China's SMIC and Huawei have surged ahead in chip technology, defying the U.S. restrictions aimed at curbing their technological advancements, Burn J. Lin, a former TSMC vice president, told Bloomberg in a rare interview. He believes ASML lithography tools that SMIC already owns will allow the company to advance to a 5nm-class fabrication process.
Despite the U.S. imposing technological constraints via sanctions, SMIC has showcased notable resilience and ingenuity by developing its 2nd generation 7nm-class fabrication process. It also achieved yields high enough for Huawei to make plans to supply 70 million smartphones. SMIC allegedly used ASML's Twinscan NXT:2000i litho tool, which is a deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography scanner that can produce chips on 7nm and 5 nm class process technologies. Exports of this tool to China were curbed by the Dutch government earlier this year.
"What the US really should do is to focus on maintaining its chip design leadership instead of trying to limit China's progress, which is futile as China is adopting a whole nation strategy to boost its chip industry, and hurting the global economy," former-TSMC R&D VP Lin is reported to have said.
From the article, written by Anton Shilov: