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Huawei's New Mystery 7nm Chip from Chinese Fab Defies US Sanctions
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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My only surprise here is the turn around. According to the people I listened to China was nowhere near the 7nm range, at all. Sanctions were put place no less than half a year ago, so for them to have figured it out this quickly is what's making it look sus. It takes nations years if not decades to get to thus point, and countries have failed trying too. My money is they are using western manufactured lithography equipment.
Edit: From the South China article:
Doesn't it make you think those people were probably wrong? Far too many people base statements like that on assumption. From the article I read they're using a different method to fabricate them and they're very different to other chips on the market - china have a huge engineering sector and have been investing heavily in chip r&d for a long time.
I doubt it. Ten years ago when I was in college I attended a presentation of a researcher who was working on lithography methods at the 9nm scale and the challenges that came with it. A country doesn't go from making 40nm chips to making 7nm chips in less than a year. It's simply not possible. If it was that simple Taiwan wouldn't be geopolitically important, where all of the silicone fabs capable of <7nm are located and how they supply literally all of the world because no one else can. India tried started an industry and failed. The US is now spending billions of dollars to open up fabs in the US and its going to take them way more than a year or two.
It's like the development of the hypersonic missile, you simply cannot develop it overnight. So when China or Russia says they have it I'm skeptical, and with Russia it turned out that they really didn't have a true hypersonic missile as was shown in Ukraine.
As I understand it, the sanctions against China were not against the chips, but the manufacturing equipment for making the chips which China does not know how to make and its the part of the intellectual property that the US controls. Like I said, I think they circumnavigated sanctions to get this equipment, and probably got some workers who knew how to work them. That is if the headline is true.
China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the "02 Special Project" all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world's largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.
It's an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn't going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.
5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the "7nm" Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.
Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.
TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It's only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.
According to this links the SSA/800-10W is a 28nm lithography machine:
https://techwireasia.com/2023/08/the-first-28nm-lithography-machine-in-china-this-year/
I also read this article about the 02 Special Project and SMEE in it doesn't mention anything below 90nm:
https://equalocean.com/analysis/2021062316392
The experts I listened to mentioned that China cannot go below the 20nm regime, that's specifically the bottleneck they are dealing with right now. And if even everything you say is correct and China supposedly has this capability, it doesn't take away that China still has not made sub 10nm chips with home brew equipment.
There are special difficulties that come with entering the 10nm space. As I mentioned in another comment, I attended a presentation by researcher about developing lithography process in the sub 9nm scale, this was only 10 years ago and it shows how slow development is.
Also, I don't think China is shy about replacing a foreign product with a domestically produced product. If they indeed had 7nm and 5nm capability as you mentioned, based on their history, they would have subsidized and made it work regardless of market forces.
28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.
The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren't sub 9nm. TSMC's 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven't matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.
SMIC, Huawei didn't get to where they are by compromising. They never would've bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn't matter in this industry, what they're looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn't compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.