SMIC breaks through the 12nm process, how far is it for Kirin chips to return to the high-end?
Some time ago, a number of digital bloggers claimed: SMIC's 12nm chips are initially mass-produced, and Huawei's Kirin chip production capacity is about to recover.
Careful industry insiders have found clues, Huawei's Kirin 9000 is a 5nm process, and now SMIC's process is 12nm, can the top mobile phone chip be made?
Some time ago, let's talk about SMIC and Huawei.
SMIC's 12nm process.
Founded in April 2000 in Pudong, Shanghai, SMIC is a company specializing in chip foundry. It has become the world's fourth-largest chip foundry company.
Its global chip foundry strength is second only to TSMC, Samsung and UMC.
Many netizens will shake their heads and say no when they see 12nm. But do you know how hard it is for SMIC to get to where it is now?
The founder of SMIC is Zhang Rujing, the founder of Shida Semiconductor. After Skadden sold to TSMC, Zhang Rujing decided to build a wafer fab in the mainland.
At first, he chose Hong Kong as his target, but Hong Kong people didn't know that they got the news that Zhang Rujing was coming to Hong Kong to speculate in real estate, and they put up posters on the streets.
Zhang Rujing went to Beijing, but the Beijing leaders told him:"It's not suitable for building a chip factory, you should go to Shanghai!
As a result, SMIC settled in Shanghai, and in order to show its support, Shanghai ** gave SMIC a big gift"Tax exemption for five years, halved for five years"preferential policies.
Since SMIC's founding, the company has grown rapidly.
In January 2002, SMIC's first chip factory achieved mass production, and a subsidiary was established in Japan in the same year.
In March 2004, SMIC was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
These achievements could not have been achieved without the efforts of Zhang Rujing, as well as his former subordinates, who had held management positions at Texas Instruments and Setia.
But these former subordinates also helped him a lot.
Some of his engineers used TSMC's technology without Mr. Zhang's knowledge, leading to TSMC's direct lawsuit against SMIC.
The lawsuit, which lasted for six years, left Zhang exhausted and brought SMIC to the brink of bankruptcy.
In order to keep the first wafer factory on the mainland, SMIC was forced to reach an agreement with TSMC.
In November 2009, SMIC and TSMC ended the dispute, and TSMC paid 1With a loss of $7.5 billion, SMIC CEO Zhang Rujing resigned, and TSMC acquired an 8% stake in SMIC.
Before leaving, Zhang Rujing said in a serious tone"I will take responsibility for things, this is not a failure in life, don't be discouraged by this, SMIC will continue to move forward bravely. "
However, after Zhang's departure, SMIC continued to experience personnel changes, equity disputes, and declining performance. 2009: loss of 4$800 million, 2011: loss of 2$4.7 billion.
With the entry of Datang Telecom, state-owned enterprises and large-scale national enterprises, SMIC has gradually stabilized.
In 2017, Liang Mengsong became the CEO of SMIC, and SMIC began to develop rapidly.
SMIC has mass produced 28nm, 14nm and 12nm chips. Among them, 12nm is SMIC's most advanced process.
In December 2020, SMIC announced the trial production of the second-generation FinFeTN+1 chip, which will use a 12nm process to improve performance in all aspects.
You must know that SMIC just mass-produced 14nm chips in early 2020, and in less than a year, it went from 14nm to 12nm, which shows that SMIC's R&D strength should not be underestimated!
Of course, this is also inseparable from the help of China's chip industry, in July 2020, China's relevant departments announced an investment of 160 billion yuan to help the development of Shanghai's chip manufacturing industry.
In short, SMIC was founded in 2000 and took 22 years to achieve the siege and mass production of 12nm chips, which has to be said to be a miracle.
What about SMIC 12nm?
SMIC's 12nm technology has received mixed reviews.
Some netizens said: 12nm is too powerful, isn't Intel's half-century achievement 10nm?
