Chinese semiconductor industry
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Intel's CEO threatened the White House that if we are not allowed to sell chips to the Chinese, we won't build those chip factories in the United States..
If there is no order from China, there is no need to build the world's largest chip manufacturing base..
This is just the beginning. LMAO
They are like the boy who cried wolf -- keep screaming about national security concerns and now a real national security concern has arrived.
i find often 2 years in China for these big projects from start of construction to low rate production, so maybe a little faster than what you are stating here. Of course, could always be delayed by equipment delivery delays
Definitely. Ga is typically your industry where economic value does not come close to show its security importance. I'm really surprised that wolfspeed claims they will not have problem getting supplies. Let's see. 2% of production in 2020 was from countries outside of China, Ukraine & Russia. No idea where they think they are getting all the Gallium from
According to Bard (recently started to give useful answers):
I guess military applications will be the last one to suffer, eventually it will be a problem mainly for LEDs....but they are already made in China anyhow, so the real impact is not clear at this point. The needed quantity of Gallium per wafer is very small and military applications don't require high volume of wafers.
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I'm afraid they won't listen to him, although they should. Intel is the posterchild of the US semiconductor company and Gelsinger is the posterchild of the US CEO....but the ball is already rolling, it can't be stopped, not by this administration.
The need for gallium varies with the process in question. For GaN on silicon carbide for example you only need a tiny amount of gallium which is added thinly on top of the silicon carbide wafer with a CVD process. But GaA is often done with actual gallium arsenide single crystals and wafers.
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Thanks for the numbers. here are some to think about
2021 production
China 420t
Japan 3t
Korea 2t
Russia 5t
So just 5t out of 430t are accessible to Western companies if China does a full sanction on this.
Also China exported 94t raw Ga in 2022. Not sure how many ton of GaA and GaN wafers it exported
Here are other things to think about
So, you can extract Ga from different bauxite production, but ones outside China may have low Ga content & it may be really hard to extract them without the experience of doing so like Chinese alumina refineries. On top of that, keep in mind that Chinese refineries get them naturally as part of a very energy intensity industry to produce alumina (that's the main money maker). So any factories outside China would get lower yield (maybe really low yield) trying to extract Ga from bauxite without an end user (since what do they do with all that Alumina if China is the biggest consumer of that?). Much higher cost may not be an issue, who knows.
But Chinese report does claim that 68% of recoverable Ga is physically in China. Clearly, China also imports bauxite from other countries (so it's not just emptying out its own stash)
so most of these foreign Ga producers closed their business several years ago. Only one with a little capacity is Japan, which apparently also has high purity type (the good stuff). Meaning you have to rebuild the skill set & the bauxite production to produce Ga. How long does that take?
again, here is the breakdown of the top GaN RF producers
Based on the #s you provided. over 225t were needed for Ga semiconductors. That number is likely higher now due to natural growth of GaA & GaN market. Let's say 300t is needed for that. 5t of production was available from last yr. Germany unlikely have restarted production of it due to the energy intensive nature of Ga & its energy issues.
take a look at the GaA chart. Most of the wafers are produced by Japanese manufacturers. I don't know if they even understand how much capacity exists in China (hint a lot)
So for all of America's limited raw Ga import, it likely relied on quite a bit of GaA wafer import for Japan. Qorvo & Skywork are the largest GaA players. Without Japanese GaA wafers, I really wonder where their input is coming from?
good point. GaN substrate likely finished outside of China. GaA substrate is the big question. Do you sacrifice GaA wafer production in favor of GaN-on-Si/Sic or try to keep up as much of your GaA RF production as possible. GaA RF chips looks to be a $6B business for American firms. Keep in mind that Qorvo overall revenue in 2021 was only $4B, so this is large part of that.
So if you loose that, you have to downsize & reduce R&D. Remember, issue is not cutting off US defense industry Ga. That's not possible. But how it would affect companies supporting them and their product development (R&D) & production costs
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From Nexchip's stock info material, 2024 DDIC market still expects just 12.7% of market to be sub 45nm. But expect this to be rapidly growing going forward. This tells me that although SMIC is behind Samsung & TSMC, it hasn't lost access to huge portion of pie. Although, this may be the highest revenue portion. Being able to produce 28-40nm DDIC chip from this year or next means SMIC will be able to compete with TSMC on the highest end DDIC market
another part from Nexchip
It expects to concentrate on 90/110/150nm process in its 12-inch plant. 55nm risk production just started
It's parent company Powerchip concentrates on 350nm to 25nm, so as a whole, they concentrate on mature chips.
Nexchip focused on developing MCU, CIS,, PMIC, Mini LED chips for 28 & 40nm segment. Again, major demand from Chinese industries in this segment.
That's why TSMC & UMC continue to add capacity. We may not like the increased competition on SMIC, but it also means less import from Korea.
Yes, South Korea is losing a lot of market share in sales of chips to China in part because of China now being able to make their own display controller chips which used to be imported. Some are contracted in general purpose foundries such as SMIC or Hua Hong, and there are dedicated foundries for display controller chips like Nexchip. In addition YMTC is undercutting South Korean NAND IDMs at the same time the industry is in a major slump and memory prices are crashing. China is still severely behind in DRAM technology however and there is no foreseeable solution for that given that the market is switching to EUV and China is banned from buying those machine tools. It would require some major change in technology in DRAM architecture to change this situation.
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