U.S. restrictions on China's access to advanced chip technology have prevented China from buying and manufacturing top-of-the-line chips.
However, according to Bloomberg, China is working on chiplet technology, which is looking for a breakthrough by combining mature chips like building blocks to create chips that are close to the advanced level.
Despite the recent sluggish overall performance of China**, small chip concept stocks in the semiconductor industry have repeatedly hit new highs. China's large-scale packaging and testing company "Huatian Technology" has attracted much attention because of its continuation.
In the past six months, China's chiplet semiconductor companies have been favored by investment institutions, among which the innovative company "Arctic Xiongxin", which is engaged in the research and development of next-generation general-purpose chiplets and functional chiplets, and the automotive chiplet R&D manufacturer "Xinli Intelligence" have recently received financial support.
The article points out that China's hope of catching up in the field of traditional chip technology may be slim, but in the field of emerging technology, China is going hand in hand through multiple routes, including graphene, quantum chips and chiplets. Among them, chiplet technology, which was little known two years ago, is considered to be the most realistic hope in China.
China is using chiplet technology to put together mature chips like building blocks to create chips that are close to advanced processes, hoping to break through the U.S. blockade. Feldgas, a data research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, explained that instead of making one large chip, it is better to build a series of small chips and then package them together to enable a faster interconnection than two separate chips.
While traditional chips integrate all components on a single silicon wafer, modern modular chip designs take a different approach. In this design, each chip is given a specific function, such as data processing or storage, and then the chips are connected into a complete system. As each chip becomes smaller and more specialized, they are less expensive to manufacture and have a correspondingly lower failure rate. At the same time, this design allows individual chips in the system to be independently upgraded to newer, better versions, improving overall performance, while other functional components remain unchanged.
As a result, MIT Technology Review listed chips as one of the top 10 breakthrough technologies in 2024. Chipmakers firmly believe that smaller, more specialized chip designs can continue the vitality of Moore's Law. Leaders in the chip industry, such as AMD, Intel, and Apple, have adopted this technology extensively in their products.
For these leading companies, chip technology is one of the key ways for the semiconductor industry to push the boundaries of physics and continuously improve computing power.
For China's chip companies, this technology can not only shorten the time and reduce costs for the development of more powerful chips in China, but also provide strong product support for growing key technology fields such as artificial intelligence. To turn this potential into reality, these companies need to invest in advanced chip packaging technologies to efficiently integrate multiple chips into a single device.
Cameron McKnight-MacNeil, a process analyst at TechInsights, a semiconductor intelligence company, said: "China undoubtedly faces an important task in developing the advanced packaging technologies needed to utilize chipset designs. But as we all know, China has mastered some basic chip deployment technologies, which has laid a solid foundation for future development. ”
From a business point of view, there are big advantages to using chiplet architectures. If Chinese companies can design such a system, they may find a way to bypass U.S.** export controls. However, there is no concrete evidence to support this, and further observation is needed.
Chiplet technology is considered by the semiconductor industry to be a key technology that transcends the physical limits of Moore's Law. Through homogeneous and heterogeneous integration, multiple processor engines, memories, RF components, power management chips, optical components, etc. are integrated in a chip network of a small chip. The key to chiplet technology is advanced packaging technology.
Today, chiplets have become a key approach to next-generation chip design and manufacturing. Industry giants such as Intel, AMD, and TSMC have adopted chiplet design concepts.Chiplet technology successfully breaks through the four limitations of SoC design: first, it transcends the limitation of reticle area and enables large-scale integration; Secondly, through heterogeneous integration technology, it breaks the functional limitations and is no longer subject to the constraints of multiple processes. In addition, chiplets improve chip performance with scalable computing power; Finally, its agile approach to development significantly shortens the design cycle. With chiplet integration technology, chiplets enable a high level of system integration, increasing functional density and reducing costs. In addition, the combination of innovative transmission circuits and device technologies can further enhance the value of electronic products and promote industrial upgrading and scale expansion. At present, chip technology has been widely used in the fields of next-generation mobile communications, high-performance computing, autonomous driving, and the Internet of Things.
For many years, the United States** has continued to restrict the development of China's semiconductor industry through an export blacklist.
In October 2022, a new sanction banned China** from exporting any technology that could be used to make advanced chips in the 14nm range and below.
In the face of such constraints, China** has been exploring ways to break through the bottleneck of chip manufacturing, but it could take decades to make progress in key areas such as lithography. Lithography, the technology that transfers design patterns to silicon materials through light, is still lagging behind companies in Taiwan, the Netherlands and other places in terms of chip manufacturing capacity.
McKnight-McNeill noted, "Although SMIC has produced 7nm chips, we suspect that they are expensive to produce and limited in production. ”
However, chipset technology offers China a potential way around these restrictions. By splitting the chip function into multiple modules, the manufacturing difficulty of each individual part is reduced. If China is unable to buy or manufacture high-performance monolithic chips, it can achieve similar or higher computing power by connecting multiple chips that are less difficult to manufacture.
But this approach to chip manufacturing poses an even greater challenge to another area of the semiconductor industry: packaging. Encapsulation is the process of combining multiple components of a chip together and testing the performance of the final device. Ensuring that multiple chips can work together requires more complex packaging techniques than traditional monolithic chips. The technology involved in this process is known as advanced packaging.
For China, it is relatively easy to improve in the field of packaging. At present, Chinese companies have accounted for 38% of the global chip packaging market. While Taiwanese and Singaporean companies still dominate in more advanced technologies, China has relatively little difficulty catching up in this area.
Packaging technology is less standardized and less automated. Harish Krishnaswami, a professor at Columbia University who studies telecommunications and chip design, said. Considering that China's labor costs are still much lower than those of Western countries, he believes that it will not take decades for China to catch up in this area.