China makes progress in its work on abandoning US technology in production of chips

By Alimat Aliyeva

China is moving forward in its efforts to eliminate dependence on American technology in the manufacture of chips. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal newspaper, Azernews reports.

As an example, the publication cites the activities of one of the largest manufacturers of chips and microelectronics in China, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC). The newspaper notes that although SMIC's production processes may be "several generations late" compared to leaders in this field, such as Taiwan's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) or South Korea's Samsung Electronics, the Chinese company is "intensively introducing domestic semiconductor manufacturing equipment."

At the same time, China's dependence on American instruments is decreasing, a source familiar with the matter told the newspaper. "By banning everything, you force the sleeping lion to wake up," a former TSMC employee said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, referring to export restrictions in the field of semiconductors from the United States.

As the publication emphasizes, the desire to produce chips using its own mechanisms will protect China from the sanctions of the United States, which, together with the Netherlands and Japan, have limited the supply of semiconductor manufacturing technologies to China. These measures, on the one hand, undermined China's production capabilities in this area, on the other hand, prompted it to invest more funds, develop and experiment, the newspaper writes.

To fully localize the production of chips, China will need not only to assemble the equipment itself. All its components, as well as the semiconductor wafers themselves, must also be Chinese, The Wall Street Journal points out. As a breakthrough on this path, the publication mentions the Huawei Mate 60 smartphone, which was introduced in August 2023. The mobile device is equipped with a 7-nanometer Kirin 9000S microprocessor, which was developed by Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon and produced by SMIC. In September 2023, Bloomberg, citing data from its own investigation, stated that the chip inside the smartphone was "only a few years" behind advanced American developments.

On October 16, 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced the blacklisting of 13 Chinese companies, as well as the expansion of export restrictions on the supply of chips to China. At the end of January of the same year, it was reported that the Netherlands, the United States and Japan had reached an agreement to limit the supply of semiconductor manufacturing technologies to China. These countries fear that the chips could be used to create advanced military-technical equipment.