4 ms·

China has been trying to fabricate chips for decades and it's been one failure after the next. Pretty good read about some recent fraud in the area: https://ch

• FooBarWidget 5y ago
  "Failure after next" needs to be quantified. They haven't succeeded so far in sub-7nm, but they're now able to manufacture 24nm which is where the majority of the market lies. Mind you: many countries can't even manufacture any chip on its own. 14nm and ~10nm are around the corner: they already have the ability but the supply chain there is not sufficiently dewesternized, making it prone to sanctions, and the market demand for those nodes are not big enough so they haven't scaled up those nodes yet. That there are fraud causes and that progress on sub-7 nm has been very slow so far is true. But that doesn't mean that long-term trends are negative. In fact, all the sanctions have created an economic opportunity that they otherwise won't have: they now have a large domestic market for future domestic sub-7 nm chips, a market that they otherwise wouldn't have because it was too easy to just buy foreign chips or to contract foreign fabs.
  • throwaway6734 5y ago
    Good points! Where have you seen the ability to produce 10nm? I thought that was currently beyond capability.
    • FooBarWidget 5y ago
      SMIC's N+1 process is 7nm-ish. They've had this for a while. It lowers power usage as one would expect when going from their 14nm process to 7nm, but performance did not improve as much, hence why some call it comparable to 10nm.