China is known for not making too much of a fuss about patents, and now the same is true for advanced chips. China was several generations behind modern factories from Samsung or even TSMC, but the analytical company Techinsights she brought information, that the Chinese manufacturer SMIC has already started producing the first 7nm chips on a small scale. How is it possible?
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Apparently, the technological leap is not driven by genius engineers, but by the theft of intellectual property. Direct from TSMC. It was TSMC that had already sued SMIC for similar thefts in 2002 and 2006, so another battle will certainly follow, which should also have international consequences in the form of new sanctions. However, this may not bother SMIC so much, because similar sanctions already apply to the company in the area of exports to many countries. But the Chinese market is huge, and China is also trying to become technologically independent, so there will be plenty of demand.
The first 7nm chips from SMIC appeared in a small series of chips for Bitcoin miners (the MinerVa Bitcoin Miner contains a total of 120 small chips with a total consumption of 3.3 kW) and it was very easy to reverse engineer it to reveal that SMIC uses an all-too-similar manufacturing process technology like that of TSMC.
It should be noted that SMIC has definitely not caught up with other 7nm chip manufacturers, because the aforementioned mining chips are relatively simple in terms of architecture and structure, and it can be estimated that SMIC is still at least two generations behind TSMC or Samsung.
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SMIC does not yet have access to ASML’s key EUV lithography technology and tools, but as the FBI and MI5 security chiefs recently said, China has the biggest hacking facilities to use to steal intellectual property from around the world.
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