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China United States Hardware

Huawei Teardown Shows 5nm Chip Made in Taiwan, Not China (bloomberg.com) 29

Huawei's newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough. From a report: The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, around the time US sanctions cut off Huawei's access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News. That counters speculation that Huawei's mainland Chinese chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., may have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique.

Huawei caused a stir in the US and China last August when it released a smartphone with a 7nm processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC. A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro's chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.

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Huawei Teardown Shows 5nm Chip Made in Taiwan, Not China

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  • Economic sabotage is going to be counter-productive in the long eun.
    • China was always an illusion. Now that foreign investors are once bitten twice shy, it's being exposed as a scheme where new investment hid previous losses.

      Anyway, the chip ban makes sense when you consider that China's hyper missiles have been grounded until they find a replacement source of chips. By the time that happens it may be moot.

      • pssst Taiwan IS part of China, and they know it. They just pretend to hate the PRC because the US keeps giving them cool technology

        Every scrap of IP that the US has sent to Taiwan has been immediately forwarded to the Mainland

      • >> the chip ban makes sense when you consider that China's hyper missiles have been grounded until they find a replacement source of chips.

        They could just buy games consoles, for the chips. ref [theregister.com]
  • by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Friday January 05, 2024 @05:42PM (#64135195)

    SMIC has no functioning EUV equipment. They are stuck on N+1 and N+2 nodes for the foreseeable future.

    • Dr. Burn-Jeng Lin who used to work at TSMC, who proposed the use of immersion lithography, claims you can do 5 nm with current DUV equipment.

      The only question is would something like that be commercially viable or not. Because the yields and price per chip might be crap.

      • Here is the relevant news article talking about this:
        https://wccftech.com/huawei-5n... [wccftech.com]

      • Crap, meaning zero, because it's theoretical

        • The PRC is clearly doing research on it:
          https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ab... [ieee.org]

          Q. Wu, Y. Li, X. Liu and Q. Wang, "The Possibility of Using 193 NM Immersion Lithography Process For 5 NM Logic Design Rules," 2023 China Semiconductor Technology International Conference (CSTIC), Shanghai, China, 2023, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/CSTIC58779.2023.10219265.

      • They're free to try! Maybe after a decade or so of work, they can get functional yields. While the rest of the world moves beyond EUV to High NA EUV and really exotic stuff.

        • And by functional yields the most likely outcome is 10 years worth of production can get them 1 year of product.
        • It is not a waste of time to figure out more advanced techniques to do multiple patterning. They are already doing multiple exposures with EUV equipment in the latest processes at TSMC and Samsung. So it is not like the industry will stick with single exposures.

          These kinds of techniques are kind of an add on you can do to the regular lithography process.

  • designed and manufactured in Taiwan, on Dutch equipment as their own!

The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter Drucker

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