Why China Does Not have the 5-7 nm Chip Manufacturing Plants?

5 July 2022

There were plenty of speculations about  some Chinese manufacturers such as BYD,  Huawei etc have successfully produced 7nm microprocessors for their products when the US slammed sanctions against selling such devices to the Chinese companies.  This article will try to explain what has happened and why there is always such a claim.

Chip Design & Production

Chips are usually designed and produced in 2 different processes.  First,  the company that wants to manufacture the chip will design the chip using special design software like those licensed under ARM of the UK.  After having designed and tested the logic,  circuitries and various working components of the chip,  a file will be created for the chip manufacturing plant (Fabrication Plant) to etch and produce the chips for the company.  Here is a short video about how chips are designed and produced.

Why No 5-7 nm Chip Manufacturing Plants in China?

This question must have been asked all the time.    China has been seen to pay lot of attention and has been known to provide funds for the research & development of chip manufacturing.  To date,  there just isn't much progress although there were lots of media speculation about China having acquired the technology to produce the 1.0 nm chip.

The following could be the reasons requiring further confirmation:

a)  China might have the chip design capability and other supporting facilities such as a clean room etc but might not have the sophisticated equipment for the production of the 5-7 nm chips;  one of such equipment is the lithographic printing machine for the printing of the chip design onto the photosensitive silicon wafer.   The US company,  ASML is presently the only supplier of such machines in the World. 

  

b)  Today,  many companies are quite aware and have been taking steps to prevent their new technology from being "duplicated or stolen"; therefore,  the foreign chip manufacturers and companies have moved only older chip manufacturing technologies to countries like China;

c)  China today have no existing 5-7 nm wafer fabrication plants where they can take reference to learn quickly to set up these plants.  So,  it is expected that China would have to take a longer time to acquire and build up such technology from scratch.   The "road" ahead would be difficult for China especially when many countries that have the required technology are not friends of China.