This was of course disinformation produced by SMIC and the Chinese Communist Party with the goal of trying to see if they could convince ASML (or rather Congress and the US government) to abandon the CHIPS Act sanctions. They did it again by lying about the chips in the new “Huawei flagship” which, upon further investigation, were not genuine SMIC chipsets at all as they claim, but simply their old stock of Kirin 9000 chipsets that they received from TSMC before the sanctions. entered into force.

As far as we know, none of this is true, although the Chinese government has stolen and “duplicated” some of the methods for producing smaller nodes (14nm) through all sorts of thefts at other chip companies (as well as ASML’s attempt), but again, on… As far as we know, there is little use for this and they can only make “logical” lithography without other important gates (?) like memory, which actually makes them only useful for ASICs, for example, but not “regular” chips (like a smartphone CPU /SOC, etc.) and they still have to develop (or steal) all kinds of production methods.

Please correct me if I am wrong because I followed him in the last month a little less than before. But since this whole story quickly died a silent death, we can assume that if they actually managed to produce this on a large scale, they would shout it proudly from the rooftops. By the way, the former CEO of TSMC says they can do 5nm, but with all the caveats and caveats, including terrible yields.

It seems to me that honest players like ASML, TSMC and Japanese companies will always, or certainly for a long time to come, have the advantage over Chinese state-owned companies SMIC, etc., who are simply trying to steal as much money as possible. Possible from third parties, because everything ASML does etc. is simply too complex – although the Chinese government won’t try to steal more until after the CHIPS Act and ASML simply has to keep innovating against competitors (whether they’re honest or not).