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Chinese chipmaker SMIC says US sanctions mean it will struggle to develop 10nm products

martinusher Silver badge

They use a different process to achieve 7nm equivalent resolution. Intel itself is having problems at 10nm and below, currently it appears that only TSMC is in a position to mass produce at this level and they've got the problem that a lot of their product goes to ...... China.

A lot of this really fine geometry is specmanship -- it just represents the smallest feature on a chip, not every feature.

As for 'stealing information' its really not that simple. I know that back in the day the blueprints for some secret naval installtion would be stolen and Sherlock Holmes or Piorot or whoever would recover them but even then there's a lot more to process knolwedge than a simple file or two. Everyone knows roughly what needs to be done but doing it, and doing it repeatedly and reliably on a large scale, requires a lot of institutional knowhow, the collective knowledge of a lot of people.

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