China has found a way to get TSMC to manufacture its chips. It works, although with restrictions

The joint effort that SMIC and Huawei are making is allowing them to take surprising advantage of ASML’s deep ultraviolet (UVP) lithography equipment. At the beginning of this year they patented a technique that we have told you about in other articles and with which they are presumably already manufacturing 5nm integrated circuits: SAQP (Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning). He multiple patterning Broadly speaking, it consists of transferring the pattern to the wafer in several passes with the purpose of increasing the resolution of the lithographic process. And the SAQP technique is a multiple patterning more aggressive.

One of the problems that China faces is that most of its semiconductor designers do not have the necessary resources to commit to a strategy similar to the one that Huawei and SMIC have implemented. In fact, not even these latter companies can help them. And it is that he multiple patterning It has two big problems: its performance per wafer is presumably well below the 80% accepted by the industry as a minimum to ensure profitability, which causes the cost of each chip to be very high.

Objective: recover TSMC

It’s just a guess, but we can be reasonably sure that SMIC and Huawei’s production of 5 and 7nm ICs only allows them to meet their own needs. Under these circumstances, most Chinese integrated circuit designers find it difficult to access cutting-edge lithography, and some of them have a very important role in China’s strategy to develop its capabilities in the field of intelligence. artificial (AI). MetaX and Enflame are two of these companies.

At the end of 2023, these last two companies sent the designs of several GPUs for AI to TSMC so that they could be manufactured. The ASML lithography equipment used by this Taiwanese company incorporates technologies of American origin, which empowers the US Administration to condition its use. The Government led by Joe Biden does not allow TSMC to produce cutting-edge integrated circuits that can be used by China to reinforce its supercomputers, its data centers for AI, and much less to develop its weapons.

However, the US ban is not total. NVIDIA, for example, cannot sell any GPU in China with a performance greater than 70 TFLOPS FP32, but it can market those chips whose performance is below this limit value. Something like this happens with TSMC, although at the moment it is not entirely clear what the limit set by the US is. What we know for sure is that the designs that MetaX and Enflame have delivered to TSMC are cut. And they are, precisely, to comply with the prohibitions imposed by the US.

At the moment, TSMC spokespersons have not commented on the orders they have received from MetaX and Enflame in particular, but they have confirmed that the agreements they reach with all their clients respect international legislation. Be that as it may, for Chinese chip designers the possibility of access TSMC lithography nodes It represents a breath of fresh air even if they are forced to significantly cut back on their designs. As long as China does not have its own extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment, its cutting-edge technologies will be in the hands of SMIC and Huawei. And at this juncture the possibility of having TSMC, even in a limited way, helps.

Image | TSMC

More information | Reuters

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