They are scared because the higher ups in the government no longer believe in the United States. If you don’t even have faith in your own country, what can you have faith in?
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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They are scared because the higher ups in the government no longer believe in the United States. If you don’t even have faith in your own country, what can you have faith in?
I totally agree that US firms would try their hardest to not get hit by sanctions. But the reality is that even if they are able to develop equivalent tools outside of America, it would be viewed with the same suspicion by Chinese companies. And I don't blame them.
In the short term, China will continue to buy whatever tools that are available from American firms, but that will change as soon as domestic firms can scale up.
It's not easy for China to draw talents from Western countries. However, it is probably quite easy for China to draw Chinese American talents and from Taiwan/South Korea. I think they are already doing that.
At this point, NAURA impact is the unclear one for me. Aside from adding some companies to UVL, it seems like most of the sanctions are just formalizing what they've already done (like no equipment under 16nm, no advanced GPUs and such).
As for decoupling, I think this is one direction. US is really not capable of decoupling its own production from Chinese supply chain. Where are they going to get silicon or noble gas?
The question is whether we get a Western market that will stop buying/selling from/to China or one where only America refuses to sell to China? Those are completely different things. It will take Chinese soft/hard power to ensure we get to the latter scenario.
For example, China needs to make it clear to Dutch government that banning Arfi scanners will have serious consequences. For example, how would ASML deal with SMEE or someone else from China flooding the market with cheaper scanners? Keep in mind that SMEE already has 40% of world wide back end scanner market. Aside from that, it can cooperate with big European IDMs like Infineon or ST to open up fabs in China that use a lot of Chinese equipments and then achieve wider adoption. It seems to me that Chinese tool makers just need to scale up quickly to give rest of the world more options.
If it's not about elections, then why did all these laws come out right before the midterms? Yes, there is a collective freak out in DC. However, they also aimed these policies to be released just at a time where they can tell American public that they are tough on China.
Even the restrictions they put through seem to be very rushed and without any input from people who would know better. This kind of stuff is deeply damaging for American businesses.
As for your other complaint, I would say that you should only be concerned from reading Dylan Patel's post if you believe that China has not de-americanized its technology. Because as we've discussed above, they've basically secured no cooperation from anyone else.
I feel like the entire thing is a huge reaction to the SMIC 7nm news and super computers. American politicians just aren't that bright.
If they didn't spend so much time freaking out, someone could've told them that the so called "SMIC 7 nm" was just N+1 design that was probably better than all of the N+1/10nm chips from TSMC/Samsung, but not as dense as the latest Intel 10 nm process.
I wonder what they will do when SMIC comes out with its "5 nm chip", which is probably what SMIC refers to as 7 nm, but is more dense than any TSMC/Samsung 7 nm chip process probably close to the earliest Samsung 5 nm process.
Aside from YMTC/NAURA UVL, I haven't seen anything new that would slow China down at all. Even with NAURA/YMTC, it's unclear to me how much they would be hurt.
One thing is for sure, this is a great opportunity for most of the Chinese firms in this industry. US politicians will not see the folly of their actions until too late.
I don't think these restrictions have to do with the elections. They were lobbying for such restrictions among their allies for a few months. China should honestly cut off diplomatic relations with the US sometime in the future.
Even UMC just had a record quarter.
Based on latest release of its monthly revenue,
- UMC's streak of 11? consecutive record monthly revenue came to an end
- Buy, the Sep revenue is just a bit shy of August's
- By any mean 3Q2022 came in better than 2Q2022 @ ~$2.4B USD
Back to what I mentioned before, not all semiconductor segments behave the same. Just because the memory guys are hit hard doesn't mean we should expect the same from foundrie. tsmc and UMC had good Q3, then we should expect decent Q3 by SMIC despite of them being a bit less well positioned in terms of their specific market segment exposure.
Based on latest release of its monthly revenue,
- UMC's streak of 11? consecutive record monthly revenue came to an end
- Buy, the Sep revenue is just a bit shy of August's
- By any mean 3Q2022 came in better than 2Q2022 @ ~$2.4B USD
Back to what I mentioned before, not all semiconductor segments behave the same. Just because the memory guys are hit hard doesn't mean we should expect the same from foundrie. tsmc and UMC had good Q3, then we should expect decent Q3 by SMIC despite of them being a bit less well positioned in terms of their specific market segment exposure.
