The largest genuine Chinese semiconductor manufacturer SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) is doing its best to catch up with the international chipmakers TSMC, Samsung, Intel and GlobalFoundries.
With its headquarters in Shanghai and worldwide sales, SMIC is now one of the leading contract manufacturers and has impressive production capacities by comparison: three fabs for 8-inch (200 mm) wafers and three fabs for 12-inch (300 mm) wafers in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Shenzhen. Four further fabs of the same design are under construction. Among other things, international customers are supplied with circuits in FinFET design with structure dimensions of 0.35 and 0.28 µm.
SMIC was founded in 2000 with the backing of the Chinese government in order to catch up with competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the USA and to produce the most modern semiconductors domestically. SMIC's current and ambitious goal is the mass production of 7 nm chips and further downscaling to the common process nodes of four, three and two nanometers. The Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC is currently the leader in this area and is well advanced in this direction. TSMC also has the necessary research and production expertise.
Since the middle of last year, rumors have been making the rounds that SMIC has succeeded in producing the first 7 nm chips in-house using its own lithography systems to expose the wafers. Serious reports confirm this. The South China Morning Post (SCMP), which is published in Hong Kong, wrote at the end of August 2022 - based on the Canadian analyst TechInsights - about the first real 7 nm chip from SMIC, which had been removed from an SMIC crypto-mining computer and verified as such using reverse engineering. SMIC does not have the standard EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography systems from the Dutch equipment manufacturer ASML.
SMIC appears to be approaching the world level of chipmakers
What's more, according to a report published in July 2022 by the rather inconspicuous trade publication SemiAnalysis from San Francisco-based publisher Substack, SMIC is even able to manufacture its 7 nm chips in mass quantities in a process known as N+2 using so-called immersion imagesetters - without the usual EUV lithography. TechInsights suspects that intellectual property theft (IP theft) by ASML could also be involved here. Various lawsuits in this direction have also been reported in the Asian trade press. ASML itself, with its de facto monopoly on these manufacturing systems, is under strong political pressure to fully comply with the applicable trade restrictions. A decision is expected shortly.
In the opinion of tech analysts, SMIC is thus approaching the global level of chipmakers and is thus easing the trade restrictions imposed by the USA on Chinese manufacturers and their suppliers for the latest chip generations. SMIC is also on the US Department of Commerce's blacklist ('Entity List'), which does not allow the sale of corresponding US-based technology to China. For the leading Chinese smartphone provider Huawei, not being able to obtain the necessary chips is a major obstacle. At CES 2023 in Las Vegas, the absence of suppliers of the latest data devices from China was clearly visible. They were mainly limited to TV sets.
