28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.

The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren’t sub 9nm. TSMC’s 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven’t matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.

SMIC, Huawei didn’t get to where they are by compromising. They never would’ve bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn’t matter in this industry, what they’re looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn’t compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.

China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the “02 Special Project” all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.

It’s an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn’t going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.

5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the “7nm” Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.

Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.

TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It’s only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.

That’s based on TSMC’s own test chip not an actual customer’s. 17.92 mm² is incredibly tiny when SoCs, CPUs and GPUs range in size from 100 to 600 mm² increasing the proportion of chips with defects as the number of chips on the wafer drops.

From that very article

In that case, let us take the 100 mm2 die as an example of the first mobile processors coming out of TSMC’s process. Again, taking the die as square, a defect rate of 1.271 per cm2 would afford a yield of 32.0%.

As TSMC themselves designed the chip, they definitely followed all their design rules for that process to maximize yield. No customer would do that.

Anand explains this in one of his articles.

But have no fear. What normally happens is your foundry company will come to you with a list of design rules and hints. If you follow all of the guidelines, the foundry will guarantee that they can produce your chip and that it will work. In other words, do what we tell you to do, and your chip will yield.

The problem is that if you follow every last one of these design rules and hints your chip won’t be any faster than it was on the older manufacturing process. Your yield will be about the same but your cost will be higher since you’ll bloat your design taking into account these “hints”.

Generally between process nodes the size of the wafer doesn’t change. We were at 200mm wafers for a while and now modern fabs use 300mm wafers. The transistor size does shrink however, so in theory you could fit more die on a wafer with each process shrink.

The problem is with any new process, the cost per wafer goes up. It’s a new process, most likely more complex, and thus the wafer cost is higher. If the wafer costs are 50% higher, then you need to fit at least 50% more die on each wafer in order to break even with your costs on the old process. In reality you actually need to fit more than 50% die per wafer on the new process because yields usually suck at the start. But if you follow the foundry’s guidelines to guarantee yield, you won’t even be close to breaking even.

The end result is you get zero benefit from moving to the new process. That’s not an option for anyone looking to actually use Moore’s Law to their advantage. Definitely not for a GPU company.

The solution is to have some very smart people in your company that can take these design rules and hints the foundry provides, and figure out which ones can be ignored, and ways to work around the others. This is an area where ATI and NVIDIA differ greatly.

TSMC N7, N7P and Intel 7 don’t use EUV. It’s all quad patterned DUV. DUV lithography has been in use since the 1990s going from 800nm to N7P.

Every single node after TSMC’s so called 16nm has been all marketing. It would’ve more accurate to call TSMC 16FF as 20nm FinFET. This is why Intel brands what they themselves called 10nm as Intel 7 to bring their marketing more in line with TSMC’s.

SMIC N+1 has a density of 89 million of transistors per mm² while TSMC N7 has 91.2. TSMC 10FF and Samsung 10LPP only offer slightly more than half that density.

NASA planing to use SpaceX’s Starship as the Human Landing System, has convinced me that China will step foot on the moon before Artemis III.

I kind of wonder, if “Buy America” wasn’t a requirement and the US allowed China to bid for High Speed Rail contracts would the US already have decent HSR network by now?

Oh well, at least the hype is distracting the US from attacking the more productive sectors China’s economy. US government officials really seem fixated on whatever the current tech buzzword is.

Honestly, the self-driving car hype train from a decade ago made me a bit skeptical about the newest AI wave. In spite of the absolutely massive gains Nvidia’s machine learning chips have made, Full Self-Driving is perpetually coming next year according to Tesla.

Before sanctions, Huawei was the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor.

After sanctions, Huawei is still the largest except they barely have any US chips in their products.

The CHIPS act has always been incredibly questionable. It seemingly goes against market forces. The US are alienating what were potentially the largest customers for all the chips they plan on making. Customers are especially scarce at the higher end processes that the US are targeting.

Global Foundries abandoned 7nm since they believed that most of their clients wouldn’t be able to afford migrating to leading edge nodes. UMC barely had any clients for their 14nm process. Not even Global Foundries’ contractual obligations to AMD / IBM, UMC’s connection to Mediatek, and access to the latest ASML EUV machines were enough incentive for them to transition to 7nm and beyond.

The US essentially made Huawei a guaranteed customer to SMIC. EUV isn’t even necessary for 7nm and 7nm isn’t necessary for 5G. Intel 7 and TSMC N7, N7P are made with DUV. TSMC’s 12nm was used for UNISOC’s Makalu 5G modem and one of their 5G SOCs. The delay in making 5G phones might just be Huawei needing EDA tools to design a modem using SMIC’s existing processes.

The way the sanctions are so gradual it’s almost as if the US wants China’s chip sector to undergo import substitution industrialization. It really resembles the slow ramp up of import restrictions that established the automobile industry in many countries. It’s also kind of amusing that in practice it’s the US that are cutting themselves off from advanced tech while China can still by the latest chips. Nvidia made the A800, and H800 just for China… Nvidia probably lobbied to make the restriction easy to implement and based on the specification that affects performance the least.

US bans Huawei so there stuck with 4.5G marketed at 5G.

US bans DJI drones in government so they use terrible Skydio drones for search and rescue.

I’m still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is warranted though.

It’s written by David P. Goldman, an Asia Times writer whose views run counter to the mainstream US media China narrative.

The National Interest putting one of his pieces on the front page seems really uncharacteristic of them.

If the US left Taiwan alone it would’ve already been unified with the rest of China peacefully.

Those NATO trained Übersoldaten with Leopard 2A6s are really taking their sweet time against those shovel armed conscripts with Bukhankas.

