Another step towards technological self-sufficiency:
Huawei has patented one component used in EUV lithography systems that is required to make high-end processors on sub-10 nm nodes. It solves the problem of interference patterns created by the ultraviolet light that would otherwise make the wafer uneven.
[...] EUV lithography systems are currently made exclusively by Dutch company ASML. EUV lithography relies on the same principles as older forms of lithography but uses light with a wavelength of about 13.5 nm, which is almost an X-ray. ASML generates the ultraviolet light from fast-moving droplets of molten tin that are about 25 microns in diameter.
[...] ASML needed more than €6 billion and 17 years to develop the first batch of EUV lithography machines that could be sold. But before they were finished, the US government pressured the Dutch government into banning exports to China, restricting the nation to the older DUV (deep ultraviolet) technology. [...]
Chinese companies like Huawei were previously able to send their designs to fabs like TSMC for manufacture with EUV lithography. But since the US imposed sanctions on China that has been decreasingly possible. Huawei needs access to the advanced nodes that use EUV lithography to continue to improve on its custom processors, which target everything from smartphones to data centers. It has a long way to go before it can make its own EUV systems but they are receiving plenty of capital and support from the government to get there.
Related Stories
Used or new, does not matter:
As the U.S. government is gearing up to put even stricter constraints on the Chinese semiconductor sector, China-based chipmakers are accelerating their purchases of wafer fab equipment (WFE) to ensure the continuous operation of their fabs. However, Chinese companies prefer to keep these transactions under the radar as some violate U.S. sanctions, reports DigiTimes.
Companies like SMIC, HuaHong, Nexchip, and Silan Microelectronics are buying everything they can, including second-hand tools, according to the story that cites anonymous industrial sources. Some of the WFE they procure cannot be shipped to China as this would violate the U.S.-imposed sanctions, which is precisely the reason why parties prefer to keep such purchases low profile.
Interestingly, even Huawei — which is under severe sanctions by the U.S. government and legally cannot procure anything containing advanced U.S. technology without permission — is stepping up purchasing wafer fab tools. Perhaps, as it is prepping to build a fab with SMIC, it wants to get as many tools as possible.
Previously: U.S. Sanctions Against China Could Hurt Own Domestic Industry: Semiconductor Industry Association
Related:
- Netherlands Refuses to Summarily Agree to US Export Restrictions on China Over Silicon Chips
- Huawei Patents EUV Lithography Tools Used to Make <10nm Chips
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday December 30, @03:53AM (10 children)
The US restricting access to technology to China may have beneficial geopolitical short term consequences. But it also forces China to make the necessary R&D effort to catch up, meaning eventually the US will lose its technological edge. This is what's happening here.
Moreover, other countries are taking notice of how the US is able to throw its weight around to cripple another country at will, and will also quietly invest to decrease their dependency on American tech before it happens to them too.
In short, the long term loser is the US.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday December 30, @05:06AM
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's almost as if controlling other people is hard.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30, @05:14AM (7 children)
China already had a publicly stated plan to be domestically producing 40% of microprocessors by 2025 [wikipedia.org] before the sanctions. This idea that China suddenly decided to produce microprocessors domestically in response to sanctions is really uninformed. Sanctions didn't cause them to do it they were already very publicly doing it!
Also, China has already been producing 7nm DUV [theregister.com] microprocessors for months. And while China is announcing patents on 10nm EUV, TSMC is beginning real world production on 3nm microprocessors [tomshardware.com]. If China were literally producing 10nm CPU today (and they aren't) they would already be six years behind TSMC [wikipedia.org] (TSMC started 10nm production in 2016). And remember, patents on 10nm EUV doesn't mean they have an end to end working process, just maybe some steps in the process.
So maybe, realistically, they're a decade behind? If they're lucky? ASML is the only country on earth producing EUV lithography machines and it requires components from reportedly 70+ countries to build. China isn't going to somehow suddenly develop all this technology internally and eclipse the west. It's just not going to happen.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sea on Friday December 30, @05:39AM (2 children)
They have a bigger population than everyone else, and so they have more scientists upcoming than anyone else too.
China can graduate and throw more scientists at their problems than the entirety of North America and Europe combined.
They also have a weird approach to problems. The kind where they will build a brand new, empty city, and fill it with engineers dedicated to solving just one problem. That's the kind of thing China does.
I don't see how any problem can stand against manpower like that. For all we know they *already* have a city of 10 million engineers just working exclusively on this one thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 30, @06:50AM
"They also have a weird approach to problems. The kind where they will build a brand new, empty city, and fill it with engineers"
Amazing what you can do when the state controls industry and you have people in charge that aren't clueless like the Soviets were.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @09:11PM
Unfortunately for China, all the truly talented ones are educated and work in the west.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 30, @07:37AM (2 children)
Ground rule: "3nm", "10nm", etc. are all fake, but somewhat comparable. TSMC's "3nm" is likely better than Samsung's "3nm".
The important part here is if China actually has its own domestic EUV. Although it took decades for EUV to become a reality, other technologies improved during that time to help make it possible and economically feasible. Creating usable EUV was a monumental technical task, stealing related trade secrets through hacking or social engineering should be considerably easier. The hard work has already been done by ASML, now China can throw money at the problem, but without needing to reinvent the wheel. Here's a comment I saw a couple days ago on Tom's:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/huawe-euv-scanner [tomshardware.com]
EUV isn't the end of the story. New innovations are needed for very small nodes, such as high-NA EUV [semiengineering.com], but getting domestic EUV at all would be a great turn of events for China.
