Design is a weakpoint of the supply chain for China. This is incredibly impressive.
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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antiterror13
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not anymore
I never really understood why people thought EDAs were that hard. It's just software at end of the day. China doesn't lack of software developers.
but the more important part is the partial support for 5nm. That tells me Samsung & TSMC are busy cooperating with Chinese EDA developers to have additional options and to eventually de-americanize also.
I assume by "digital tools" it means computer/mobile CPU?
What are analog chips then? and why do they need 7nm process ?
Because the software for these things is mostly about collecting and building libraries. Coding is fast and easy work compared to physical engineering. It’s not constrained by physical parameters.
also because only America and China are good at software. So when the DC blobs see that none of these other "advanced economies" that are in other portion of the semi supply chain can develop EDA worth a lick, they just assume it's super hard. When in reality, EDAs always seem to me as one of the easier things for China to tackle.
Anyways, good thread here comparing Q1 results and announcements
I would say it's quite clear that SMIC is not following the world street financial playbook. Don't worry, everyone. Despite having the 3rd worst operating margin in there, it's spending as much as Samsung on capex this year on the logic side of things. In fact, it spent as much as Samsung last yr also. Intel is spending a lot more, but we all know how expensive things are in America
It’s the sigma approach to economic warfare. First pioneered by Guanzhong during the Spring and Autumn period.
You are underestimating the amount of effort. Large pieces of software can be incredibly complicated. Even average run of the mill commercial programs can have hundreds of thousands of lines of code. That can be a decade's worth of iterative effort by a team of 8-12 people. A single person can develop a program in the tens of thousands of lines of code if you give them enough time to code it.
Something like a web browser or operating system can have tens of millions of lines of code. Try designing a machine with millions of pieces and get it to work flawlessly, and that is how complicated software can be.
It is clear that the DC blobs don't realize/understand that much of the tech dominance of the US is due to the first-mover advantage and not some mysterious magical technological ingredient that only the US possesses. The entire US tech war on China is basically the US deliberately throwing away its first-mover advantages.
EDA software was "hard" because the first-mover advantage in software is overwhelming. Once someone have an established software product and ecosystem, the marginal cost of selling that already existing software product to additional new clients is essentially zero, giving the established products a massive advantage over any newcomers that have to spend money and effort on R&D and creating a viable ecosystem.
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