TechInsights, a Canadian industry research company, released a follow-up research report on Monday (29th), pointing out that China’s largest semiconductor company SMIC has made a great leap forward in technology, achieving a 7-nanometer technology breakthrough that rivals Intel, TSMC and Samsung.
TechInsights disclosed last month that through reverse engineering analysis, it was found that the SoC of Chinese mining machine company MinerVa product SMIC’s 7-nanometer process technology, this product began to ship as early as July 2021, and the analysis results pointed to this. Core 7nm technology may be a copy of TSMC’s 7nm process technology.
TechInsights released a follow-up on Monday stating that SMIC has indeed reached technological maturity. It is found that SMIC’s 7nm technology is sufficient as measured by “standard cells” (that is, the basic building blocks of logic chip set design). with TSMC (TSM-US), Samsung and Intel (INTC-US) and other major global foundries.
The United States has included Huawei and SMIC on the Entity List in the past two years, and the United States has also tried to cooperate with manufacturers in the Netherlands, Japan and other countries to restrict the sale of equipment and technologies needed to manufacture advanced manufacturing processes to China.
U.S. President Biden signed the much-anticipated U.S. Chip Act on August 9 and signed an executive order on August 25, accelerating the allocation of $52 billion in subsidies to semiconductor companies such as Intel, underscoring the Biden administration’s urgency to increase U.S. competitiveness once morest China.
Analysts are closely watching SMIC’s technological progress to see whether U.S. sanctions on China will affect China’s goal of semiconductor self-sufficiency.
TechInsights analysis pointed out that even if SMIC does not have the highest-end EUV machine, it took SMIC only 2 years to realize the leap from 14nm to 7nm technology, which is faster than TSMC (3 years) and Samsung (3 years) 5 years) faster.
The latest findings from TechInsights show that SMIC’s 7nm technology may be a copy of TSMC’s 7nm process technology, with many similarities in process technology, design and innovation.