There are also different voices: TSMC and Samsung are both 3nm, and the gap has reached 4 generations.
So, what does SMIC's 12nm process look like?
Objectively speaking, from the perspective of the 12nm process, SMIC's chip manufacturing level has reached the world-class level, although there is still a big gap with TSMC and Samsung.
As for Intel's process, it's actually more complicated.
Foreign netizens chose Intel's 14nm Core i9-10900K (++Process) and TSMC's AMD Ryzen 93950X for comparison, apparently observed with an electron microscope.
The result: AMD chips with TSMC's 7nm process are only slightly denser than Intel's, which means that Intel's 14nm+++ is more advanced than TSMC's 10nm process.
According to this standard, Intel's current 10nm process has surpassed TSMC's 7nm process.
Another chip foundry, UMC, has a 7% global market share, making it the world's third-largest chip foundry. It announced in 2018 that it would stop investing in advanced processes below 12 nanometers.
Despite this, SMIC ranks fourth in the world in terms of chip technology, behind TSMC, Samsung, and Intel.
TSMC, Samsung, and Intel all have strong U.S. capital behind them, and SMIC has always been considered a loser.
What kind of Kirin chips can be manufactured by the 12nm process?
Theoretically, SMIC's 12nm process is comparable to TSMC's 12nm process and can make Kirin 710.
The Kirin 710, released in July 2018, is the first chip in the Huawei 7 series to use TSMC's 12nm process.
CPU: 8 cores, frequency 22GHz, 4 A7322GHz + 4 A5317ghz。
GPU: Powered by Mali-G51 graphics processor, it is more power-efficient than the previous generation and has greatly improved performance.
Network: 5G is not supported, with a peak downlink rate of 600 Mbit/s and an uplink peak rate of 150 Mbit/s.
Let's take a look at the Kirin 710A, SMIC's first chip for Huawei
The Kirin 710a is manufactured by SMIC and uses a 14nm process.
CPU: 8 cores, frequency 20GHz, 4 x A7320GHz + 4 A5317GHz, just under 710.
Graphics processor: Malig51-MP4 graphics processor.
Network: 5G is not supported.
Comprehensive comparison: The Kirin 710 with 12nm process has 20% lower power consumption, 10% higher performance, and 20% lower error rate than the Kirin 710A with 14nm process.
The Kirin 710A is mainly used in low-end models such as the Honor Play 4T, Huawei Enjoy 20SE, and Honor 10XLITE.
Huawei nova3i uses 710, which is only a mid-range model!
Considering the improvement of Huawei's chip design in recent years, SMIC has adopted some new technologies, so the 12nm Kirin chips produced can only be used in mid-range mobile phones.
Because Apple's chips have been updated and iterated in recent years, the gap is getting bigger and bigger.
Nowadays, the gap between Huawei and chips is **?
Huawei's activities in the chip field mainly include chip design, like Apple and Qualcomm.
Chip design capabilities include CPU design capabilities, GPU design capabilities, and integration capabilities (CPUs, GPUs, and basebands).
Let's start with the most important CPU design capabilities:
Apple acquired a CPU design company in 2008 and has since embarked on the road of independent research and development of mobile phone CPUs, Apple's CPUs are stronger than those of Huawei and Qualcomm.
Qualcomm is known as the magic change, and the CPU architecture after the magic change is more suitable for today's smartphones.
Huawei basically uses the public version of the ARM architecture, and there is still a certain gap.
Next to the GPU aspect:
Qualcomm's GPUs come from AMD, Apple snatched Imagination's R&D team and started developing its own GPUs, while Huawei continues to opt for Arm's Mali architecture.
It can be said that in terms of autonomy, Huawei is once again lagging behind.
Baseband: Huawei and Qualcomm both have their own basebands, and the baseband performance is not much different, but Apple does not have a baseband.
Integration capability: The first 7nm 5GSoC is Huawei's Kirin 990, and the Kirin 9000 is the first 5nm5GSoC, which shows that Huawei's integration capability is still very good.
