Chinese semiconductor industry

The third-generation semiconductor equipment project of CETC 48 was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology​

According to the news from Jiwei.com, recently, the research and development of the third-generation semiconductor equipment of the 48th Institute of China Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. has made a major breakthrough. Major equipment" key special project.



Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) equipment is the core "mother machine" of advanced materials and chip manufacturing. Based on the needs of the country, the trend of the industry, and the capabilities of the electronic technology, the 48 Institute focuses on the "three beams" of ion beams, molecular beams, and electron beams, (I love how Chinese name things) and continuously promotes the research and development and industrialization of core technologies for semiconductor equipment. It has successively developed single-chip 4-inch, The 6-inch model and its application have laid a solid technical foundation for the development of large-size MBE equipment.

The project will be jointly tackled by 48 domestic universities, research institutes and professional companies, making use of the technical advantages of 48 institutes, giving full play to the role of the National Third Generation Semiconductor Technology Innovation Center (Hunan) platform, and striving to break through a number of key core technology and process problems , to provide strong support for the leapfrog development of my country's MBE technology and equipment. (Proofreading/Zhang Yiqun)

So ARM stopped selling their latest architecture to China，as anticipated. This will accelerate Chinese companies's converge to RISC-V

YMTC putting Xtacking 3.0 architecture on new product X3-9070, which is their 4th generation TLC 3D Nand
looks like the initial Tiplus7100 using 128 layers design was just a blip. They have now fully started with 232 layers NAND

Colorful Technology (七彩虹) will be using the latest YMTC NAND flash on their CN700 SSD product line.
They had been using the 128 layer technology from YMTC for CN600 last year. So, the rapidly improving capabilities of YMTC is having a positive effect on the product from Colorful Technology and other firms.

Note how when they first came out with CN700, it was constrained to 1600 MT/s due to using the older YMTC tech. Now with new Xtacking 3.0, they can reach 2400 MT/s and achieve read/write IO speed of over 7 GB/s

tokenanalyst said:

The third-generation semiconductor equipment project of CETC 48 was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology​

According to the news from Jiwei.com, recently, the research and development of the third-generation semiconductor equipment of the 48th Institute of China Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. has made a major breakthrough. Major equipment" key special project.

Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) equipment is the core "mother machine" of advanced materials and chip manufacturing. Based on the needs of the country, the trend of the industry, and the capabilities of the electronic technology, the 48 Institute focuses on the "three beams" of ion beams, molecular beams, and electron beams, (I love how Chinese name things) and continuously promotes the research and development and industrialization of core technologies for semiconductor equipment. It has successively developed single-chip 4-inch, The 6-inch model and its application have laid a solid technical foundation for the development of large-size MBE equipment.

The project will be jointly tackled by 48 domestic universities, research institutes and professional companies, making use of the technical advantages of 48 institutes, giving full play to the role of the National Third Generation Semiconductor Technology Innovation Center (Hunan) platform, and striving to break through a number of key core technology and process problems , to provide strong support for the leapfrog development of my country's MBE technology and equipment. (Proofreading/Zhang Yiqun)

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MBE is usually a small batch production system since evaporative deposition is usually very slow for metallic materials, and you need line of sight to the target. The advantage of keeping single crystallinity and having crystal lattice match at the interface between the film and substrate is a niche capability. It's used in OLED alot though since for organic materials with high vapor pressure you can easily deposit gigantic amounts of OLED materials in a short time.

Typically for hard semiconductor though CVD and ALD is preferable since highly precise control of deposition rate and shape ie conformal coating or selective coating is possible. Sputtering PVD is fast for metal deposition but not as controllable. But MBE neither shares the control of CVD/ALD nor the speed of sputtering. Looks like this is for 3rd generation semiconductor AKA not Si though, so maybe some sort of lattice matched III-V heterostructure is what they're going for. That would mean RF or optoelectronics.

联和东海 has come out with XRS302-416W work station that uses the Zhaoxin KH40000/16 CPU. It also supports domestic GPU (no idea who they've tested it with)

tphuang said:

Colorful Technology (七彩虹) will be using the latest YMTC NAND flash on their CN700 SSD product line.

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They had been using the 128 layer technology from YMTC for CN600 last year. So, the rapidly improving capabilities of YMTC is having a positive effect on the product from Colorful Technology and other firms.

Note how when they first came out with CN700, it was constrained to 1600 MT/s due to using the older YMTC tech. Now with new Xtacking 3.0, they can reach 2400 MT/s and achieve read/write IO speed of over 7 GB/s

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I have tried contacting their official store on Aliexpress before, they cant confirm if their supply of NAND chips is from YMTC.

Having troubling finding stock for hiksemi ssd cc700 too which used the 232l xstack from ymtc.

olalavn said:

RISC-V is also now starting to hit the high-performance field. Ventana made the 5nm 192-core chip a few days ago. Mr. Bao Yungang from the Institute of Computer Technology , Chinese Academy of Sciences also revealed the progress of RISC-V in the country in this respect .
Teacher Bao Yungang also mentioned that the third-generation "Kunming Lake" Xiangshan architecture is also under development. Xiangshan has the advantage of open source, which makes a fundamental difference compared to SiFive and Ventana
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yeah, this is very big news. If they can develop HPC chips using RISC-V architecture, then all the domestic firms will move to using that. being open sourced will encourage developers from China and all of the world to develop libraries for those chips. It's a really good idea and makes China look good in sharing technology. I'm sure certain firms in China like T-Head and Baidu Kunlun will want to keep RISC-V designs to themselves to have competitive advantage, but this is too important to Chin's whole industry to be kept to just 1 or 2 players. I think they will keep developing ARM/x86 chips, but RISC-V will take over in the next few years.

Definitely looks like T-head is now fully committed to the RISC-V course. I think a real mistake from US/UK to block ARM standard from China. Now, China will have full control of its chip design and have the first mover advantage to an architecture that could one day be more widely adopted than ARM. There are no shortage of RISC-V fans out there that are excited about any new RISC-V CPU, whether developed by China or someone else.

Looks like T-head is quite involved here in the RISC-V community providing many patches for Android support. This should allow for wider adoption of RISC-V worldwide, since Android support would encourage other design shops to use RISC-V standard.

Now as you can see, this opens another issue which is Android itself. Longer term, I think RISC-V integration with Harmony OS and Kylin OS need to be prioritized. The former will be China's multi-device/platform replacement to Android. Harmony is a great OS for something that works across a whole host of platforms. And of course, Kylin OS integration is badly needed since that's what is needed for domestic data centers and SOE desktops and such.

On the whole, I would say that T-head has been going full speed into RISC-V recently. It's sad that it has taken a rejection from ARM in order for then to go in this direction. But still, better now than 2 years from now. With all these brains going into developing RISC-V, there should be faster progress in the coming 2 years.

tphuang said:

Definitely looks like T-head is now fully committed to the RISC-V course. I think a real mistake from US/UK to block ARM standard from China. Now, China will have full control of its chip design and have the first mover advantage to an architecture that could one day be more widely adopted than ARM. There are no shortage of RISC-V fans out there that are excited about any new RISC-V CPU, whether developed by China or someone else.

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It's inexplicable.

If we have a monopoly, why give it away?

Why open the door?

Either this is some 5D chess move, or this thing is in collapse mode, like that Roman guy who played the fiddle while Rome burned to the ground.