

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AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
machupicu said:
SMIC will likely survive well due to many factors?


A “cold turkey” cut off could be very ugly

If the US government decided to cut off SMIC cold turkey, things could get very ugly, very quickly. Much like Jinhua we would have to assume that the government would also cut off support of existing installed equipment as well, which would cut off recurring revenue as well.

At Jinhua, US companies employees left literally in a day and were on the next plane out leaving the fab in a lurch and killing it in 24 hours.

Without spare parts, maintenance and upgrades SMIC would have serious problems continuing to function.

So much as with ZTE, Jinhua and Huawei, denying access to US technology could prove a death sentence for SMIC

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The Chinese government won't let SMIC die.

The worst case scenario is that SMIC will shrink for a few years.
But afterwards, SMIC will continue growing again, but will have zero reliance on US technology.
 
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tamsen_ikard

Junior Member
Registered Member
ansy1968 said:
hi Aperture05,

Yes, the waiting game, that's all we have to do for now, I'm no expert, but I trust WTAN, Skywatcher, Superdog, locaizer and others about Chinese semiconductor industry. Cant wait for 2021, I'm hoping China will surprise us all.

Once again, It would be 5 years behind TSMC, like SMIC currently is.

Its a given TSMC will be ahead by 2 generation by 2023, with their 2nm, by that time, all ingenious tech equipment will be available for China at least for 7nm tech. And from their own EUV machine as well (ASML will never sell their EUV to China). Like you said we had to be a realist, I know the enormous challenges China faces, its a 3 way race between TSMC, SAMSUNG and SMIC all asian tech company. Being in the game is what counts for SMIC and hopefully Huawei.
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One thing I would like to point out is that these 7NM, 5NM terms are no longer tied to the actual physical process. These are marketing terms to hype up process technology. Intel's 10NM process has much higher transistor density than TSMC and Samsung's 7NM process. So, when TSMC hyped up its 7NM as being ahead of Intel, it was not true. Whether the 5NM and 2NM are significant improvements or not cannot be measured just by looking at X NM number. We need to look at transistor density and several other measures to actually compare different process technologies.
 
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latenlazy

Brigadier
tamsen_ikard said:
One thing I would like to point out is that these 7NM, 5NM terms are no longer tied to the actual physical process. These are marketing terms to hype up process technology. Intel's 10NM process has much higher transistor density than TSMC and Samsung's 7NM process. So, when TSMC hyped up its 7NM as being ahead of Intel, it was not true. Whether the 5NM and 2NM are significant improvements or not cannot be measured just by looking at X NM number. We need to look at transistor density and several other measures to actually compare different process technologies.
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As I’ve mentioned before, transistor density alone is not the most important metric. Power efficiency and transistor switching speeds are a big part of performance gain for smaller nodes. That’s why feature sizes, independent of how closely you can pack transistors, is still such a big deal. In fact features sizes are small enough now where density is at best a secondary performance determinant, since you’re talking about minor differences in package sizes for the same transistor counts between a more densely packed solution and a less densely packed one.
 
localizer

localizer

Colonel
Registered Member
latenlazy said:
If what I said earlier wasn’t clear enough...the size of your transistors are where you’re getting most of your speed and efficiency gains, not how densely your transistors are packed.
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Intel’s 14nm node (comparable to TSMC 10nm) and architectures demonstrates all of those. It’s as good it’s gonna get with DUV.
 
localizer

localizer

Colonel
Registered Member
latenlazy said:
It’s comparable on transistor density. Not on actual power efficiency and switching speed.
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Good stop gap for SMIC though. As long as Chinese end users have access to latest CPUs and GPUs, China can be in business and SMIC can try to catch up in the background.


Issue I’m most worried about is a full blockade of semiconductor goods, everything else just needs time.
 
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