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IBM was ahead with copper interconnects and they were early adopters of SOI.
Intel was ahead with strained silicon, HKMG, FinFET.
TSMC was arguably ahead of others in low-k by using Black Diamond.
TSMC is fairly conservative with changes in process design. This can be seen by them being...
IBM used to be the aggressive one with adopting new process technology. Intel was right behind them or sometimes ahead. TSMC used to be pretty conservative.
Then IBM sold its fabs.
The only "aggressive" moves TSMC did was helping create immersion lithography, and putting EUV into production...
This latest round of sanctions is futile. The prior ones were not.
Huawei is still limited to using manufacturing facilities in China. So they will lag other vendors which can access more advanced process technology.
But this does not need to be crippling necessarily. Intel did not vanish...
They can continue to increase chip complexity vertically. Making increasingly taller transistors. Stacking wafers on top of each other.
Cooling then becomes an issue. Clockspeeds might go massively down to decrease heat, or you will see larger chips, to increase the dissipation area.
Another...
Hua Hong and Nexchip added a huge amount of capacity at 180-55nm over the last years. Around 200,000 wafers per month at 300 mm diameter.
SMIC might have also needed to lower wafer prices to capture new Chinese customers after the exit of several Western customers.
This is an empty gesture. Political grandstanding.
Huawei already spun out its vanilla smartphone and X86 server businesses as separate companies years ago.
HiSilicon can now manufacture 7nm ARM SoCs of their own design in China. Their latest core design has a similar level of architectural...
For the Chinese government, the two major imports they have are semiconductors and oil, and they want to cut those down.
The capacity expansion in semiconductors and the switch towards EVs fit into that scheme.
China is also trying to move into high end manufacturing. Final assembly is expected...
Nexchip is in Hefei and not even in that graphic. It already has over 100,000 wafer per month capacity with 300mm wafers.
It looks like whoever made that chart mistook Nexchip with JHICC or something. I never heard of JHICC having a fab in Hefei. Heck the JHICC company is called Fujian Jinhua...
Some of China's new fab builds are 200mm. The ones by the smaller players like SiEn and CRMicro.
These companies might be making discretes or might not have enough volume to justify building their own 300mm fab yet.
Most new small diameter wafer capacity in China will not be in silicon, but in...
Apple has not had much success on the server market. Few customers like being locked into a single vendor solution.
Apple could have more success with making these chips for their own internal servers. They certainly have enough of a consumer base to justify building their own AI datacenters...
Less money to waste on pointless certifications for a market that won't buy their products anyway.
It is just a ban on sales of Huawei and ZTE products by a different name.
It remains to be seen if China won't start doing the same thing as the US and imposing their own standards on imported...
If that video is correct then the largest core design is highly advanced. Were it not for the lag in process technology it would likely have performance in between Snapdragon Gen 2 and Gen 3. They claim the chip is 8-wide. The Cortex-X3 in Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was 6-wide, and the Cortex-X4 in...
It is definitively worth it so we do not regress a decade just because there is a war in Taiwan or something. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea.
Yet according to Rock's Law factories increase in price exponentially. Which means the amount of companies and fabs making the...
If Huawei is getting the HBM it would likely be for use in their HiSilicon Ascend NPUs.
Right now CXMT is the only company in China capable of making high-end DRAM (LPDDR5). Although there are rumors of more DRAM companies being created, none are fabricating and selling chips that I know of...
Fujian Jinhua is supposed to have won the lawsuit against Micron with regards to stealing their IP. Are they still in the sanctions list?
I do not see how they will be making HBM if they cannot even make DRAM properly.
This is not the impression I got from speeches by the TSMC CEO last year. I hope you are right.
China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore also subsidize factories. And they pay lower salaries to workers while making them work longer hours.
In China, for example, you get the land for...
It is ridiculous how the politicians (not just Gina) continue spouting such bullshit.
You can purchase most electronics off online sites with little oversight and the chips are small. They can easily be smuggled if necessary.
The Russians have the capability to manufacture chips up to 90nm. The...
Forget Apple and AMD. AMD Zen 5 to be launched in H2 2024 will use the TSMC N3 process. At most the TSMC Arizona fab could manufacture the N4X process I/O chiplet. But not the logic chiplets which have the processing cores. As for Apple the A17 SoC is already using the N3 process.
Will they...
It remains to be seen if TSMC's 5-4nm factory, which will only operate in a couple of years, will have much clientele. Especially when the chip prices will be much higher than for chips made in Taiwan. Everything is more expensive in the US including salaries.
Previous experience with TSMC's...
Nanning has close to 9 million people. While losing 50,000 jobs is significant it is not like you can say much of the income from making iPhones is spent in the local economy. It is well known that the manufacturing cost of an iPhone is like 4% of the total price.
The US government then decries...
