Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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17% was in 2014 and mainland China has 1.4 billion people compared with just 51 and 23 of SK and Taiwan.
In my personal opinion there is a lot of people getting into university to pursue degrees that will leave them underemployed or jobless and wont have an impact in the economics or the well being of the country. For a lot of people who can't enter good careers learning real life skills like electronics, mechanics, programming, health care and so on I think will be better.
If you scratch the surface of US stem graduates based on ethnicity I think the picture is even bleaker. This is why it is important to attract foreign talents, not label them as CCP spies for cheap political points.
IC Design White Paper (4): China has become the largest source of chip design talents
China-based IC design houses are estimated to employ 89,000 semiconductor design engineers. Including China-based IDMs/Foundries and Internet giants/OEMs, the total number of semiconductor design engineers reach 98,000.
By geographic region, China has been the world's top region in IC design talent supply due to its numerous higher education institutes and the large number of STEM graduates from semiconductor-related majors.
Many overseas corporations also employ a large number of local talents from China. For example, Qualcomm has nearly 5000 employees in China, with most being R&D personnel. It's estimated that local and overseas suppliers in China employ 121,000 semiconductor design engineers in total.
According to the "China IC industry talent white paper," the number of local IC design employees in China reached 221,000 in 2021, and local design engineers accounted for 55% of the figure.
The number of semiconductor design engineers employed in North America totals around 87,000, with many engineers coming from foreign regions like India and China. After China and North America, India and Taiwan are the third and fourth largest supply of IC design talents, respectively.
For India, there are around 56,000 semiconductor design engineers employed locally. Most of whom work for subsidiaries and R&D centers established by foreign corporations. A few joined local IT companies. In 2021, Qualcomm employees in India accounted for 34% of its 45,000 global employees, making it the semiconductor supplier with the most design talents hired in India.
In the US, STEM students only account for 17% of the total student population, far lower than the global average. Add to that an aging semiconductor engineer population and high turnover rate, and US companies become extremely reliant on foreign engineers coming to the US and hiring IC design talents worldwide, as seen in Qualcomm's nearly 5000 employees in China.
Hua Hong's results were pretty lackluster. I assume that is because they are mostly stuck with older generation processes and competition in that segment inside China is increasing. Today companies like Nexchip are ramping up production. IIRC a lot of Hua Hong's income was in making display driver chips and Nexchip directly competes with them in that. Nexchip uses all 300mm wafers so they likely have lower fabrication costs than Hua Hong in making those devices. So it is critical for Hua Hong to both ramp up their 300mm wafers Wuxi fab to full capacity as soon as possible, and find other clients and applications to keep their older 200mm fabs occupied. You can tell this is likely the case because PSMC (Powerchip) also make display driver chips and also had similar hits to revenue as Hua Hong.
It is also surprising, to me at least, how positive GlobalFoundries results were considering their silicon process is not any better than UMC's.
SMIC's results were roughly in line with UMC's and that is to be expected. It is hard to compare with TSMC or Samsung because those companies have more advanced processes which none of the other fabs have. It is basically a duopoly between those two at 7nm and lower.
The whole DRAM sector is in a meltdown but Micron's results are pathetic. A lot of people joked about Samsung getting an early lead into using EUV on DRAM, claiming Micron were smarter in continuing with DUV for memory, but now look at the results.
As for CXMT there is no way they have similar revenue to Nanya. Nanya has a lot more capacity and are currently building a fab which uses EUV so the gap will likely increase rather than decrease.
Micron has a surprising result by the negative again.
Analog is a catchall for several kinds of chips which are not necessarily similar to each other.
No. China has fabless processor design companies and logic foundries. But there are IDMs in China like YMTC.
Depends on which rumors you choose to believe. The founder of Huawei said they had no plans to be an IDM several years ago. But with the US sanctions unless they get a really close connection to a foundry in China, they will likely have to become an IDM to survive in the sector. They certainly have the volume to become an IDM if they wanted to.
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The US political elites seem to be struggling mightily with the “own the CCP by taking all of China’s best talent, fight the CCP while protecting Chinese people from racism” aspiration right now. It looks more like a clumsy guy trying to walk a tightrope by swinging out the alternate leg with each step.
1. GloFo has government orders due to its sites in the US, and specializing in relevant tech like RF and fin-FET SOI.
I do not see anything from UMC on FD-SOI at low nodes.
2. 200 mm has less automation and less dies per wafer but it also means more customization is possible and the equipment is usually fully depreciated. That means that Huahong might want to move towards specialty chips like power, RF or FD-SOI based chips, rather than keep trying to compete in commodity chips like display drivers.
3. Huawei can probably become an IDM for their mid/high range chips. Low end chips they can buy from foundries, and as their equipment depreciates and moves away from the leading edge, they can just move them to mid range chips from the high end, and by that time, they can just buy high end chips from foundries. By mid range, I mean, 14-65 nm, which should be sufficient for their automotive, power, RF and base station applications. The ultra high end processors for mobile should be a second priority.
Maybe. But the question is which applications are we talking about here. And most of their sites are in fact outside the US. But yeah their fabs are either in the US, or Germany or Singapore. So they might be perceived as more reliable in case of conflict with China.
That press release is about converting a 200mm silicon fab to produce GaN chips.
The IBM mainframe processors used to be made at GlobalFoundries sure.
But IBM has switched to Samsung on more recent processor designs like IBM Power10 and IBM Tellum. z/Architecture on mainframe switched to Samsung. IBM has sued GlobalFoundries for not delivering on processes below 14nm so their business relationship is strained.
HLMC's website claims they have an FD-SOI program. But I heard nothing from them recently.
There is lots of competition for 200mm wafers with power semiconductors in China for automotive like CRMicro, SiEn, and GTA Semiconductor. The market might get saturated. FD-SOI might make sense I guess.
I think it is highly likely they would go for 65nm-28nm for that middle of the segment, with 14nm or lower coming afterwards. The announcement of the EDA tools for greater than 14nm processes, and the leak that they are attempting to make a process based on Nikon DUVi machines points in that direction.
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why not? CXMT and Nanya produce mostly same D20/D1x DRAM AND CXMT has much larger wafer capacity than Nanya. So in theory CXMT should be similar or greater revenue than Nanya.
Are you suggesting perhaps CXMT get lower ASP for their wafer or have lower yield so despite having 120K wpm capability on paper their actual wafer out per month is lower than Nanya’s 70K wpm? Im interested to hear why you would agree with TrendForce’s estimate that CXMT/others earned much lower revenue than Nanya when they actually should in theory be higher.
the question was whether there are any IDM in China that makes processors. do you know any?
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