Chinese semiconductor industry

CMP said:

processing. The high value added part.

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the processes to produce rare earth elements are complicated, involving many stages of physical and chemical treatment. The energy and reagent consumption are high. The treatment of waste gas, water and tailings is difficult. rare earth processing is very bad for environment. only China has political will to do this job. China also control critical process technology. i have read somewhere even if American company start today, it will take years to master this tech.

sunnymaxi said:

the processes to produce rare earth elements are complicated, involving many stages of physical and chemical treatment. The energy and reagent consumption are high. The treatment of waste gas, water and tailings is difficult. rare earth processing is very bad for environment. only China has political will to do this job. China also control critical process technology. i have read somewhere even if American company start today, it will take years to master this tech.

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With the labor shortfall in the US, they'll never master it. Nobody wants to do this kind of work when they can make 1.5-2.5x as much doing easier work from home/a fancy, comfortable office with fully stocked micro kitchens and game rooms. It's tricky because it's the kind of work that takes really smart people that will also need to work really hard in uncomfortable environments. There are very few people like that, since most very smart people who are willing to work very hard pursue careers that put them in remote work/fancy office environments. Or they go into dentistry/medicine instead because it pays 3-5x more and is high prestige.

CMP said:

With the labor shortfall in the US, they'll never master it. Nobody wants to do this kind of work when they can make 1.5-2.5x as much doing easier work from home/a fancy, comfortable office with fully stocked micro kitchens and game rooms. It's tricky because it's the kind of work that takes really smart people that will also need to work really hard in uncomfortable environments. There are very few people like that, since most very smart people who are willing to work very hard pursue careers that put them in remote work/fancy office environments. Or they go into dentistry/medicine instead because it pays 3-5x more and is high prestige.

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Reminder that weightlifting 50 lbs is a requirement in semiconductor jobs and even a service technician job is BS preferred.


I posted one for Hitachi a few months back for their etch engineering positions. Also 50 lbs weightlifting.

Microelectronics Institute and others have made progress in energy-efficient floating-point in-memory computing​

In recent years, in-memory computing architecture has become an important research direction for artificial intelligence acceleration chips. The in-memory computing architecture can reduce data access overhead and significantly improve the energy efficiency of intelligent algorithms such as neural networks. At present, research on in-memory computing chips is concentrated in the field of fixed-point in-memory computing. Existing implementations of floating-point in-memory computing use near-memory circuits, exponent-base separation, floating-point-fixed-point conversion, etc. , facing low parallelism Or the challenge of more floating-point operation cycles, it is difficult to achieve high energy efficiency and high performance. Considering the needs of larger-scale network models and complex tasks, as well as the necessity of floating-point operations in the neural network training process, the floating-point operation function is very important for future in-memory computing chips.

Aiming at the challenge of energy-efficient floating-point in-memory computing, the team of Liu Ming, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and researcher at the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the team of Professor Liu Yongpan of Tsinghua University have proposed a new hybrid in-memory computing architecture of " dense memory + sparse numbers " . The study found that the data distribution of each layer of the neural network has a long-tail characteristic, and the exponential bits of most of the data are densely distributed in a small interval. Based on this, the research proposes to use the high-efficiency in-memory computing core to perform data operations with dense exponent bits, and use the highly flexible sparse digital core to perform data operations with sparse exponent bits with long-tail characteristics. High-efficiency floating -point - to-fixed-point conversion circuits, a flexible-coded sparse digital core, and an adder tree circuit for digital in-memory computations that save high-bit computations further enhance the energy efficiency of the design. The SRAM in-memory computing chip is taped out under the 28nm process. In the case of 4- bit specific point and 16- bit floating point, the peak energy efficiency of the dense network of the in-memory computing core reaches 275TOPS/W and 17.2TOPS/W , respectively, and the peak energy efficiency of the sparse network reaches 1600TOPS/W and 90TOPS/W . This achievement will help promote the application of SRAM in-memory computing chips in high-precision floating-point neural networks and neural network training.
The relevant research results are titled A 28nm 16.9-300TOPS/W Computing-in-Memory Processor Supporting Floating-Point NN Inference/Training with Intensive-CIM Sparse-Digital Architecture , which was selected into the top conference ISSCC 2023 in the field of solid-state circuits .

tacoburger said:

Well as bad as it is, it could have been much worse. Imagine if all this sanctions were put into place all at once a few years ago. The sanctions are being drip fed just enough to allow the industry to struggle, not to kill it entirely. I think it's on purpose too. Washington must know that they can't hit push China too far into the corner, otherwise China will start hitting back hard. They probably also don't want the entire chinese semiconductor industry to collapse, the economic shock will hurt the entire world badly.

