The status quo of China's core: design, sealing and manufacturing, there may be a gap of 10 years

As the foundation of the technology industry, as well as information and digitalization, chips have been receiving much attention since their birth and have also been thriving.

In recent years, because the United States wants to cut off the global chip supply chain and break the pattern of global supply chain integration, it has caused global panic, so we see that countries around the world are building chip industry chains, and want to try to get rid of or reduce their dependence on the United States.

And China is no exception, after all, we are one of the targets of the United States.

In recent years, the domestic semiconductor materials, equipment, technology and other aspects, continue to break through, but at the same time, we also found a more embarrassing fact, that is, the current chip manufacturing process, design, sealing and the world's top level is basically synchronized, but the manufacturing is behind the gap may have 10 years.

First of all, the current international most advanced chip design level is 3nm, and the domestic also has the same level, although Huawei Kirin can not be mass-produced, but Huawei's research and development has not been broken, and the world's top level is synchronized.

In addition, when Samsung mass-produced 3nm, domestic manufacturers were the first customers, which also shows that the country has long had the design capability of 3nm chips.

Again this piece of sealed test, there are three major domestic sealed test manufacturers, ranking the world's top 10, respectively, Changdian Technology, Tongfu micro electricity, Tianshui Huatian, the three major sealed test companies in the world are ranked 3rd, 5th and 6th.

These three companies also said that they have a 4nm chip sealed test technology, as for 3nm, because it is also just mass production, so there is no indication, but considering that the threshold of sealed test is not high, so these three companies synchronised to achieve 3nm sealed test, there is no problem.

The most backward is the chip manufacturing this piece, the strongest chip manufacturing enterprise in the mainland is SMIC, the current public, has been mass-produced process is 14nm, in 2019 has been mass-produced.

However, due to the lack of EUV lithography machine, and then stuck in 14nm, and in 2022 was pulled into the blacklist, further restricting the import of advanced process equipment, estimated process breakthrough, it is more difficult at present, so the current strategy of SMIC is obviously to improve the mature process capacity, first solve the gap in domestic wafer production capacity, slowly.

The world's top chip process is 3nm, from 14nm to 3nm process. So how long does it take to go from 14nm to 3nm? Let's refer to the three giants of TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

TSMC achieved 16nm in 2015, and then 3nm in 2023, eight years apart, and Samsung's time is roughly the same, which is also about eight years. As for intel, from 14nm to 3nm, it will take longer, it is expected to be around 9 years.

Therefore, if the core is to be upgraded to 3nm, even if the advanced equipment is not restricted, it is estimated that it will take about 10 years, and the current advanced equipment and some technologies are still limited, and they may not catch up in 10 years.

So on the whole, the current domestic most should make up the short board, is the chip manufacturing capacity, as long as the manufacturing capacity to improve, design, sealing test is not a problem, at any time can equal the international top level.