Are they really 7nm chips tho? They do love to brand shit as other shit.
Wait until these end up in phones and have the power performance of 11nm stuff.
There are really 7nm chips that are designed using a different approach, but have similar characteristics. It’s kind amusing how people think that there’s something magical involved in making these types of chips that would prevent China from making them.
There is. The uv lithography that China cannot buy is literally the magic.
TSMC N7, N7P and Intel 7 don’t use EUV. It’s all quad patterned DUV. DUV lithography has been in use since the 1990s going from 800nm to N7P.
Every single node after TSMC’s so called 16nm has been all marketing. It would’ve more accurate to call TSMC 16FF as 20nm FinFET. This is why Intel brands what they themselves called 10nm as Intel 7 to bring their marketing more in line with TSMC’s.
SMIC N+1 has a density of 89 million of transistors per mm² while TSMC N7 has 91.2. TSMC 10FF and Samsung 10LPP only offer slightly more than half that density.
I literally linked an article explaining that China uses an alternative approach with chiplets. Maybe go read it. Also, it’s not like China can’t develop DUV themselves, or just hire people who already developed it to build it for them. There is no magic here.
The article doesn’t really go into it but what’s a typical yield for chips like that? That’s great they’re on a smaller dye but if you’re trashing half of them it seems you’re not quite there yet.
If you’re trashing half of them, that’s just means fabrication is more expensive. This seems to be an acceptable cost for Huawei, and I imagine SMIC will get subsidies to offset the cost in the short term. The important part is that SMIC can now produce commercially viable 7nm chips domestically, and they’re only going to get better at doing it going forward.