But this means that the sanctions will keep coming. There's no real limit to what America can and will do. Once China gets high end DUVi and EUV to start working and the technological issues sorted out, there's tons of other areas that they can hit back, there could be massive bans on even buying or using chinese chips, banning chinese companies from SWIFT and other such drastic sanctions that we currently see on Iran and Russia. IMO, China needs to prepare for that even once the current technological issues have been solved.

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The economic shock would be unbearable, already how many autoworkers were laid off due to chip shortages? How bad would other industries suffer? Appliances, TVs, Retail stores with nothing in stock?

There certainly is a practical limit to what the USA can do before they bleed themselves out.

tacoburger said:

Because China sells a lot of their semiconductor outside china. Imagine if America passes a law saying that they will sanction, ban or fine any product that has a chinese chip in it.

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This will only work for luxury consumer-end products and won't work unless somehow America can pass laws for the whole of the world. Anything else is US cutting off its arm to hit China with.

CMP said:

With the labor shortfall in the US, they'll never master it. Nobody wants to do this kind of work when they can make 1.5-2.5x as much doing easier work from home/a fancy, comfortable office with fully stocked micro kitchens and game rooms. It's tricky because it's the kind of work that takes really smart people that will also need to work really hard in uncomfortable environments. There are very few people like that, since most very smart people who are willing to work very hard pursue careers that put them in remote work/fancy office environments. Or they go into dentistry/medicine instead because it pays 3-5x more and is high prestige.

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The labour shortfall is too easily overlooked.

I was saying from the beginning that the challenge of building the fabs in Arizona will be even getting enough construction workers and here we are

It's not something you can just throw money at.

FairAndUnbiased said:

Reminder that weightlifting 50 lbs is a requirement in semiconductor jobs and even a service technician job is BS preferred.

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I posted one for Hitachi a few months back for their etch engineering positions. Also 50 lbs weightlifting.

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In science, technology, engineering, etc. for the most part, anyone desperate enough will only take a technician job for a couple of years. Just to build up experience before transitioning to a supervisor/junior manager/analyst role, even if it means switching to a different industry. The pay is too low and the work is too uncomfortable. That's why it's even funnier that so many companies will only hire technicians that have 4+ years relevant experience. This is the real reason why they have such a hard time filling such roles. They only want people with the right education and tons of experience, but nobody with the right education and tons of experience would be caught dead doing this work unless they're desperate enough.

Some companies that desperately need this expertise will even hire them as managers-in-name-only and permit them to get away without doing any hands-on work, just to ensure that the subject matter expertise is available in-house when needed. That's how tight the labor situation is. Companies with extremely rigid HR and hiring practices are unable to fill those roles precisely because their expectations do not match the expectations of those people with the right experience and skills. This isn't the 20th century and 2000s anymore. The era of extremely experienced technicians, that have no serious interest in moving up, died as the baby boomers retired.

CMP said:

In science, technology, engineering, etc. for the most part, anyone desperate enough will only take a technician job for a couple of years. Just to build up experience before transitioning to a supervisor/junior manager/analyst role, even if it means switching to a different industry. The pay is too low and the work is too uncomfortable. That's why it's even funnier that so many companies will only hire technicians that have 4+ years relevant experience. This is the real reason why they have such a hard time filling such roles. They only want people with the right education and tons of experience, but nobody with the right education and tons of experience would be caught dead doing this work unless they're desperate enough.

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Even the engineers have weightlifting requirements. It's just part of working in semiconductor. what's even more fun is lifting in a clean room suit that is moisture tight. So who wants to do that when software, finance and other ez pz jobs in offices are available?

supersnoop said:

The labour shortfall is too easily overlooked.

I was saying from the beginning that the challenge of building the fabs in Arizona will be even getting enough construction workers and here we are

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It's not something you can just throw money at.

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You CAN throw money at it. But none of the lower-level managers in charge of executing on spending from those budgets are willing to justify to THEIR managers that they must pay 80k+ and benefits for modestly experienced (1-2 years) skilled labor, outside of pharma industry at least. This situation will only get worse because they needed skilled labor that is also educated. Well, hands-on work is not respected in educated society, so nobody will go for it until the offered pay is "right". What is "right"? Adjust for increase to COL, education, and housing, and you're looking at upper 5 figures to start, with rapid promotion opportunities within the first couple of years, unless you want to lose them to competitors. It's MUCH easier and safer for a lower-level manager to just go through all the motions and then let a project take 2x as long than it is to risk making those justifications.

Once the plants are built, they're also going to run into freshwater shortages. The absurdly vast quantities needed for mass production of chips is beyond what the Colorado river can supply. I visited last year and it is already looking bone dry or at crisis levels in some sections. They'll need to ship the water in via mass convoys of trucks on a daily basis. This is going to be a loss driving business unless iPhones start selling for $2500 each. They're going to create a bunch of chips that they have to sell at a huge loss.