As for Apple, integration is not possible without its own baseband.
We use the Kirin 9000, Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, and Apple A13 for comparison.
According to the Geekbench5 test, the results are as follows:
The Kirin 9000 has a single-core score of 1019 and a multi-core score of 3703;
The Snapdragon 888 scored 1135 points for single-core and 3794 points for multi-core.
The Apple A13 has a single-core score of 1331 points and a multi-core score of 3336 points.
Although the Snapdragon 888 has a very good running score, the Apple 13 was launched almost a year earlier than the Snapdragon 888, so Apple is still the best when it comes to CPUs.
Run gfx3The GPU score at 1 is as follows:
The Kirin 9000 has an FPS of 132 and a power consumption of 83W, the energy efficiency ratio is 16;
The Snapdragon 888 achieves 122fps with a power consumption of 77W, energy efficiency ratio of 20;
The Apple A13 achieves 122FPS with a power consumption of 20 watts and an energy efficiency ratio of 16;
Overall, the Apple A13 is still the strongest, the Snapdragon 888 is second, and the Kirin 9000 is last.
But in fact, Huawei has improved better in the system and chip combination, so the user experience is still better than that of phones with Snapdragon 888.
If Huawei does not restrain itself, if the Kirin chip is successfully upgraded and iterated, then the high-end mobile phone chip will be a dead end in the end, you don't know.
When will domestic high-end chips become a reality?
We know that the weakness of Huawei's high-end chips lies in manufacturing, and TSMC and Samsung cannot be relied on, so they can only rely on SMIC in the mainland.
SMIC CEO Liang Mengsong also issued an announcement saying that 7nm technology has been conquered, and 5nm and 3nm are being done, just waiting for EUV lithography.
In other words, SMIC's advanced technology stays in"EUV lithography machine"So the research and development of the EUV lithography machine has not been completed, but in fact, the research and development of the EUV lithography machine is too difficult.
EUV lithography technology is the crown jewel of industrial manufacturing, and it is also the world's most technological, even ASML only masters 10% of all technologies.
More difficult of these techniques are extreme ultraviolet light sources and lenses.
The wavelength is 13The 5 nanometer extreme ultraviolet light is very easily absorbed, and there is no such light source in nature, so we have to develop it ourselves.
ASML's method involves using a 30-kilowatt high-power laser to bombard falling tin droplets with extreme ultraviolet light.
At temperatures of up to 200,000°C, two laser beams are generated, with the first laser blasting the tin droplets into a specific shape and the second laser penetrating the tin droplets again, producing extreme ultraviolet light.
We can only imagine the precision and precision of the machine tools that make these devices, and that's exactly what we lack.
Lenses are more demanding.
The flatness of the lenses is equivalent to that of a high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing, and there can be no waves of up to 2 centimeters, which is simply outrageously difficult.
In addition, since the glass also absorbs extremely strong ultraviolet rays, the lenses must also be coated with a special material several nanometers thick.
These processes and recipes are also non-existent.
In addition, in order to overcome all its own advantages, the EUV lithography machine has up to 100,000 precision parts, which is called"Mission impossible"。
In order to realize the localization of high-end wafers, R&D institutions, universities and enterprises such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Huawei, and Shanghai Microelectronics have carried out research.
According to the calculations of relevant experts, it will take at least 5 to 10 years to surpass EUV lithography technology, which means that high-end Kirin chips will not be available in a short time.
SMIC's mass production of 12nm chips is undoubtedly positive, although there is still a big gap between TSMC and Samsung's technology, but this is already a big progress.
12nm technology can realize the mass production of terminal chips such as Kirin 710, but high-end chips have not yet been realized.
With the continuous efforts of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Huawei, SMIC and Shanghai Microelectronics in the field of chip manufacturing, in the next 5 to 10 years, domestic high-end chips can be used.