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.
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.
Re: (Score:1)
They could both be serial rapists. In any case, good job taking off-topic bait in a thread about Huawei.
Economic sabotage .. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
They could just buy games consoles, for the chips. ref [theregister.com]
No surprises (Score:3)
SMIC has no functioning EUV equipment. They are stuck on N+1 and N+2 nodes for the foreseeable future.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't make any sense. At all.
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize that these SoCs are aging chips from 2020? They need to use them before they become too obsolete to sell on the market.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Here is the relevant news article talking about this:
https://wccftech.com/huawei-5n... [wccftech.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Crap, meaning zero, because it's theoretical
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Neither China nor Huawei lied about this, and the fact that you think they did shows how badly you're being misled. You fell for American media's juxtaposition of two different things meant to trick lazy readers into believing there'd been a lie and that fears of China making progress were unfounded. If you read carefully, it states that the 7nm phone that prompted the fears and talk was truly made in mainland China -- and that this 5nm laptop chip which Huawei had never made any claims about being from the
Re: (Score:2)
No. The teardown was down by TechInsights. These guys actually know what they are doing.
https://www.techinsights.com/b... [techinsights.com]
This is what the /. article should have linked to instead of Bloomberg really. A failed news site if I ever saw one.
Re: (Score:2)
s/down by/done by/
How dare they claim American Tech (Score:2)