A reappraisal of China's semiconductor strategy

ZeEa5KPul said:

@s002wjh, so what do you think should be done? A lot of Negative Nancy defeatists crying and complaining, but not a single one offering a constructive solution. Should Xi go to Trump on bent knee and beg him to stop the technology embargo? Maybe he should offer him a 99 year lease on Beijing, how about that?

And China doesn't need tens of thousands of foreign electrical engineers, it graduates more than enough. It needs a handful (measured in tens) of the most senior engineers like Liang Mong Song with very specific technical knowledge. One individual, Liang, managed to advance SMIC's 14nm program by a year. It didn't take thousands or tens of thousands to accomplish that, just one guy.

As for the specialized equipment, the proposal I gave in the first post takes care of that.

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China not only need TOP/cream of the crop engineer but also many senior/chief engineers, they can't offer everyone with free housing, $200k USD+ salary. I guarantee under that one individual there are dozens if not hundreds engineer work under him. there is no UNO in semiconductor, its team effort. The guy might have good idea or team lead, but from idea to application to production involve alot various engineer. the GPU part of Intel CPU require hundreds engineer to design/research etc.

China can start attract talent from taiwan/SK/japan but attracting from US is bit harder, not only engineer in US pay higher, but also living condition is good. as china living standard get better, more ppl will move there. ppl move to US due to its living standard, good housing, good school, etc etc.

PeoplesPoster said:

Lol no, I literally help run a company that helps China’s push towards advanced manufacturing. Heavily used in aerospace, medical, and automotive. We deal with high level negotiations in the private sector and gov’t. If what we are doing isn’t considered worthwhile to China’s growth I don’t know what would be. Sure we get support, but it doesn’t get you past most of the red tape and hassle.

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It's good that what you're doing helps China advance, and I hope you're well-paid for that. It's also good that you take pride in your work, and have a healthy sense of self-esteem. I'm sure that since you're educated and worldly enough to be an executive (I'm assuming "help run" doesn't mean secretary or something) at a company involved in advanced manufacturing, it hasn't escaped you that China is still - despite all its scale and power - a developing country. Things like

PeoplesPoster said:

As mentioned before, living standards, pollution, food safety are all concerns.

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afflict all developing countries, sadly. You've certainly also noticed that China is a victim of unrestrained hybrid warfare by the West. It is a country besieged, so the defensive measures you point out

PeoplesPoster said:

In addition anyone from the IT or tech industry expects open access to information and even with a VPN that is painfully difficult in China

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are a necessary evil. No one thinks the Great Firewall is a virtue in itself; life gave China lemons and it had to make lemonade. The Firewall, for all it inconvenienced you, also allowed the likes of Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to flourish - a feat unique in the world. Nowhere else, even in developed Europe, is there an indigenous tech industry.

PeoplesPoster said:

Everything from setting up bank accounts to purchasing property is difficult or effectively off limits. Also even if you end up making tons of cash in China, your stuck with transferring at most 50k USD out of China per year.

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The capital controls are another necessary evil. Money has no homeland, and the wealthy care nothing for country, only their personal comfort. If those controls were not in place, then the nouveau riche would move all of their money out of the country to blow up housing bubbles in Sydney and Vancouver. China would be starved of capital, and a company like the one you work for might not receive the kind of investment it's receiving (with subsequent effects on your remuneration). It would be lovely to live in a world where capital controls are unnecessary, just as it would be to live in a world where walls (fire and otherwise) aren't necessary - but until we do, stringently applied laws will have to supplement anemic patriotic sentiment.

PeoplesPoster said:

I've been working in China for the past 4 years and not a day goes by where something isn't hugely annoying because the system just isn't geared to be easy to navigate for non Chinese citizens and its just getting worse.

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I don't know your personal circumstances, so I can't say why you're working in China. Maybe you're a dedicated careerist and think a China stint would look good on your résumé, maybe you stepped on the wrong toes at the home office and were banished, I don't know. But I do know you've worked in China and are still working in China, so it can't be all that bad.

China doesn't need to be Paradise-on-Earth to attract foreign talent; it just has to be just good enough to attract just enough of the people it needs for just long enough until it cultivates its own talent.

