Chinese semiconductor industry

I already said here. Rare gases. China is the main supplier of neon gas for excimer lasers to Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.
The other main suppliers are Russia, which is already sanctioning sales to the West of such gases, and Ukraine. Or should I say Ukraine was one of the sources. They basically scoop up the neon gas from large air filtration facilities put right next to large steelworks. One of those steelworks in Ukraine was the one at Mariupol.

There is basically no replacement for it. You can in theory recycle the neon gas to reduce its usage but few factories do this, and changing a factory which does not do this to recycle the gas would require making a new building basically. These gas recycling units have a pretty large volume from what I understand. You can't easily shoehorn them after the fact. And making new facilities to produce neon gas would take several years from what I understand.

Fudan Microelectronics: develop new products, expand new pedigree, raise 2 billion yuan for new generation FPGA and other projects​

In 2022, Fudan Microelectronics achieved revenue of 3.539 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.31%; realized net profit and deduction of non-net profit were 1.077 billion yuan and 1.019 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 109.31% and 129.49%. Among them, security and identification chip revenue was 976 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.67%, accounting for 27.58% of revenue, ranking first; non-volatile memory revenue was 940 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30.41%, accounting for 26.57% of revenue, followed by The smart meter chip revenue was 595 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 101.02%, accounting for 16.8% of revenue. It is worth mentioning that in 2022, Fudan Microelectronics FPGA and other chips will grow rapidly, achieving revenue of 781 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 82.81%, accounting for 22.69% of revenue, becoming the third largest source of revenue.

In order to enhance the company's core competitiveness and enhance the company's profitability, Fudan Microelectronics plans to issue A-share convertible corporate bonds of no more than 2 billion yuan for the development and industrialization of a new generation of FPGA platforms, the development of intelligent reconfigurable SoC platforms and Industrialization, new process platform memory development and industrialization, new high-end security controller development and industrialization, and passive Internet of Things basic chip development and industrialization.

Among them, the new generation FPGA platform project has attracted the attention of the industry. The project is a new generation FPGA based on 1xnm FinFET advanced process, which is oriented to application scenarios such as computer vision, machine learning, and high-speed digital processing, and provides low-cost, low-power , High performance, high reliability product series.

As a hardware reconfigurable integrated circuit chip, FPGA has software programmability and flexibility. In fields with frequent iterative upgrade cycles and large technical uncertainties, such as 5G communication and artificial intelligence, FPGA is a An ideal solution. Fudan Microelectronics is one of the leading companies in the field of FPGA technology in China.

The company's existing products include 28nm and 65nm and other process products, mainly 28nm products, which can meet most of the needs of customers. During the exchange, the relevant person in charge of Fudan Microelectronics said, "Due to the company's years of R&D investment in FPGA products and good market accumulation, the growth of the product line has been relatively good in recent years, which is of great importance to the company's 2023 performance. support.” The person in charge of Fudan Microelectronics also emphasized, “With the continuous expansion of artificial intelligence applications, edge computing and intelligent communication markets, the market demand for high-performance, highly integrated AI chips is growing rapidly, and Fudan Microelectronics will continue to Promote the layout in high-speed communication, signal processing, image processing, industrial control and other application fields."

Cambrian and its MLU590 GPU has own an order for 155m RMB to build Shengyang car city smart computation center. Will require 100 PFLOPS (FP16) of computation power & to be delivered by 09/30

Cambrian seems the only one other than Huawei that has been able to win these smart city contracts

Tam said:

Rare earth will likely be next, particularly those with military applications like Yttrium. For example the phase shifters on the SPY-1 AEGIS radar is based on that element. Yttrium is used for permanent magnets like used for EVs, naval IEP drives and submarine electric motors. While Western powers will be forced to substitute, it will come at much higher prices.

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Yttrium oxide is also a plasma resistant coating for etch chambers. That might not be good for their semiconductor equipment industry.

What this pro-US think tanker says is that correct, folks? That YMTC is contracting after the chips sanctions of the US and their allies (Netherlands, Japan)?

Dark Father said:

What this pro-US think tanker says is that correct, folks? That YMTC is contracting after the chips sanctions of the US and their allies (Netherlands, Japan)?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1676615990233186309

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Why is YMTC coming out with new products then?

Dark Father said:

What this pro-US think tanker says is that correct, folks? That YMTC is contracting after the chips sanctions of the US and their allies (Netherlands, Japan)?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1676615990233186309

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I don't think you need to label this guy. Most people simply just read what's on the media and accept that to be the case. If you were him and read all day long that YMTC is dying, would you assume otherwise?

YMTC has suffered from lack of access to tools that it paid for, but it is now transitioning to domestic equipments and is able to expand again soon enough. In fact, it has produced so much SSDs that it has to keep lowering prices to rock bottom level to sell them

Dark Father said:

What this pro-US think tanker says is that correct, folks? That YMTC is contracting after the chips sanctions of the US and their allies (Netherlands, Japan)?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1676615990233186309

Click to expand...

Another HG. I didn't knew this one, they are becoming a plague and of course he is using a very influencing think tank as a platform for advocating for policy recommendations that could have far reaching consequences for an entire industry that he has nothing to do with. Like in the days before the disaster of the Iraq War, people who have never been in a war advocating for war.


Memory chips don't scale as fast as logic chips, compared to logic chips memory chips scale more linearly, so that give some memories players chance to catch-up, that makes the memory market more even, but also is creating walls for new technologies like AI, also make memory very susceptible to boom burst cycles as players cramp the industry.
The logic market in the other side is unforgiving, it move really fast and that why TSMC is a behemoth because introduce new logic processes quickly and efficiently.
I think Chinese companies could made breakthroughs on memory faster than logic even using mostly domestic tools, they will definitely make breakthroughs with logic as well as we saw with SMIC 7nm process but I think memory and storage will be faster. Jinhua is still alive, kicking and hiring people.

The sanctions on equipment might have delayed YMTC's capacity expansion plans somewhat. But I think the financial trouble at its parent company Tsinghua Unigroup played much more of a factor. We have secondary evidence that they seem to have found alternative tool vendors in China. Time will tell if their second fab will ramp up as expected or not.

Much was said about reduced overall income by YMTC, but this has been due to a capacity glut in the market now that demand for NAND basically imploded, rather than reduction in production. Production at YMTC still seems to be increasing.

Even the claims of problems with management at YMTC seem to be overblown I think. The CEO left his position to go into the Deputy Chairman position. If the owners of YMTC had major issues with his performance he would not have been put into that position.