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China is catching up: SMIC foundry is now able to produce 7 nm chips
SMIC's N+1 (7 nm) chips are mostly on par with GloFo's, Samsung's and TSMC's competing nodes as far as scalability and power consumption is concerned, but the Chinese tech is still a step behind when it comes to performance. Next goal for SMIC is to dethrone TSMC in regards to Chinese chip orders.
www.notebookcheck.net, Oct. 16, 2020 –
China has lately been very focused on cutting most of its ties with the Western world, and one of the domestic sides benefiting now from massive investments is the IT&C sector, including the semiconductor production facilities. There already are a few notable foundries in China, but production capacities and miniaturization is not really on par with big players like TSMC, Samsung and GlobalFoundries. Still, the Chinese foundries are catching up at an ever increasing rate, as the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) recently announced a major breakthrough with the first 7 nm chips taping out through its new N+1 nodes.
These chips were ordered by Chinese crypto currency mining ASIC maker Innosilicon, which claims it has invested heavily (millions of US$) in the optimization of the N+1 nodes since 2019. It is still unclear if the chips are test samples or models ready for commercialization, yet Innosilicon specified that all chips went through multiple testing procedures in the past few months and cleared all function tests in one pass. While SMIC may be able to soon mass produce 7 nm chips for the Chinese markets, it might not be able to request upgraded production tools from outside China, since the company has been included on the U.S. Department of Commerce banned Entity List.
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