Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger believes that sanctions imposed against China's semiconductor production sector by the US, Japan, and the Netherlands are restraining the development of process technologies beyond 7nm in China for now. While China will continue to develop its semiconductor prowess and design more advanced chipmaking tools domestically, it is about a decade behind the global semiconductor industry and will stay this way, Gelsinger thinks.

"The export policies that have been put in place recently, we have seen the Dutch [policies] in place, the US policies Japanese policies, sort of put a floor in the 10 to 7nm range for [the Chinese semiconductor industry]," Gelsinger said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, broadcast by CNBC. "We are racing to go below 2nm and then 1.5nm, and you know we see no end to that in sight."For now, China-based foundry SMIC has a 7nm-class process technology that can be used to make high-volume complex application processors for smartphones, which is about five and a half years behind TSMC and Samsung. Meanwhile, according to media reports, Shanghai Huali Microelectronics Corp. (HLMC) began trial production of chips on its 14nm FinFET-based fabrication process in 2020, which means that it is now nine to 10 years behind TSMC. 

Yet, both SMIC and HLMC use tools produced in the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S., as well as pure raw materials from Japan. Without access to them, Chinese companies will have to develop their wafer fab equipment and means to purify gases, resists, and other chemicals for leading-edge chip production. For now, they are about ten years behind the global chip industry, and while they will evolve, they will stay about a decade behind for the foreseeable future, according to Gelsinger.

"It is not like China is not going to keep innovating, but this is a highly interconnected industry," Gelsinger said. "The mirrors of Zeiss, the equipment assembly of ASML, the chemicals and resist in Japan, the mask making of Intel. All of those together, I think this is a 10-year gap, and I think it is a sustainable 10-year gap with the export policies that have been put in place."

Modern semiconductor process technologies require a concerted effort by the whole global industry, plenty of fundamental research, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on R&D. Whether or not China will be able to handle all of this alone is up to debate. Meanwhile, if China is completely cut off from advanced chipmaking tools and technologies, its semiconductor companies may try to reverse engineer and copy equipment that they can lay their hands on to close the gap with the global chip industry. This is not exactly a sustainable method, but they simply may have no choice.

By Anton Shilov