Chinese semiconductor industry

Status
Not open for further replies.
E

european_guy

Junior Member
Registered Member
tphuang said:
A lot of the companies were being excessively cautious in their interpretation of the original order in order to not violate them.
Click to expand...

What US has done is really unprecedented and will have very deep implications.

But we need to wait few months for the dust to settle to even evaluate the short-term impact. Now it's just random noise and click-bait titles. Now is good only for media and journalists. Who really wants to understand what happened unfortunately needs to wait some more months IMO. Even who wrote this new rules has no idea of the actual impact.

Some new rules have more deep implications than others. For me the two that will have very long term effects are:

1. Decision to suspend after sales services and technical assistance literally on the spot. This is unheard of in any kind of industry, even much less critical than semiconductor manufacturing. It means crucial and indispensable trust between customer and supplier is lethally broken and will never be restored, no matter what. It is the end of high-tech US companies in China market. Maybe it will take some more years to pan out fully, but is unavoidable now. Without trust there cannot be any business relation.

2. Decision to limit freedom of work for US persons This will be challenged in court for sure, but beside this pretty legal point, it represents a watershed moment. Study and working in US for Chinese people involved in STEM disciplines will never be the same again.
 
T

tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member

Peking University Wuxi Institute of Electronic Design Automation has landed, focusing on EDA-related core technologies​


According to micronet news, on November 1st, Peking University and Wuxi City gathered in the "cloud" to sign a comprehensive cooperation agreement, and Peking University Wuxi Electronic Design Automation Research Institute landed in Wuxi High-tech Zone.

1234646109946.58281458024005961.9917.png


According to news released by Wuxi, Peking University Wuxi Institute of Electronic Design Automation will focus on EDA-related core technologies, combining the advantages of the Department of Design Automation and Computing Systems, School of Integrated Circuits, Peking University, to create self-controllable EDA innovation technologies and promote basic and applied research. , Cultivate and introduce scientific and technological talents, promote the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, cultivate emerging industries, build a basic scientific research and industrialization promotion platform for the transformation, upgrading and innovative development of the integrated circuit industry, and drive theoretical research in the field of integrated circuits including EDA, technology applications and The industry prospered.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 
O

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
Japan has "internal discussions" about what sanctions they should impose on China

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
- The U.S. is urging allies including Japan to follow its lead on restricting exports of advanced semiconductors and related technology to China, potentially intensifying the impact of Chinese-American tensions on chipmakers worldwide.
Click to expand...
Tokyo has begun internal discussions on the issue at Washington's request, a Japanese government insider said. Officials are weighing which restrictions can be adopted in Japan, and will watch how other U.S. allies such as the European Union and South Korea respond.
Click to expand...
 
G

gelgoog

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
After the war in Ukraine started and the neon supply from Ukraine went kaput these Asian semiconductor companies have been buying neon gas from China. China is the only real alternative right now that has the huge steel mills and the sequestration capacity for gas outside Ukraine and Russia. So they better watch out on how wide these sanctions would be.
 
E

Eventine

Junior Member
Registered Member
tphuang said:
I think this is a good article addressing a lot of the hysteria and hyperventilation that came out originally.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
now, it has all been proven to be true.

A lot of the companies were being excessively cautious in their interpretation of the original order in order to not violate them. As we discussed before, the firms that were mostly affected are the chip design firms, not the chip making firms. And now, it seems they have clarified the law such that chip design firms are not affected. If I were the founder/head of these firms, I would still be looking for secondary citizenship in mainland and/or other countries in order to not be left stranded if the "American person" ban gets expanded to entire sector. The damage from the original order is permanent imo and it is an indictment of the stupidity of the bureaucrats issuing these orders. They put in the widest scope order imaginable and cause market/industry panic before clarifying it to be narrower. Now, you have spooked all the Chinese customers, scared away Chinese Americans that want to work for American companies and destroyed your companies.

While the actual sting of the sanction may turn out to be quite minimal on China's IC industry, the relationship damage is permanent and simply cannot be reversed. China has now charted its own course in developing a supply chain centered around Chinese companies. That's the long and damaging part of this for America.


And this is probably the most important point here. There are too many alarmists out there overstating how easily China's IC industry can collapse. This is not 10 years ago. People have way overestimated American power here and underestimated where China's IC industry is at.

Thus far, we have not seen any slow down (maybe there have been some slowdown that we haven't noticed) in Chinese fab/capacity expansion. On the other hand, we have seen a complete move away from American tool makers.

The other thing I want to point out is that Samsung and TSMC have probably been overly cautious about what they can produce for Chinese chip designers. I'm sure they will get clarification on that very soon and most of the production will get restarted.
Click to expand...

The US was recently reported to be lobbying European allies to use "Russian style" sanctions against China. Given this fact, it's more likely that what happened here was that the US went ahead with severe, restrictive sanctions, then realized its allies were not going to get onboard (or that getting them onboard would require more than just the US announcing it), and so backtracked to minimize damage to its own companies and industries since it'd mean handing the Europeans, Japanese, etc. a free market advantage in China, and the US never does anything that isn't to its own advantage.

This doesn't mean the intention has changed, just that the US will go back to the drawing board on negotiating with allies and putting together a "coalition of the willing" rather than go at it alone. That matches up well with Biden's standard of operation so it's the most likely scenario.
 
T

tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member
Take it with a truck load of salt but in summary for things I had been reading looks like before SMIC was put in the blacklist in 2020, there was a civil war in the company between the Taiwanese leadership and Chinese leadership about the course of the company, the Taiwanese side probably argued that SMIC should be pushing for the bleeding edge and should do it fast, that the company should focus in acquiring tools from the West no matter what , the Chinese side argued that was an impossible goal and the US will never let the company to achieve the leading edge, that the best course of action was to secure the company supply chain and introduce local tools in to the supply chain. Looks like the Chinese side won. Looks like they foresaw that this was coming.
SMIC started to validation process of more local tools into their supply chain that include ion implantation equipment, parts and other equipment. One of the founders of SMIC created a equipment company who is developing process equipment so is very probably SMIC is a target client. The most interesting part of all is SMEE, I think they don't only started the testing of SMEE scanners to much of the engineers complains but also I think they took over the development of those scanners along with the Shanghai ICRD, The Semiconductor Equipment Development Innovation Center, Huawei who invested in RSLaser and Beijing ETown. Putting SMEE scanners along side ASML scanners could solve the bottleneck problem
The case of YMTC is quite interesting, they were probably advised that this was going to happen, the tension was in the air. They started to adopt more local tools in their supply chain but the drama about their personal leads to believe that they didn't hire enough non-Americans at time in case the situation worsen and to made things worst the got reliant on KLA tools to advance their NAND products as evidence in the research literature. The reason is probably the high competition in the NAND market.​
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top