Chinese experts expect the country's semiconductor sector to continue to lag behind global leaders.
  • gonirad@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    But that’s not the point either. Even if they made their own 5nm chips, and they are not, they would still rely on foreign machines. SMEE, their domestic lithography machine maker, may finally deliver a 28nm capable machine this year, though afaik they haven’t yet. That’s literally a decade old at this point. Even if they massively sped up their development, it would take years for them to catch up with Western manufacturers. Even with them poaching Western engineers to steal intellectual property.

    But your statement is still not really truthful. Because what you are saying, expensive 5nm are better than cheap foreign 5 or 3nm chips because they control the production, that only works for small numbers. For their military, maybe some government computers. But it doesn’t scale. They are not able to sell it abroad if they can only afford making it with massive subsidies that will ban them from any other market. But then, spending all that money on foreign tools so they can make a horrible 5nm chip doesn’t make sense when they cannot sell it.

  • Pax3Canada@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    1. Did the gap between Intel/TSMC/ect & China shrink in the last 10 years?

    2. If so, why did it shrink?

    3. Why will it grow in the future?

  • GenZia@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    So… SMIC is on par with Intel?!

    /s

    Anyhow, this article is clearly politically motivated so I’m not going to fall for this trap.

    But let’s assume that SMIC 7nm is on par with TSMC N7, that means China is just 2 full-nodes behind (N5, N3), not 5.

    With 5 nodes, we are talking about TSMC 16nm and Samsung 14nm!

  • zolosa@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The article is from 15th August. Mate 60 pro was released on 30th August.

  • gonirad@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The nodes do not matter. Even if their 7nm node was technically identical to TSMCs, there are more aspects you have to compare. Like costs, the wafer throughput, the yields… and there, China simply cannot compete. It works a bit because SMIC is aggressively subsidised, so that the CCP can claim being on par with other countries. But they rely on foreign machines that they don’t get anymore, are cut off from EUV without real perspectives of getting their own, and can only compete because the Chinese government burns billions of dollars on them.