The US wants to avoid at any price that China has avant -garde photolithography equipment. These complex machines are necessary to manufacture very high integration semiconductorssuch as those used by the data centers specialized in artificial intelligence (AI). And without them the technological development of the country led by Xi Jinping has slowed down. It is fair What the US government wants.
China is dedicating a huge amount of resources to the development of its own avant -garde lithography teams. Two of its largest investments They arrived in 2014 and 2019before the technological war of which we are witnessing was unleashed. In 2014, the Chinese government injected about 19,000 million dollars into its chip industry, and in 2019 this figure increased to touching 27.5 billion dollars. However, these investments pale in front of China at the end of 2023. And it is that just two years ago the government approved An investment of 41,000 million dollars expressly dedicated to manufacturers of lithography equipment.
In any case, these machines are only one of the ingredients of a recipe in which the leading role is interpreted by chips manufacturers. And the best option that China has is SMIC (Semiconductor manufacturing international corp). This company has cost more than two years to refine its most advanced integration technology as necessary to produce integrated 5 nm circuitsbut your effort is already paying fruit. And is that, According to SCMPtheir income during the first semester of 2025 has increased by 22% if we compare them with the same period last year. And its benefits have grown by 35.6%.
This is SMIC’s great challenge: go beyond 7 nm
Dr. Kim, an expert in chips manufacturing who has worked in Samsung and currently investigating TSMC in the US, He maintains that SMIC It is about to start the production of 5 Nm chips. It is perfectly credible because, as we have just seen, we know with certainty that this company has been Working in this technology. And, in addition, Dr. Kim is a reliable source. However, this expert has pointed out something crucial that we should not overlook: the performance per wafer that SMIC has currently achieved in its 5 Nm nodes is less than 30%.
When semiconductor manufacturers produce a chip wafer, some of those nuclei do not work properly. It is normal. And when they launch a new lithographic node their performance per wafer usually has a wide margin, but little by little, as engineers refine their integration processes, This parameter improves. A mature lithography can deliver to integrated circuit manufacturers a very high performance, but an incipient technology usually moves in the orbit of 50% performance, so only half of the chips produced work correctly.
The 5 Nm chips that SMIC will manufacture for Huawei are possible thanks to a technology known as SAQP
The problem is that for an integration technology to be profitable from an economic point of view, its performance by wafer has to be At least 70%. And, as we have just seen, Dr. Kim argues that the SMIC 5 NM node is below 30%. It is objectively a very poor performance, but we know what this low figure explains: the technique used by this manufacturer to produce these semiconductors. It is known as Multiple patterningand SMIC has used it for more than a year and a half to make 7 NM chips for Huawei and other customers.
This strategy consists in transferring the pattern to the wafer in several passes with the purpose of increasing the resolution of the lithographic process. It works, but is responsible for wafer performance is clearly improvable. However, all probability Integrated 5 nm circuits that presumably SMIC will manufacture soon for Huawei are possible thanks to a technology known as SAQP (Self-alledhed Quadruple Patterning), which is nothing more than a Multiple patterning more aggressive and sophisticated than the one used to manufacture the soc Kirin 9000s of 7 nm and other chips.
A report published by the Taiwanese media Economic Daily News ensures that SMIC will start the manufacture of 3 Nm semiconductors equipped with GAA transistors (Gate-alall-around) For Huawei in 2026. However, this is not all. This article also maintains that this last company has already completed laboratory tests that pursue the manufacture of integrated circuits using carbon nanotubes. Huawei’s plan presumably is to give this innovation to SMIC to adapt it to large -scale production.
Image | SMIC
More information | SCMP
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