The United States in May issued the Export Control Regulations, further increasing the "entity list", explicitly prohibit Huawei and other companies to use U.S. semiconductor equipment and its U.S. technology made of goods.
Haisi, as one of China's largest semiconductor companies, is now able to develop high-grade integrated ICs on its own, but Huawei is not able to produce and process them.
TSMC, which has maintained good mutual cooperation with Huawei, is likely to end its mutual cooperation with Huawei because it uses a lot of US technology and specialized equipment.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC), which is seen as the best alternative to TSMC, and which has received $16 billion in investment from China, also said recently that it would not be able to continue supplying chip manufacturing services to Huawei and other companies until it received permission from the US Department of Commerce to do so.
Even the head of the mainland enterprises are subject to the new U.S. policy, which completely unveiled the shortcomings of the application of Chinese technology.
The special equipment that is crucial to chip manufacturing is the photolithography machine, and although SMIC has completed the production and processing of 14nm chips at this stage, the special equipment for the photolithography machine it uses is imported from abroad.
At the beginning of 2018, Semiconductor Manufacturing International purchased an EUV photolithography machine from ASML in the Netherlands at a price of 150 million dollars, which has not yet been obtained, which has highlighted how passive our country is at the level of optical high technology.
China is also a company committed to breaking the photolithography technology, in which the most iconic is Shanghai Microelectronics.
Not long ago, Shanghai Microelectronics announced that it would deliver a domestic lithography machine in 2021-2022, but it is a 28nm lithography machine.
To understand, the market demand for cell phone processor sales market has come to the period of 5nm, 28nm is very obvious technology lags behind a lot.
I believe that in the vast majority of people's view, the biggest shortcoming of the Chinese chip manufacturing companies, represented by SMIC, is the lithography. While lithography is a primary challenge, it is not SMIC's biggest shortcoming.
Not long ago, Ma Zuoping, a micro-nano-electronics scientist and Chinese-American Academy of Engineering member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, emphasized that the key to SMIC lies in the number and quality of talented people.
"Excellent talents are the core competitive advantage for company development." Huawei released a "Super Genius" program last year, intending to attract 200-300 young geniuses around the world with high salaries.
Alibaba specializes in creating a scientific research department called "Dharma Academy", which has already teamed up with 234 teams of scientific researchers from 99 research departments in 13 countries to study cutting-edge technologies.
It has also attracted first-class talents such as Michael I. Jordan, an American academician and a globally renowned master in the artificial intelligence technology industry.
TSMC has also been sitting at the top of the world's integrated ic processing and manufacturing industry by virtue of the many specialized technical talents in its products.
Looking back at SMIC, there are only 300-400 talented technical backbones, and the overall quality of the elite team of talented people is not excellent, so in the long run, it will certainly continue to be constrained by others.