coolieno99
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Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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It is okay for having offices but the dumb part is not consider they would be watched like a hawk
If it were another Chinese company, it is fine. But ZTE is like under microscope.
Probably shouldn't have plead guilty back in 2017. Once a company admits guilt, they become an easy target for the court system.
Better way would be to not admit anything and let the case drag on..
ZTE was hoping that it would get off the hood like other non-Chinese companies by paying a fine. It didn't know that it is a trap by giving the US the rope to hang them.
China May Win in AI Computing
Leveraging Hybrid Bonding as an Alternative to Dimensional Scaling
The technology driver for the next decade is AI. Quoting Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson, “” Dickerson has been traveling the world talking to chipmakers and policymakers about a $10 trillion question: how do we capture the economic opportunity of AI, which will transform nearly every industry and institution over the coming years? Gary showed this chart, presenting the 1,000x challenge to the semiconductor industry.
The required improvement in power performance, to support the demand of AI computing.
In fact, the AI challenge is a moving target as computing demands are growing by 2X about every 3.5 months.
In recent years, there has been a buildup of tension in U.S.-China relations resulting in the U.S. blocking China from securing access to advanced semiconductor technology and equipment. This includes access to advanced tools such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Accordingly, it was reported that only TSMC, Samsung, and Intel have stayed in the race at technology node scaling below 10nm. Hence, it makes sense for Chinese firms to focus alternative resources on mature chip tech, say analysts.
This could explain the adoption of hybrid bonding as a core technology by multiple Chinese corporations. Hybrid bonding allows them to replace dimensional node scaling with system-level 3D scaling.
In August 2018, YMTC officially launched its ground-breaking architecture at the Flash Memory Summit and won the Best of Show award. For its 3D NAND product, it uses two semiconductor manufacturing lines, one for the 3D NAND multi-level memory and one for the peripheral (memory control) circuits as illustrated below.
Xtacking: using hybrid bonding to stack periphery on top of the 3D NAND memory fabric.
In September 2020, another Chinese company, IC League, published the results of its heterogeneous integration technology on chip (HITOC), an AI-oriented IC development, in a paper titled .
IC League’s heterogeneous integration technology on chip (HITOC).
Quoting from the paper, “With HITOC, we have two wafers, logic wafer, and memory wafer, bonded (using Hybrid Bonding) together [see the diagram above]. On the logic wafer, we have pools of processing units. Underneath the logic pool on the other wafer are pools of DRAM arrays.” The results reported by IC League were of better than orders of magnitude of overall improvement as could be seen in the table below.
Fig. 5 HITOC technology the Sunrise device vs. conventional 2D alternative devices.
At ISSCC 2022, Alibaba presented a more than 1,000 x improvement for AI computing devices using hybrid bonding in a paper titled “184QPS/W 64Mb/mm2 3D Logic-to-DRAM Hybrid Bonding with Process-Near- Memory Engine for Recommendation System.”
Like i say before no everything is about EUV, in this game you have to dominate it all, packaging was seen as the poor man, low level part of the semiconductor industry but looks like no anymore. Here were that SMEE new advanced packaging machine could pay off and why the company landed in the unverified list.
we've been talking about packaging this whole time. It looks like we guessed correctly - that packaging was an underexplored aspect of chipmaking that would be the next place to see great gains, and China will be a first mover in advancing it.
Chinese EDA startup BTD Technology raised nearly RMB100 million in angel round financing
BTD Technology(比昂芯科技), an EDA startup based in Shenzhen, announced that it completed angel round of financing, raising nearly RMB100 million ($15.82 million) last month.
The investors include InnoAngel Fund and Fosun Capital, The well-known Chinese IC investment institution Oriza Holdings also joined the financing. The capital raised will be used to upgrade high-precision and large-capacity simulation platforms from digital circuits to analog and RF circuits.
BTD was established in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs in the EDA and AI fields and is committed to building a new generation of EDA platforms. The company's core products are high-accuracy chip simulation and signoff tools based on distributed computing, as well as high-performance interconnection and computing IPs.
BTD’s target customers cover the three major semiconductor fields of chip design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing.
The company has successfully launched BTDSim, the first full-featured RF circuit simulation software in China, and BTDesign, the only post-Moore design and digital-analog hybrid verification platform in China. Its product has won the favor of the first-tier companies in the semiconductor industry.
Chen Datong, chairman of Oriza Holdings, said that EDA tools are indispensable parts of the semiconductor industry, China’s domestic EDA software demand is increasing rapidly. With an experienced team able to launch new products, BTD is expected to become a leading EDA provider in China.
In the article is also written "The results were achieved while using a relatively old process node of 55 nm for the logic"
If it is confirmed, then this is a real breakthrough, and to me it is the most important point of this article. It means state-of-the-art performance in AI could be achieved with semiconductor equipment already (almost) localized in China.
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