ZeEa5KPul said:

It's good that what you're doing helps China advance, and I hope you're well-paid for that. It's also good that you take pride in your work, and have a healthy sense of self-esteem. I'm sure that since you're educated and worldly enough to be an executive (I'm assuming "help run" doesn't mean secretary or something) at a company involved in advanced manufacturing, it hasn't escaped you that China is still - despite all its scale and power - a developing country. Things like


afflict all developing countries, sadly. You've certainly also noticed that China is a victim of unrestrained hybrid warfare by the West. It is a country besieged, so the defensive measures you point out


are a necessary evil. No one thinks the Great Firewall is a virtue in itself; life gave China lemons and it had to make lemonade. The Firewall, for all it inconvenienced you, also allowed the likes of Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to flourish - a feat unique in the world. Nowhere else, even in developed Europe, is there an indigenous tech industry.


The capital controls are another necessary evil. Money has no homeland, and the wealthy care nothing for country, only their personal comfort. If those controls were not in place, then the nouveau riche would move all of their money out of the country to blow up housing bubbles in Sydney and Vancouver. China would be starved of capital, and a company like the one you work for might not receive the kind of investment it's receiving (with subsequent effects on your remuneration). It would be lovely to live in a world where capital controls are unnecessary, just as it would be to live in a world where walls (fire and otherwise) aren't necessary - but until we do, stringently applied laws will have to supplement anemic patriotic sentiment.


I don't know your personal circumstances, so I can't say why you're working in China. Maybe you're a dedicated careerist and think a China stint would look good on your résumé, maybe you stepped on the wrong toes at the home office and were banished, I don't know. But I do know you've worked in China and are still working in China, so it can't be all that bad.

China doesn't need to be Paradise-on-Earth to attract foreign talent; it just has to be just good enough to attract just enough of the people it needs for just long enough until it cultivates its own talent.

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Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy working in China and as one of the owners I take pride in the company we built. But it could be so much better and easier to operate and live in China and seeing that gap is maddening.

s002wjh said:

China not only need TOP/cream of the crop engineer but also many senior/chief engineers, they can't offer everyone with free housing, $200k USD+ salary. I guarantee under that one individual there are dozens if not hundreds engineer work under him. there is no UNO in semiconductor, its team effort. The guy might have good idea or team lead, but from idea to application to production involve alot various engineer. the GPU part of Intel CPU require hundreds engineer to design/research etc.

China can start attract talent from taiwan/SK/japan but attracting from US is bit harder, not only engineer in US pay higher, but also living condition is good. as china living standard get better, more ppl will move there. ppl move to US due to its living standard, good housing, good school, etc etc.

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I hate to cite the US as a good example of anything (I really, really do), but when the Sputnik satellite streaked across the void, did America put its head in its hands and weep, "Woe is me! How will I ever attract rocket scientists from the Soviet Union? They're not even allowed to leave!!" Or did the US government go to every high school student in the country and say, "Hey, kid! Here's a scholarship and a pencil. GTFIH, it's physics."

America really does have a fantastical arrogance I wish China had some of. Enough of the soul-crushing "hide-and-bide, feel the river by crossing the stones" tripe, China isn't poorer than sub-Saharan Africa anymore. Get a little big-headed and dare to dream.

Alright, guess I'll weigh in on this. Attracting foreign talent, and I mean truly foreign, not sea turtles, has it upsides and downsides. The upside is that when you are lagging badly in a field, hiring a couple of foreign experts to point you in the right direction is a quick boost, but the downside is that the trust level is not there and you are putting power and resources in the hands of someone who is aligned with nothing but money. If he'd leave his mother country to help China for money, he'd sell China out for more money. Sea turtles are expected to show loyalty to their blood and of course that is not always the case no matter what group of people you are talking about, there can be no more stringent mass screen for loyalty than DNA. The US attracts a lot of talent but they are facing the problems in that those talents are not loyal because they are not American. When offered more money, they leave; when offered a payout, they sell information, and others just want to send the data that they collected with American resources back to their colleagues in their home country for cooperation. The advantage to the US approach is that talent from all over the world is available for target; the disadvantage is that no one has any reason to be loyal if they were just lured with material offerings. Ideologically, they cannot be bought. China's advantage is that those of Chinese blood are less likely to sell out or be a foreign agent; the disadvantage is that the recruitment is more or less limited to Chinese overseas talent. But that's not so bad because there are a ton of talented, highly educated Chinese overseas and they are often feeling increasingly discriminated against and given incentive to go back home.

China's biggest weakness is that it started its tech march far later than the developed nations, but its strength is that it has more domestic talent (more population and more STEM graduates per capita leaving China with a huge edge in number of STEM graduates) than the rest of the developed world combined. This means that once China gets its foot in the door, it can move forward, accelerate, and never look back, beating all of its rivals combined in every field on its own power alone. But where it hasn't got enough of a foot in the door yet, it would benefit from foreign assistance. Of course we cannot know in every field where China is and it will be up to the CCP to decide on a per field basis how to recruit talent, what kind of talent to recruit, and what incentives to offer in order to strike a correct balance between advancing Chinese tech quickly and keeping it controlled in Chinese hands.

