Beijing’s success in making advanced 7-nanometer (nm) semiconductors will likely result in Washington further tightening its tech export restrictions on China, experts say, as the current curbs have failed to prevent Chinese firms from finding loopholes.
Apparently made using less-advanced Western lithography machines, the silicon chips powering Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone series represent a jump forward in China’s domestic chipmaking capability as the country boosts efforts to catch up with the U.S. and other rivals.
“Huawei’s new phone demonstrates that China is figuring out ways to limit the impact of sanctions, and this will necessitate tactical changes in U.S. export controls and other restrictions to achieve the same strategic goal,” said Matthew Bey, an analyst at U.S.-based geopolitics and intelligence firm RANE.
It’s only a matter of time before China cracks EUV lithography and can produce sub 5nm-chips, will this have been worth it?
EUV may not even turn out to be a critical bottleneck. It reduces the number of masks you need for some parts of some chips, but using more masks appears to be a feasible approach, and there are rumblings that the advantages of EUV are already plateauing.
It may turn out that the headstart we as the west thought we had in chip tech may not be as large as we thought.
Why do we give a fuck about Chinese smartphone chips? I’m fully aware that they could be used in more than smartphones, I’m just not sure why this is such a big concern for the US.
They don’t want China to steal semiconductor IP because that would enable them to equal or possibly better the US; giving them an economic, military, and intelligence advantage. Big tech companies are all US based, and US military allies design and build the most advanced computing components. This gives them a lot of leverage and an enormous attack vector to spy on the global population via hardware backdoors (in addition to the software backdoors). If China beat them at semiconductors then much of the developing world would buy components from China instead, probably killing a lot of the US’s intelligence capability, as well as increasing China’s.
That makes sense. The way these articles are written makes it sound like it’s about smartphones. Thank you.
The chip wasn’t even made by Chinese machines. And the chips are many generations behind in performance.
The CCP propaganda machine has gone all out trying to prove to the west that “see, we can make amazing products even with your sanctions in place, so you should just remove the sanctions. …Please remove them.”
So what better response than to tighten the sanctions?
Well since the US sanctions started, the chinese semiconductor industry went from being a multi generations late, government funded laughing stock, even for Chinese officials, to something that is now close to the best Intel and USA can make.
Both now are at 7nm non-EUV, only Taiwan is significantly ahead.
If anything the sanctions are counterproductive, instead of crippling the competition, they lit a fire under them.
The Chinese chip manufacturing industry is still a laughing stock, and many generations behind. The new Huawei phone is using components from 2018 that they obtained before the sanctions. There won’t even be a next generation after this. They’re not even close to Intel despite what claims they make.
Just as the USSR had computers but they literally got nothing out of it in the end.
It does not matter that they can produce chips if there is no way to utilize it. They dont have market value for the most part.
Xenophobia ruins progress
