Moore's Law is stagnant, and China has plenty of time to catch up with TSMC and Samsung!
As we all know, in terms of chip manufacturing, Chinese mainland cannot be compared with the world's top chip technology. Taking TSMC and Samsung as examples, they have entered the 3nm process and will enter the 2nm process in 2025.
What are we going to do? The current 14 nm, which is ***, is about 10 years old.
Huawei's launch of the Kirin 9000 S indicates that we may face the 7 nm process, but there is no inevitable relationship between the two, and even the same 7 nm process, in fact, it has a history of two whole generations, and the difference between them can be seen by anyone who knows a little bit about computers.
This is why the United States has taken various measures to curb or delay our development of high-end integrated circuits, so that we will always be left behind by the United States in the semiconductor industry and let the United States reap the benefits.
For example, extreme ultraviolet lithography cannot be sold to Chinese mainland, and the current cutting-edge deep ultraviolet immersion lithography equipment cannot be sold to Chinese mainland.
Despite the bleak outlook, we still have plenty of time to surpass TSMC, Samsung, and others as chip technology approaches its physiological limits.
Does the wafer process refer to 14nm, 7nm, 3nm, etc.? Actually, it's the width of the door. It was also replaced with"Line width", which is used to represent the width of the least etched chip line.
However, since 28 nm, the line width of the semiconductor industry has not increased, because a line must have a width of more than 10 (or even 100), which makes it impossible to continue to reduce the line width.
From 28nm onwards, the progress of the wafer process is mainly driven by the structure and process, which enables the same energy efficiency and efficiency as the higher process wafers.
For example, in the 28 nm process, I use the 28 nm process, and the line width will not change, but I have increased the process to 15 percent, so in our era, it should be called 28 nm or 22 nm, right? The same is true for 22 nm, as 22 nm was developed on top of 14 nm and 10 nm.
Similarly, 7 nm, 5 nm, and 3 nm do not simply refer to 7 nm, 5 nm, and 3 nm, but are optimized in terms of architecture, process, etc., so that they can theoretically achieve the energy efficiency and performance of 5 nm and 3 nm.
The development direction of today's IC production technology is no longer to reduce the line width, but to develop more advanced structures, such as FinFETs, Gaafet, etc., and use 3D structures to realize the 3D stacking of transistors, which will fundamentally meet Moore's law"Equivalent process"！"
In addition, since the line width does not actually decrease, many semiconductor devices such as lithography equipment and etching equipment are commonly used in this type of wafer manufacturing. Although the technology currently known as the "chip process" is still in the development stage, it is indeed at a standstill, and it is still a long way before we catch up.
Although there is no mature extreme ultraviolet lithography and deep ultraviolet immersion process, we can still make improvements in architecture, process, device structure, etc., and make improvements on this basis, and make further improvements on this basis.