Chinese semiconductor industry

Overbom said:

Yeah, no...

Russia can use Chinese semiconductors equipment if it wants and in exchange it can supply some semiconductor materials. However "build a joint semiconductor industry", no.

Russia and "joint" programs don't match

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Russia has some decent optics and mechanical design industries. They can contribute OEM components. However, this is the big one: do they want to and do they have the QC do it consistently? Otherwise it's better for them to just buy the tools to make their own chips.

Strangelove said:

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Russia and China should build a joint semiconductor industry​

The only way to escape the US technology sanctions squeeze is to pool expertise and resources, without limits

Russia and China are perfectly complimentary in this endeavor. First of all, China possesses surplus capital, expertise and other resources, with an increasingly educated workforce which excels in scientific fields. On the other hand, Russia possesses the critical natural materials required to make semiconductors.

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IMO the most valuable asset Russia has is talent.

Russian engineers and scientists are very good, especially in R&D positions and software development. A smart move by China would be to foster connections at university and research institute level and get young Russian students in, that later become active researchers. Like US did with China, with huge advantages for US....and undoubtedly also for China.

But differently from the US-China case, here the risk that Russian researchers go back to Russia to found startups or to be employed by local high-tech companies is very limited because Russia is not (and will never be) an industrial and economic powerhouse, so it lacks the needed tech / economic substrate.

Regarding the article, I fully agree with other posters here: China can just sell chips to Russia, and that's it. No advantage in doing more than this. Raw materials will always be available, by simply buying them from Russia. If in the future, for some reason, Russia decides to block raw materials for China, well, to have a JV in Russia would be even worse. They will simply confiscate it, as they did many times in the past.

The kind of hubris and 'Russia brings nothing to the table' attitude I'm reading here is no different from the West's on China.

Russian industry could probably contribute to a machine tools effort in things like lithography if required.

Russia has been working on lasers for decades. And they also have like you said a pretty decent optics industry. For example they built a multi-mirror telescope in South Africa (SALT) and they also built mirrors for the VST in Chile. Most of the Russian optics industry is concentrated under Shvabe Holding which is part of Rostec. If they can get Russian scientists to cooperate with the efforts of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on lithography it might be helpful. But Russia simply lacks the market to apply the knowledge to actual mass production tools I think. Whatever tools they will make will be for the military to use, and the military simply has vastly smaller requirements than a mass production solution.

european_guy said:

Russian engineers and scientists are very good.

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Certainly in the soviet past. But today? i doubt that. But perhabs you know more than i do about this.

This CNBC article mentions that there were meetings betwen representatives of the chinese government and the chinese chip industry. Does anyone knows more about it?

Huawei’s 5G cellphone ready?

siegecrossbow said:

Huawei’s 5G cellphone ready?

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it's only Mate 40 series with no leica... and enhanced 5G

Orthan said:

This CNBC article mentions that there were meetings betwen representatives of the chinese government and the chinese chip industry. Does anyone knows more about it?

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We already talked about this yesterday. That info is based on a Bloomberg report and we know how reliable they are... not very.

It should be quite normal for MIIT to be having meetings with different local players to assess the impacts of the new sanctions. There will clearly be some impact. The issue with Bloomberg article is that they singled YMTC out and made it sound like it was about to collapse and interviewed with renowned doom sayers. Especially with ASML comment, that was a verifiable lie. If these Chinese firms have any guts, they should be hiring lawyers for defamation suits against Bloomberg. Too bad these people are not media savvy at all.

Anywhere, just to put China's domestication effort into perspective. Here is the latest bid for China mobile.
In the recent 3 rounds of procurement (7 to 9th round), about 61% of computers were using Chinese CPUs (41.08% from Hygon and 19.95% from Kunpeng). The procurement of Chinese CPUs is increasing. In the 1st to 6th round, Hygon was just 11.36% market share and Kunpeng was 15.05%. Overall through 9 rounds, Hygon is up to 20.90% and Kunpeng is up to 20.53%. So even at large SOE like China mobile, they still have quite a bit to go to reach 100% domestic CPU production.

According to this Phytium article , they will be presenting their product at China mobile's 10th global partner conference. Weird that their chips are not been procured by China Mobile for PCs.

Provincial governments are likely to be using a higher % of Chinese CPUs.
It says here that 32 province/cities (I think 33 in total in China?) and 128 ministries are using Phytium CPUs. It's like that Hygon is seeing even a larger %.

华润微 (CR Microelectronics) has signed an agreement with Geely to produce chips. This should include power chips, MCUs and other products. CR Micro is an IDM that designs, produces and packages chips.

This is from June when CR Micro commented that they have started producing auto chips.

So now, we have at least CRRC, StarPower(produced by Huahong/SMIC), BYD, Silan and CR Micro that are selling auto chips and expanding their production.