Huawei Teardown Shows 5nm Laptop Chip Made in Taiwan, Not China::Huawei Technologies Co.’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.
When you say “they can’t” do you mean “they haven’t constructed a facility and hired people that can do this” or do you mean even if they did those things they would not be able to?
The reason I ask is I have been in several discussions on here where people have insisted it is the second.
There are barriers to suddenly having sub 7nm chip production. The EUV etching laser setup is hundreds of millions of dollars per machine and are made by one country - The Netherlands - who are aligned with American and NATO trade ideals.
The issue also isn’t getting one; maintenance and software are required for each machine and are also strictly guarded. It’s why places like China and NK don’t have advanced chips but have rocket programs. It’s gatekeeping their progress.
Taiwan literally bet it’s future as a country on advanced technology and it paid off, probably the only one that did. SK has chaebols to soak up the cost and Samsung did exactly that with the help of the government in the 80s to compete with Japanese DRAM. It worked so well Japan stopped making most chips and SK took over.
USSR, India, Germany, America, Japan, Bulgaria, Vietnam, etc. have tried to start advanced chips technology centers but it doesn’t succeed for nmone reason or another, typically due to the long time frame and high costs making it unsustainable.
Edit: it’s worth noting that China is trying to make the investment and there may be some gains but etching accurate circuit paths at that level of detail (with multiple passes that exponentially explode complexity) without EUV lithography is nigh impossible. Currently they are at 20nm reliably and it puts them around 10 years behind current mainstream computing. (An equivalent is the 22nm chips from 2008.)
Very interesting, thank you.
The facilities cost tens of billions of dollars and the equipment is export restricted. The PRC physically cannot build a facility without spending literally a trillion dollars to develop their own equipment.
Tsmc is building a 5nm facility in Arizona, it will cost $40B.
I get that it is expensive. My question was “if they…” not can or would.
I’ve had several interactions where people say “even if you moved a facility to China magically and brought all the people and they were willing, it would not work”.
Now, I have no love for China but surely that can’t be true.
It’s not. They don’t currently have this kind of technology, but moving a tsmc fab to china with all of it’s personnel willingly ‘switching sides’ would make it possible for them to learn.
With enough time and money, anything is possible.
This is important, it’s expensive and hard but it also just takes a long time to make the foundries.