Recently, some netizens left a message to me, saying that the United States and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., LTD., currently have a chip technology of 3nm, while SMIC only has 14nm, which is a big difference. If war breaks out, won't the weapons lag far behind? Because one uses a 3nm chip, the other uses a 14nm chip, the more advanced the chip technology, the stronger the performance, the weapon will be more powerful.

To be honest, many people may have such a question, because in the past, these fabs claimed that advanced technology can bring higher performance, lower power consumption...

However, this is generally only for consumer chips.

For example, 3nm mobile phone chip, it is better than 14nm mobile phone chip, do not believe you take Apple A15 and Apple A9 compared, A15 directly crushed A9.

Why should we improve the technology of the chip? The reason is that after the technology is improved, the chip of the same size has higher performance and lower power consumption. Pay attention to this prerequisite ，At the same volume.

The performance of a chip, in fact, is ultimately determined by the number of transistors in it, a transistor represents a logic switch, the more logic switch, the stronger the performance.

If you don't take into account the size of the chip, a 20nm chip, as long as you have more transistors than a 3nm chip, then the performance of a 20nm chip will be better than a 3nm chip, but the size of a 20nm chip will be much bigger than a 3nm chip.

Therefore, the process is not the only standard to determine the performance, but in the mobile phone, due to the limited internal space, so the need for small size, strong performance, to constantly upgrade the process.

Military grade products, in fact, do not care about the volume, really want to achieve high performance, take 20nm, even 40nm process, make the chip bigger, can achieve high performance, this point we do not have to worry about.

In fact, military weapons need chips, do not pursue performance, the pursuit is stable, reliable.

In military weapons, there are few general chips such as CPU and Soc that need comprehensive computing power, but more professional chips such as ASIC, FPGA and ASSP.

These chips focus on the execution of a certain instruction, do not need to be very high performance, as long as stable and reliable on the line, and the experiment shows that the more advanced the process of the chip, the worse its stability, the more backward the process of the chip, stability is actually better, do not believe you look at the rover, in order to stability, still using 130nm chip.

From the perspective of the global situation, the vast majority of military weapons and fighter jets are using 65nm and 90nm chips. For example, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a large number of weapons, aircraft and tank chips are 90nm and 65nm.

So you don't need to worry about the chip technology that makes us backward in military weapons. It doesn't exist.

We don't have EUV photolithography, but we do have another type of device, electron beam exposure machine, which is very similar in function to photolithography machine. It uses high-energy electron beam exposure to make chips. Its processing accuracy can reach less than 10 nanometers. At present, the advanced process of superconducting quantum chip in China is produced with such a machine.

But its efficiency is very low, so can not mass production of chips, but small production is actually no problem, military weapons are regardless of cost, and not mass production, so even if really want to produce 10nm below the chip, it can be achieved, don't worry.