It seems that the current tensions between china and the us around chip is because china is using us chip designs and chip making tools to create population control and surveillance high tech.
If SMIC is really at "7nm" (namely have their own EUV litographer), then it is just a matter of a few years of R&D to reach the "2nm" and they will have homegrown population control and surveillance high tech.
I thought about multi-patterning, but as far as my limited knowledge goes on the matter, "7nm" with DUV multipatterning is not a thing, or at best an abomination.
If they are going DUV "7nm" multipatterning abomination, they would have to design, improve and build their EUV litographer.
It means many top scientists and engineers, positively motivated (the hard part in an authoritative regime) and honest (being smart is no guarantee here), in a magnificient R&D center with, literaly, unlimited "powers". And even with that, ASML/Zeiss/(the EUV litographer people) have decades of know-how.
Then there is the wafer people, the nano-alignment equipment ppl, the ion implantation ppl, the photomask ppl, the vacuum and similar specialists, the ultra-clean fabs builders/maintainers, the robots designers (dirty humans are not welcome in fabs), etc, etc. No wonder the us administration is putting down hundreds of billions of $.
That said, if there is some nasty usage of high tech chips on that side, on the other side they are following with open-source performant risc-v core design, and that is in direct line of getting rid of the toxic IP tied to arm/x86 ISAs, and to have interoperalibity at the assembly level (aka no more compilers). Then, if china is not able to pull that tour de force off, it seems risc-v performant implementations will be "closed design", from the US, or maybe India does plan to open their design...
Yeah, we are talking 1000s of "rare" people with nearly unlimited powers, and probably decades, if ever.
If SMIC is really at "7nm" (namely have their own EUV litographer), then it is just a matter of a few years of R&D to reach the "2nm" and they will have homegrown population control and surveillance high tech.