Taiwan National Science Council believes China is 10 years behind TSMC

TSMC
(Image credit: TSMC)

According to United Daily News, Wu Cheng-wen, the head of Taiwan’s National Science Council, believes mainland China’s semiconductor industry is more than ten years behind Taiwan’s. While some believe that Taiwan’s chip sector is only three years ahead of that in mainland China, Wu Cheng-wen says that as TSMC advances to 2nm, its China-based peer can barely produce 7nm chips. But there is a significant catch.

Wu Cheng-wen expressed skepticism during a session at the Legislative Yuan’s Education and Culture Committee, where he was invited to discuss Taiwan’s research sustainability and policy communication. He responded to questions about a Japanese media report — based on an examination of the application processor in Huawei’s latest smartphone — suggesting that China’s semiconductor capabilities were rapidly closing in on TSMC’s, only lagging by three years. However, Wu believes the gap is still significant, possibly exceeding ten years, especially with TSMC’s continued development of advanced manufacturing processes.

TOPICS
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • Blastomonas
    Next week there will be an article stating that China is getting ready to
    release its first 2nm chips..

    Given the huge resources and determination that China has, the gap can only be maintained if Taiwan increase their rate of development.

    I would not get too comfortable with the idea that China are 10 years behind. I bet that it is far less than this.
    Reply