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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

I've been following fab news for close to 2 decades already. I am familiar with all the major players in the market, but this article keeps mentioning SMIC.

Now I know SMIC since its creation, but afaik it has always been several nodes behind leading edge, and never scored any major contract. Without any large production contract, how does it get enough experience to even get to 7nm? UMC, their partner, pretty much gave up on 7nm already. TSMC has resisted all attempts at espionage. Is it from Samsung?

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Well, there are lots of possible factors:

a) China is turning inward, maybe they're getting some state support, monetary, political, or otherwise; or at least benefiting from a lucky coincidence.

b) SMIC has been credibly accused of misappropriating TSMC secrets in the past, and settled.

c) I think a number of major Chinese manufacturing companies invest resources and money in them, possibly as some form of insurance policy.

d) The Chinese government does procure armaments, maybe SMIC does manufacturing they've been asked not to talk about.

> China is turning inward, maybe they're getting some state support, monetary, political, or otherwise;

This seems to be the most likely factor.

Yes, it is an explicit strategic policy of the Chinese government as part of "Made in China 2025" with state support (political and monetary).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

A more direct motivation is recent U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies, the state support in semiconductor section has been boosted significantly, since decision-makers in China is now seeing the lack of state-of-art semiconductor manufacturing capabilities a critical threat to national security. Plausibly, developing the domestic semiconductor market to reduce foreign reliance is going to be a major goal.

As we see, SMIC has already withdrawn from New York Stock Exchange entirely [1], and purchased a 7nm EUV lithography machine from ASML for $120 million [2]!

[1] https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3011737/chinas-biggest...

[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13941/smics-14-nm-mass-produc...

I think the thing that makes it notable in this context is just a stated willingness to invest large sums of money down the road for new nodes, regardless of current position. I assume this is due to strategic subsidies by the government.

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