One thing is for sure: it is not China's style to fill itself with foreign talent and let them run the show. China's goal is not to become another successful ethnically-diverse society like America; China's goal is to become a superpower nation built by the Chinese, run by the Chinese, for the Chinese. We have confidence in our own ability and would rather develop solidly and surely rather than quickly at any cost. China's Olympic team is all Chinese; they don't purchase Australian swimmers, Eastern European shot put athletes, Jamaican sprinters, or Kenyan marathon runners. To China, such a gold medal won is worth less than its weight in scrap metal. (Luckily, our thinking genes are far better than our running genes LOL)

manqiangrexue said:

Alright, guess I'll weigh in on this. Attracting foreign talent, and I mean truly foreign, not sea turtles, has it upsides and downsides. The upside is that when you are lagging badly in a field, hiring a couple of foreign experts to point you in the right direction is a quick boost, but the downside is that the trust level is not there and you are putting power and resources in the hands of someone who is aligned with nothing but money. If he'd leave his mother country to help China for money, he'd sell China out for more money. Sea turtles are expected to show loyalty to their blood and of course that is not always the case no matter what group of people you are talking about, there can be no more stringent mass screen for loyalty than DNA. The US attracts a lot of talent but they are facing the problems in that those talents are not loyal because they are not American. When offered more money, they leave; when offered a payout, they sell information, and others just want to send the data that they collected with American resources back to their colleagues in their home country for cooperation. The advantage to the US approach is that talent from all over the world is available for target; the disadvantage is that no one has any reason to be loyal if they were just lured with material offerings. Ideologically, they cannot be bought. China's advantage is that those of Chinese blood are less likely to sell out or be a foreign agent; the disadvantage is that the recruitment is more or less limited to Chinese overseas talent. But that's not so bad because there are a ton of talented, highly educated Chinese overseas and they are often feeling increasingly discriminated against and given incentive to go back home.

China's biggest weakness is that it started its tech march far later than the developed nations, but its strength is that it has more domestic talent (more population and more STEM graduates per capita leaving China with a huge edge in number of STEM graduates) than the rest of the developed world combined. This means that once China gets its foot in the door, it can move forward, accelerate, and never look back, beating all of its rivals combined in every field on its own power alone. But where it hasn't got enough of a foot in the door yet, it would benefit from foreign assistance. Of course we cannot know in every field where China is and it will be up to the CCP to decide on a per field basis how to recruit talent, what kind of talent to recruit, and what incentives to offer in order to strike a correct balance between advancing Chinese tech quickly and keeping it controlled in Chinese hands.

One thing is for sure: it is not China's style to fill itself with foreign talent and let them run the show. China's goal is not to become another successful ethnically-diverse society like America; China's goal is to become a superpower nation built by the Chinese, run by the Chinese, for the Chinese. We have confidence in our own ability and would rather develop solidly and surely rather than quickly at any cost. China's Olympic team is all Chinese; they don't purchase Australian swimmers, Eastern European shot put athletes, Jamaican sprinters, or Kenyan marathon runners. To China, such a gold medal won is worth less than its weight in scrap metal. (Luckily, our thinking genes are far better than our running genes LOL)

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What if under a cold war scenario, the best STEM practioners were lprevented from leaving like Qian Xuesen.?

B.I.B. said:

What if under a cold war scenario, the best STEM practioners were lprevented from leaving like Qian Xuesen.?

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The US cannot prevent all best STEM practitioners from leaving. Qian was a renown rocket scientist; that is a militarily sensitive field that even without a cold war, prominant scientists are not permitted to just up and go work for a rival country.

I'm sure the US will do its best to stem the flow of talent to China but China will do its best to attract these talents. In the end, it will depend on what the people want to do. Trying to prevent hundred of thousands of scientists from leaving your country is like trying to keep a swarm of flies contained in dilapidated house full of cracks and broken windows.

s002wjh said:

intel/AMD still dominated PC/server microprocessors, beside its just an example US has many company thats top notch, xilinx/intel/amd/TI/ etc etc. semiconductor is very broad area. SK/taiwan is good at certain area, but alot area are dominated by various US company. attract talent with experience is the fast way to speed up R&D, short from direct purchase.

