At the annual China IC Leadership Summit held on March 30, Wayne Dai, founder and CEO of Chinese IC design house VeriSilicon, observed that chiplet development in China is basically underpinned by three process nodes: 28/22nm, 14/12nm and 5nm, as reported by the Chinese tech media Ijiwei. Though China has achieved the volume production of 14nm, Dai noted the US restrictions on equipment and material would be a hindrance.
Surprisingly, Dai uttered his belief that the restrictions on 14nm would be lifted in about two years. Despite the optimism, he regarded the EUV ban, which impacts 7nm and 5nm capabilities, to be unlikely to end in five years.
Despite current US sanctions having hit the Chinese semiconductor industry's ability to develop logic chips at 16/14nm or below, NAND with 128 layers or more, and DRAM chips of 18nm half-pitch or less, China's capability to design chips using advanced process nodes remains mostly unhindered, apart from those for HPC/AI applications with 600+ GB/s interconnect speed or 4,800 TOPS+ performance.
Constraints on domestic advanced process nodes, however, will drive Chinese chip fabrication towards legacy nodes, leading China-based chip design houses to pursue technologies such as chiplet, GaN/SiC and IGBT.
Currently, Chinese companies have already garnered more than 10% of market share in sectors like 5G modems, Wi-Fi, analog ICs and power semiconductors, according to DIGITIMES Research. The turn towards mature nodes is expected to lead Chinese players into sectors currently led by Europe, Japan, and South Korea, such as automotive and industrial MCUs as well as CMOS image sensors.
During the summit, Wei Shaojun, a leading Chinese semiconductor scholar from Tsinghua University's School of Integrated Circuits, also observed that China's semiconductor industrial development is too focused on processing rather than the product itself. Compared to IDM-dominated countries like the US, Europe, Japan, and South Korea, China's IDMs remain small, according to Wei. As data gathered by DIGITIMES Research indicates, in 2022 Chinese IDMs only accounted for approximately 2% of global IDM revenues. In contrast, American IDMs accounted for approximately 42%.
Facing US restrictions on Chinese advanced chip manufacturing capabilities, Wei also brought up the possibility of merging software-defined chips with near-memory computing as a way out.
