Why aren't all the most advanced chips directly described as switching circuits by teachers?

As we all know, at present, China imports more chips than oil, with an annual import volume exceeding one trillion. In recent years, many domestic enterprises are also making great efforts to build their own chips to break the foreign blockade. On August 8, Hangzhou announced the mass production of the world's first 7nm chip, which caused a sensation for a while. But in fact, this chip was produced by TSMC, and this domestic company only designed and mass-produced it after TSMC just had the production capacity.

So some people say there is nothing to brag about. Designing a chip is not particularly difficult. For example, foreign countries banned China, the rise of Huawei Kirin, the release of Xiaomi chip, and the 7nm of Hangjia Nanyunzhi this time. The key is chip manufacturing. For example, TSMC is currently 7nm, and the strongest SMIC talent in China is mass production 14nm, which is two generations behind. So is it difficult to make a chip or design a chip? Actually, this question is not easy to answer. After all, both of them are more difficult, and most companies don't. However, if we really want to compare them together, the manufacturing is definitely more difficult, so this is why the domestic chip design is so advanced and reaches the first-class level, but the manufacturing technology is two generations behind. Judging from the current international chip companies, there are many companies that can design and reach the world-class level. For example, there are MediaTek and Huawei Kirin in China. This time, Jian 'an Yun Zhi, Baidu and Ali are all designing chips. There are many mining machinery companies in Huaqiang North, all of which have reached the world-class level.

Abroad, there are world giants such as Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple, Intel and AMD. There are only two or three companies in the world that can manufacture and reach the first-class level, TSMC, Intel and Samsung. The strongest technology in China is that SMIC is at least two generations behind TSMC. From this perspective, we can see that the threshold for manufacturing chips is much higher than that for designing chips, which is why there are so few companies that can manufacture them.

On the other hand, compared with chip design, chip manufacturing needs more high-end equipment and some cutting-edge materials, and it is highly dependent on upstream equipment suppliers and material suppliers. For domestic enterprises, many of these high-end equipment and even materials are forbidden, but after the design is authorized, it is relatively easy, so it is too difficult for most domestic enterprises to only design and not manufacture.