htmlOn December 9, according to the " New York Times ", US Minister Raymondo said in an interview that Chinese companies that violate U.S. restrictions on U.S. exports to Russia may be cut off from the supply of US equipment and software needed to produce products.
The key is that she also specially called SMIC , saying, "If SMIC or any Chinese company that ignores US sanctions continues to provide chips and other advanced technologies to Russia, the United States can make them "basically shut down".
Seeing this, someone may ask, why is Raymondo so arrogant? In fact, this is just because the United States has mastered the core of chip manufacturing. Software and hardware equipment can be used at any time to cut off supply and sanction Chinese companies such as SMIC through its " long arm jurisdiction " policy.
SMIC's "lifeline" is in the hands of others
On December 18, 2020, the United States included SMIC on the "entity list", which means that if SMIC wants to use American technology again, or equipment containing American technology, it must first obtain the United States' export license. , especially 10nm and more advanced processes related technologies, strictly prohibited to provide them to SMIC.
The US sanctions have made SMIC not yet purchased the EUV lithography machine required to produce 7nm chips and more advanced process chips. In SMIC's existing 14nm lines, a large number of American manufacturing equipment are also used, such as applied materials, pan-forest deposition, etching , ion implantation, CMP, uniform glue development and other chip manufacturing equipment. These equipment currently have no substitutes for advanced processes.
It can be said that a large number of advanced manufacturing equipment for chip foundry are in the hands of the United States. Once SMIC fails to comply with US sanctions, SMIC will not only require the previous "entity list" sanctions, but may also upgrade the ban on this basis. Some manufacturing equipment required for existing 14nm lines or even 28nm lines is more difficult or impossible to obtain licenses for repairing parts and new equipment. Then SMIC will not be fully competitive in the field of chip foundry, and corporate development may encounter major problems, and may even be eliminated by the times.
"China's core" has been choked by the United States in many fields
The United States is not only stuck in the lifeblood of , a chip foundry enterprise like SMIC, but also the chip design link is firmly grasped by the United States.
The launch process of a chip is complicated. In this process, a variety of software and hardware tools are needed to make a metaphor. If chip manufacturing is compared to building a building, an foundry like SMIC is the construction team responsible for building the building, and chip design is the design drawing of the building, and EDA software is the design tool of this drawing, and the importance can be seen.
Currently, there are three major integrated circuit EDA companies in the world, namely Synopsys, American Cadence and mail MentorGraphics acquired by Siemens , although MentorGraphics was acquired by Siemens, it is actually an American company, so these three EDA giants can be said to be all American companies. In China's EDA market, these three giants accounted for 90% of the share in 2018, and domestic chip manufacturers basically use the products of these three giants. As shown in the figure below, domestic famous companies cannot do without these three manufacturers. Among them, Huawei has already been the first to be affected by these three EDA manufacturers due to sanctions. The cooperation was terminated later. The lack of various software and hardware equipment technologies in the chip industry chain of
chips has made us unable to independently produce high-end process chips, and even the production of mid- and low-end process chips. Through the previous sanctions of the United States on domestic semiconductor companies such as SMIC, and the threat of "closing the door" to SMIC, we have made us fully realize that in today's living environment, core technologies can only be slaughtered by others if they are not independent.If you want to be uncontrollable, you have to rely on this generation or even the next generation of semiconductor to make more efforts, calm down and lay a solid foundation for basic research, and have a complete high-end chip production chain as soon as possible.
Source: 5G Communication
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