Is pretty unclear.
Seeing the Biding Data YMTC is the most localized fab and probably the most "Non U.S" fab apart from Huawei and Jinhua.
Naura has their own subsidiary to make precision components and parts.
Quickie
Colonel
The reason why China hasn't done what you have suggested is the same kind of reason why China has stopped publishing in the U.S. world's fastest supercomputer list.
Which is that it'll simply make the U.S. more envious and suspicious of China's new achievement which would then lead to more sanctions and restrictions.
This was exactly what happened years ago when China was about to upgrade its Supercomputer with Intel CPU chips to remain on top of the list (or to go on top) when the U.S. decided to ban the sales of those chips, unprecedented at the time I believe, on national security grounds.
There is a lot research being done in China but I think some of those researchers will be better off helping to solve the country most urgent needs. In this case is semiconductors manufacturing, given the urgency of the situation China should put even more human and monetary resources in the fast tracking of semiconductor material, parts, tool and so on. Some of the current research could just wait a bit more. Don't get me wrong, the Chinese had archive a lot in a short time but give the urgency of the situation more is needed.
They should create three institutes outside CAS were companies and researcher institutes cooperate fast tracking towards this goal.
1- Institute for Electronics Automation and Design: When companies and researchers work on the fast track developing, EDA, TCAD, yield management software, ecosystems, design tools and so, for the semiconductor industry.
2-Institute of Nanopatterning : Lithography, Lithography, Lithography. Companies and researches working in the fast track development of lithography tools, parts, light sources, software, materials, maskless lithography, NIL, EUV, immersion, stripping, coating, developing, photoresist, XRay, EBeam Lithography, metrology, masks, AI computational lithography and so on.
3-Institute of process equipment and materials: Fast track development of semiconductor process tools, materials and parts, Ion Implantation, deposition, etching, wet processing, dry processing, heat processing, planarization, cleaning, electric machinery for plasma tools, vacuum parts, spectrometry, robots, parts for equipment, ultra clean plastics, ceramics parts, gasses, quartz and so on.
The 上海集成电路装备材料产业创新中心有限公司 and the 上海集成电路研发中心有限公司 are a great start but given the urgency of the situation more should be done.
3月17日，上海集成电路装备材料产业创新中心有限公司发生多项工商变更。其中，投资人(股权)新增上海嘉定工业区开发(集团)有限公司，注册资本从17000万元增加到127000万元，增幅达647.06%。
For the near-term Chinese IC tech is on its backfoot / quite apparent what the weaknesses are (2 & 3). I suspect near-term Chinese tech convo's will mirror those of Chinese military hardware from 10 years ago (potential / plans but not ready to go). China's approach toward IC has been a bit haphazard / disorganized (a lot of wasted rmb in some cases), but now they kind of have to get organized no getting around it. Guess we'll see by 2030 what the space looks like.
Despite YMTC being "the most localized fab", this latest move by USG will definitely have an impact on them. The most critical etch and depositions are still handled by LAM & AMAT equipments. Qualifying domestic etch/deposition equipments will take some time if YMTC had not already done so. But I'm not as concern about these tools because they do have domestic alternatives ready to fill the void left by LAM & AMAT.
But what about inspection tools? I'm not convinced there're good domestic alternatives here. I fear this may be the area that may hinder the pace of YMTC's Fab2 expansion.
I also wonder if the USG sanction also covers photomask. YMTC source their mask from Japanese mask shops. I wonder if the latest restriction means they are blocked from buying masks required for their 232L 3D-DRAM.
So, I don't think it's reasonable to expect YMTC to come out of this unscathed. The question is how long it'll take YMTC to mitigate this situation.
Less haphazard more unconnected. A number of Champs in some subfields like designs, fabs (sort of, 7nm ain't joke) but they don't necessarily talking with each other or giving opportunities to local newcomers. Let's see what these new escalation brings.
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