Chip competition is heating up: SMIC's 14nm just went into mass production, TSMC is about to launch 5nm chips

Latest update time：2021-08-31 07:00

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On January 27, in the government work report made by Shanghai Municipal Party Committee Deputy Secretary and Mayor Ying Yong, the announcement of SMIC's 14nm process mass production attracted great attention. SMIC is the largest chip manufacturing company in mainland China and was established in 2000.

As early as the second half of 2018, SMIC announced that it had made significant progress in 14nm FinFET (fin field effect transistor) technology, and the first generation of FinFET technology research and development had entered the customer introduction stage. According to reports at the time, the yield rate during trial production had reached as high as 95%.

This is considered to be a great achievement after Dr. Liang Mengsong joined SMIC. Liang Mengsong is a FinFET chip expert. He has served as senior R&D director of TSMC and vice general manager of R&D of Samsung Electronics. He joined SMIC in October 2017. Previously in 2015, SMIC had cooperated with Qualcomm and the Belgian Microelectronics Research Center to develop 14nm process technology, but it has not been able to break through the bottleneck. Therefore, the achievements of Liang Mengsong after joining have attracted much attention, and some media called him "the miraculous rescue of SMIC."

Although SMIC's 14nm process chips are about to go into mass production, China still needs to catch up in the chip industry. In Q4 2018, TSMC's 7nm process revenue contribution accounted for 23% of total revenue, and 5nm process chips will also be taped out in the first half of 2019. Samsung said it will mass produce 3nm process chips in 2020.

According to the third quarter financial report of 2018, SMIC's revenue in this quarter was US$851 million, a decrease of 7% from the previous quarter; its net loss was US$5.82 million, a decrease of 130% from the previous quarter. Wafer manufacturing accounted for 94.4% of the total revenue, of which 28nm accounted for 7.1% and 40/45nm accounted for 18.7%.

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