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And you think China does not have domestic microprocessor they do If I am not wrong there are 3 or 4 competing microprocessor right now about to go on production Here is one of them
INTEL does not even have AI chips Nvidia does So yeah INTEL is outdated now. AI is the next big thing in semiconductor and China is leading Once in a while there is this paradigm change that completely leaving existing champion in the dust like SOC, AI, 5G



China’s new 8-core KaiXian x86 CPU is capable of matching Intel’s 14nm Core i5



The Chinese government has been working with VIA Technologies to create their own x86 processor that is able to deliver genuine PC performance on par with the Intel chips it’s trying to replace. The new KaiXian KX-6000 CPU from Zhaoxin has been demonstrated for the first time, promising a 50% performance boost over its previous chip, and the potential to rival a Kaby Lake Core i5 processor.

That’s pretty impressive given that we’re talking about a modern 14nm Intel i5 being given a run for its money by a 16nm Chinese chip. VIA is one of the few companies in the world with an x86 license able to create new processors that are compatible with the existing PC environment, and the Zhaoxin joint venture with China’s government seems to be paying off.

We don’t know when actual commercial shipments of the new KX-6000 processors are likely to start, but it’s expected to be a 2019 launch. Though because the CPUs are being funded by the government, it’s unlikely that you’ll see the chips on the shelves of Amazon or PC World anytime soon, or bother our guide to the either.


has a breakdown of the KX-6000 processor, detailing the differences between the earlier in the year. That was another eight-core processor, but was built on the 28nm lithography and could only hit around 2GHz. That meant its competitive performance was way down compared to the likes of Intel or AMD’s x86 chips.

Zhaoxin KX-6000 Intel Core i5 7600
Cores 8 4
Threads 8 4
Clockspeed 3GHz 4.1GHz
L2 cache 8MB 6MB
iGPU DirectX 11.1 DirectX 12
Lithography 16nm FinFET 14nm Intel
But by using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET production process Zhaoxin’s new CPU is capable of hitting around 3GHz with its eight cores and sit inside a much smaller slice of silicon. Like the Intel i5 it’s supposedly competing with, the KX-6000 has an integrated GPU, in itself compatible with DirectX 11.1 gaming. It also sports an integrated memory controller for DDR4 RAM up to 3,200MHz, as well as interfaces for the standard I/O too.



In short, it should be completely compatible with any Windows environment because of its x86, 64-bit nature, and the support of the SSE 4.2 and AVX instruction sets.

While the performance claims of the KX-6000 CPU are yet to be independently confirmed, if it’s offering a 50% improvement from one generation to the next, in just a year, it’s going to be fascinating to see what China and VIA can come up with next. And maybe if they get really competitive we’ll see the chips eventually setting foot outside of the People’s Republic.

i disagree sea turtle will be loyal to china either, unless they and their family live in china. consider most high tech company in US are made up majority of immigrants, its not like indian/chinese/other immigrant have loyalty to US gov. they are there due to living standard.
if their family is oversea, then china just temporary position. most ppl will go where they feel comfortable whether is sea turtle or foreigner. if they like there, they have family there, then their strong tie is there in that country, then they will least likely to move to another country.

s002wjh said:

i'm sure there are hundreds, but china need tens thousands. each year US H1B has about what 65k cap, that has been going on for decades. if china can't find talents then its very hard to become self sufficient. actually it need alot engineers to make work, training and practice take time. for every 10 or so fresh out school, you need one senior engineer to watch and check their work, for every dozen senior engineer, it need a chief engineer so on and on, its a pyramid. even small part of microprocessor might require hundreds engineer to work on.

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And you think China does not have engineering talent that is kind of weir because China graduate roughly 4 million engineer every year and they have all kind of research institute private of SOE
Huwei alone has 90000 researcher and spread world wide

Invest more money in R&D than apple
The company was founded in 1987 by . Initially focused on manufacturing , Huawei has since expanded its business to include building telecommunications networks, providing operational and and equipment to enterprises inside and outside of China, and manufacturing communications devices for the consumer market. Huawei had over 188,000 employees as of September 2018, around 76,000 of them engaged in

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.

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It has 21 R&D institutes around the world,

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and in the late 2010s, opened the dedicated

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. As of 2017, the company invested US$13.8 billion in R&D.

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Huawei has deployed its products and services in more than 170 countries, and as of 2011 it served 45 of the 50 largest operators.[

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] Its networks, numbering over 1,500, reach one third of the world's population.Huawei overtook in 2012 as the largest telecommunications-equipment manufacturer in the world, and overtook in 2018 as the second-largest manufacturer of in the world, behind . It ranks 72nd on the list. In December 2018, Huawei reported that its annual revenue had risen to US$108.5 billion in 2018 (a 21% increase over 2017).