Has China already made striking breakthrough amid U.S. chip export curbs? According to TechPowerUp, China’s homegrown EUV lithography may longer be a ...
There’s a whole range of 9000S, 9020, and 9100 of chips now, with 9100 being 6nm. It’s clear and steady progress on display here. Meanwhile, there’s really nowhere to go past 1nm chips using silicon substrate. So, it’s not like western foundries have no path forward now.
There are two paths towards improving performance going forward. First is to start using new substrates the way China is doing with carbon nanotube based chips. This requires phenomenal level of investment that can only really be done at state level. Another path is to improve chip designs the way Apple did with M series. And these aren’t mutually exclusive obviously as better chip designs will benefit from faster substrates as well.
There’s a whole range of 9000S, 9020, and 9100 of chips now, with 9100 being 6nm. It’s clear and steady progress on display here. Meanwhile, there’s really nowhere to go past 1nm chips using silicon substrate. So, it’s not like western foundries have no path forward now.
There are two paths towards improving performance going forward. First is to start using new substrates the way China is doing with carbon nanotube based chips. This requires phenomenal level of investment that can only really be done at state level. Another path is to improve chip designs the way Apple did with M series. And these aren’t mutually exclusive obviously as better chip designs will benefit from faster substrates as well.
For historical context TSMC announced 7nm in 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process and 5nm in 2020, so 5 years ago.
That’s not that long to build out this kind of infrastructure basically from scratch.