Do they plan on severing that land bridge any time soon, I guess their Crimean summer beach party is canceled?

The only thing that was annihilated was the credibility of American economic warfare.

US failed in their push to the Yalu River against 1950s China. That was China at its weakest point when it was poor and unindustrialized. It was literally less developed than Sub Saharan Africa back then.

Now that China is the host to the world’s largest industrial sector. The Chinese make the best hypersonics, the best drones, and the best surface combatant ships. All produced in numbers impossible for US industry to match. What makes you think that the US will fare any better?

The Iran was the one the that dealt the mortal blow to Iraq. The Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War, and the sanctions left Iraq as a powder keg of religious and ethnic tensions. 12 years of sanctions on Iraq contributed to the defeat of their regular army more than anything the US military itself did.

The US never fought in the large scale operations that the Soviet Army did in WW2. No US operation rivaled the size of Operation Bagration or the Manchurian Strategic Offensive.

China investing in Asia over the west as RCEP comes into force and the west is driving straight into yet another crisis, what a shock. Pivoting towards investing in an area of fast growing economies with favorable terms of investment, and makes logistical sense for China is surely a sign of “China’s fragile economic situation". Why else would they invest in the Jungle over the Garden?

American oligarchs definitely aren’t funneling millions of dollars into these useless think tanks for actual research. Of course there’s going to be a decline of foreign investment in terms of dollars as the dollar shot up in value. A certain country bombed a pipeline and secured a major market for their natural gas making their currency extra valuable. The actual RMB value of foreign investments hasn’t changed much.

The only useful thing that China could’ve invested in west for was tech, which the US will do whatever meddling they can to block. Investing in western real estate at this point is just asking to become a bag holder. It’s not just because it’s a bubble as the west has failed to deleverage and let the market cool as China did. The west also has no qualms in stealing other countries holdings in the west as they did with Venezuela and Russia. If it were the other way around and a country were to nationalize the west’s holdings, the west is guaranteed to engage in a regime change operation in that country.

Ukraine launched their ATO in 2014 and the JFO in 2018. Ukraine did make the first strike as inconvenient that fact might seem to some.

Donbass had no say in Maidan nor did they vote for Poroshenko. The LPR and DPR asked to become part of Russia. The Minsk accords asking for autonomy within Ukraine was a compromise Putin wanted not them. Putin jailed anyone agitating for full-on direct intervention or even just aiding the Donbass republics, which is why February last year took some Russian commentators by surprise. The treatment of Strelkov pretty much supports the theory that initially, Donbass wishing to become part of Russia was an inconvenience to Putin.

Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia set the precedent that it doesn’t really matter who the aggressor is. The western media is simply unconditionally against Russia.

Funny thing is no matter how much the western media tries to label it as such, the AFU’s SNAFU of a counter-offensive wasn’t a counter-offensive because there was no ongoing offensive to counter.

What can be called a counter-offensive is exactly what the Russians are doing.

The Ardennes Offensive, which is analogous to what the AFU is trying to do, and Operation Zitadelle were written off far before they reached the 2 month mark.

Nobody ever wants a long, protracted conflict but it doesn’t mean they don’t prepare for one.

They don’t go all out because:

• The effective number of a weapon is not the raw number but the amount multiplied by the availability rate.

• Mature platforms have higher availability rates and a larger stockpile of wear parts and ammo.

• The numbers available can sustain attrition for however long the conflict may endure so they don’t run out of crucial weapons system at inopportune times.

• The latest equipment may still be undergoing service tests or may have a limited amount of trained crews so any deployment would be more like what Zebra mission was to the M26 Pershing.

• Combat capable forces are still needed elsewhere for security/deterrence and in case South Ossetia gets invaded by Georgia again.

• Mobilizing the reserves would shrink the working population hurting the economy.

• Going all out might also cause a full on intervention since NATO membership isn’t actually needed for that to happen. SMO like rules are why the US in Vietnam didn’t clash with China as it did in Korea.

Availability rates of the F-15 vs F-35 vs F-22

In spite of how much older the F-15 air frames are, given the same number of planes the F-15s would in combat outnumber the F-35s or F-22s two to one.

Too much of a pain for them to “Remember the Maine”.

125 years after the self inflicted incident that sparked the American global empire and yet the modus operandi has barely changed: the same warmongering yellow press, the same fishing for incidents to weaponize, and the same callous use of proxies that are ultimately betrayed.

And what exactly is the definition of democracy are you basing that of?

https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176

When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People’s Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.

But in the U.S., which touts itself as a global beacon of democracy, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy. And just over three-quarters of respondents, 76%, said democracy was important.

For instance, some 63% in the U.S. said their government mainly serves the interests of a minority, while only 7% said the same in China. Asked about whether their country held free and fair elections and offered all citizens the right to free speech, nearly a third of respondents in the U.S., 32% and 31%, respectively, said they did not, while just 17% and 5%, respectively, in China answered the same questions negatively.

And in China, a mere 5% also said not everyone enjoys equal rights in their country, as opposed to 42% who identified this same issue in the U.S.

For the complete data here’s the spreadsheet of the “Democracy Perception Index 2022 - Topline Results”.

Liberals are neither intellectual nor do they actually want dialogue.

They’re so hostile to differing opinions that they have sullied the very word for propagating ideas. The connotation that such an action is inherently negative and something that entails deception was added by them. The redefinition of the word propaganda is ironically the result of liberal propaganda.

Liberals are the only people who could write a post like this with such a lack of self awareness as to fail to realize how blatantly hypocritical it is.