Node isn't everything. TSMC's FinFlex [tsmc.com] for "3nm" seems like a nice innovation. Node improvements with significant transistor density gains will probably stop around the 2030s, and the focus will move onto packaging technologies and 3D scaling. Going monolithic 3D could lead to orders of magnitude in performance gains, hopefully outpacing any cost increases it requires. SkyWater in the U.S. has been trying to bypass node advantages, i.e. making 3DSoCs on "90nm" that are faster than "7nm" EUV planar chips. So there is at least one potential path to beating the ASML blockade, temporarily (3D will also be used on advanced nodes, re-establishing a gap).
Even if China remains perpetually a decade behind TSMC (and does not invade Taiwan), it could create chips that are good enough for most uses. TSMC might be moving into "3nm" territory, but a decent "14nm" quad-core is good enough for most government/office PCs. Chiplets and big.LITTLE could also help.
The Reg article you linked was very skeptical of China's "7nm" DUV clone, but anything in the 7-14nm range can be good. GlobalFoundries famously dropped out of the race to "7nm", but have since produced a decent "12LP+" node. Russia was going to use "28nm" Elbrus and Baikal (8-core Cortex-A57 + Mali-T628) chips in office PCs before those got shitcanned by sanctions [soylentnews.org], and they are back to "90nm" trash at best. China is in a much better position than Russia when it comes to meeting their domestic chip goals, and I believe they will also create their own productive EUV machines sooner than expected.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31, @02:14AM (1 child)
Won't be surprised if the USA are also trying to copy any secrets TSMC/Taiwan has, if they've any already unknown to the USA and they're worth copying...
If anyone believes the Five Eyes haven't been looking into stuff like that they're naive/stupid.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday December 31, @04:18AM
I'm not even mad at China. If a country can copy technological secrets and suffer nearly zero consequences, they would be foolish not to.
As for the Five Eyes, to the extent that there is something to take, probably. I recall China is said to be ahead of the pack in the development of hypersonic weapons/vehicles.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 30, @09:09AM
I didn't know AMSL is a country. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday December 30, @12:51PM
Geopolitically, it's an "expense" since the US is forced to compromise on a number of trade & tax policy issues to get other countries to play-along.
Tactically, China still gets access to the hardware through the black markets at a time when the value of GPUs tanked so they're not losing anything. Additionally, China has a dozen GPU developers that saw record investments from global investors and are soon to see a fat subsidy thanks to the export rules. It's the same thing with their wafer growers and fabs in general. And unlike the US, they're not outsourcing production to satisfy EU partners so they get to keep money in local circulation.
Legally, limiting access to IP under national security claims without keeping it a secret is the most idiotic mistake a nation can make since it lets other countries invoke Article 73 of TRIPS to invalidate the IP and use them as they see fit. That is, when a country says a specific patent needs to be kept a secret and/or inaccessible to other countries, it means other countries can say they don't need permission or give compensation to use that patent since it's a matter of national security and you can't even counter argue against it since it's literally the very same exception you used yourself on the very same patent. e.g. the COVID-19 inoculations ended up being given away to avoid triggering that exception: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/232239/1/south-centre-rp-116.pdf [econstor.eu]
Strategically, when two countries trade war, everyone else stands to win.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday December 30, @01:30PM (2 children)
So called Western Barbarians still confused about Chinese technology as they usually were since the Bronze Age.
In public media sources, the patent reportedly has number 202110524685X. Surprisingly, this number is already obsolete.
Google patents shows this timeline:
That means, the patent we are talking about is already 19 months old.
So, Huawei did not started research this stuff yesterday. They completed it two years ago then decided to declassify for commerce.
And it already evolved to CN115343915A:
It's funny simple. I bet everyone with a decent lab can do that, if not at industrial scale.
Now the real question: what portion of the concept above has the ASML actually transferred to their design from the original Chinese research?
US hypocrisy or bullying is not worthy to comment at all... Do read some ancient stratagems before trying to understand patent policies and politics ;)
拋磚引玉, Pāo zhuān yǐn yù, Toss up brick, catch jade gem. -- 36 Stratagems, 3/5
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Friday December 30, @02:17PM
There, FTFY. Reporters, nearly all of them, simply don't understand that patent docs don't adhere to the same rules as 99% of everything else they report upon, and so when one finally publishes, after the delay, the reporters get all breathless about the "breaking news now" of company X doing project Y. All the while totally forgetting that because of the delay, the patent doc actually means company X was doing project Y 2-6+ years ago, and are likely well ahead of where it looks like they are from just the doc that just published.
And of course then there are the ones who confuse an application with a patent, and get all breathless about X patenting Y, and if the number is even referenced (reporters are also extremely bad about actually providing references to the actual thing they are reporting about) one looks it up and finds "patent application publication" -- which means "no patent, yet, for company X".
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Friday December 30, @03:25PM
Considering the topic you should link this for context to avoid further down-voting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-china-meng-kovrig-spavor-prisoner-swap-11666877779 [wsj.com]
As pointed above, the USG isn't strategizing the trade war moves so much as it being carried around by the nose as right-wing cowboys make their way to power through the usual regulatory capture and force the US into a corner which then takes the rest of the government years to mitigate the damage from if at all.
But yes. So far, Huawei has been recovering from the sanctions so maybe it's about time the US gets a clue and starts actually planning some of this stuff: https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-says-it-is-out-of-crisis-mode-as-annual-revenue-stabilized-11672375493 [wsj.com]
compiling...