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Do not let American enterprises sell semiconductor design software to Chinese enterprises, two members of Congress ask the Department of Commerce.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) And Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) Yesterday requested that Electronic Design Automation (EDA) instruments be designated as ‘fundamental technology’ by the Department of Commerce. The label requires companies to obtain export licenses if they want to sell EDA tools to Chinese companies. The congressmen also demanded in their letter to the Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, that any factory worldwide that uses American instruments be prevented from selling 14 nm or better chips to Chinese companies.
The current cutting edge in semiconductors is the 5 nm node, and currently only Samsung and the Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC produce chips commercially at the node. Limiting your Chinese businesses to 16 nm or larger can keep four generations at the forefront.
Semiconductors are incredibly important to China, which imported more than $ 300 billion worth of chips last year. That is more than the country spends on imported oil.
If the US government were to cut off Chinese companies from EDA instruments, it would be a significant blow to the country’s already backward semiconductor industry. Chinese semiconductor manufacturers are almost entirely dependent on foreign tools and software, and the country’s own EDA software is eight to ten years behind. There are EDA companies based outside the US, but US companies are particularly dominant, according to some estimates, such as Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, about 90 percent of the market.
Behind fast
The Chinese semiconductor market has always been at the forefront, although it has caught up in recent years as companies such as SMIC have recruited strongly from TSMC and Samsung. The company produces chips at 14 nm in decent numbers, and last year it announced its “N + 1” node, which he says is 57 percent more efficient and 20 percent faster. But the yields of the new process are reportedly low, and it probably represents a dead end, unless SMIC can obtain an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine from the photolithography company ASML.
EUV is required to fabricate semiconductors at 5 nm or less. The technology uses 13.5 nm UV light to etch functions on a wafer. Existing deep ultraviolet (DUV) tools use 193 nm light. Even with the clever hacks the industry has implemented to make DUV work on smaller nodes, yields below 7 nm with DUV would be too low to be commercially viable.
However, it is unlikely that SMIC will ever get its hands on ASML’s most advanced machine. SMIC placed an order for an EUV machine in 2018, but the order was suspended by government officials in the Netherlands, where ASML is based. The US government began pressuring Dutch officials to halt sales almost immediately after the order was placed, and a year and a half ago the US, the Netherlands and Japan (where Canon is still a potential supplier of advanced lithographic instruments) ‘. an ad hoc agreement not to sell advanced chipmaking equipment to China.
Cotton and McCaul’s request to prevent China from acquiring advanced EDA software will further stimulate China’s ambitions. As the manufacture of semiconductors became more sophisticated, the tools needed to manufacture chips progressed rapidly. If China does not acquire EUV, it will probably put the country back a decade or more. The Chinese government is spending more than $ 1 trillion to catapult its semiconductor industry to the forefront, but it is still facing headwinds. For example, it took ASML more than a decade before its EUV tools were ready to be placed in customers’ production lines. Restricting access to Chinese companies to EDA instruments can only contribute to their already major challenges.