China’s main chipmaker, SMIC, has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai, to mass-produce Huawei designed smartphone chips with a 5 nanometer lithographic process.
In August 2023, Huawei surprised the industry and analysts with a 7 nanometer processor for its Mate 60 Pro premium smartphone launched. The phone helped it to increase shipments in China by nearly 50 percent in the fourth quarter.
If production works for smartphones, then Huawei’s most powerful artificial intelligence processor, the Ascend 920, will also be produced at 5 nm by SMIC. This will narrow the gap between China’s AI chips and Nvidia’s.
Meanwhile, SMIC has increased its current 7 nm production capacity to make more Kirin chips and AI GPUs.
SMIC will charge 40 to 50 percent more for products from its 5 nm and 7 nm fabrication nodes than Taiwan’s TSMC does at the same nodes.
SMIC’s yield—the number of chips considered good enough to ship to customers—is also less than one-third of TSMC’s.
SMIC 5nm-class manufacturing processes does not use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. This means the light is larger so it is more difficult to get to the 5 nanometer resolution.
China is using deep ultraviolet immersion which was what the entire industry was using before EUV was finally developed.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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