Beijing’s success in making advanced 7-nanometer (nm) semiconductors will likely result in Washington further tightening its tech export restrictions on China, experts say, as the current curbs have failed to prevent Chinese firms from finding loopholes.
Apparently made using less-advanced Western lithography machines, the silicon chips powering Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone series represent a jump forward in China’s domestic chipmaking capability as the country boosts efforts to catch up with the U.S. and other rivals.
“Huawei’s new phone demonstrates that China is figuring out ways to limit the impact of sanctions, and this will necessitate tactical changes in U.S. export controls and other restrictions to achieve the same strategic goal,” said Matthew Bey, an analyst at U.S.-based geopolitics and intelligence firm RANE.
It’s only a matter of time before China cracks EUV lithography and can produce sub 5nm-chips, will this have been worth it?
EUV may not even turn out to be a critical bottleneck. It reduces the number of masks you need for some parts of some chips, but using more masks appears to be a feasible approach, and there are rumblings that the advantages of EUV are already plateauing.
It may turn out that the headstart we as the west thought we had in chip tech may not be as large as we thought.