this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
171 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
3850 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My only surprise here is the turn around. According to the people I listened to China was nowhere near the 7nm range, at all. Sanctions were put place no less than half a year ago, so for them to have figured it out this quickly is what's making it look sus. It takes nations years if not decades to get to thus point, and countries have failed trying too. My money is they are using western manufactured lithography equipment.
Edit: From the South China article:
Doesn't it make you think those people were probably wrong? Far too many people base statements like that on assumption. From the article I read they're using a different method to fabricate them and they're very different to other chips on the market - china have a huge engineering sector and have been investing heavily in chip r&d for a long time.
I doubt it. Ten years ago when I was in college I attended a presentation of a researcher who was working on lithography methods at the 9nm scale and the challenges that came with it. A country doesn't go from making 40nm chips to making 7nm chips in less than a year. It's simply not possible. If it was that simple Taiwan wouldn't be geopolitically important, where all of the silicone fabs capable of <7nm are located and how they supply literally all of the world because no one else can. India tried started an industry and failed. The US is now spending billions of dollars to open up fabs in the US and its going to take them way more than a year or two.
It's like the development of the hypersonic missile, you simply cannot develop it overnight. So when China or Russia says they have it I'm skeptical, and with Russia it turned out that they really didn't have a true hypersonic missile as was shown in Ukraine.
As I understand it, the sanctions against China were not against the chips, but the manufacturing equipment for making the chips which China does not know how to make and its the part of the intellectual property that the US controls. Like I said, I think they circumnavigated sanctions to get this equipment, and probably got some workers who knew how to work them. That is if the headline is true.