Chinese semiconductor industry

Wahid145 said:

Was about to mention, ARM ISA or RISC-5, China really needs to get on board etc LoongArch or Huawei should try to make a modern ISA which doesn't have the iteration redundancies which might be present in current mainstream ISA. I believe Memory (DRAM & NAND) aren't a huge thing anymore for China for they have world leading YMTC and CXMT closely trailing the best.

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CXMT doesn't closely trail the best, unfortunately. China is 4 nodes behind in DRAM and even more so if you look at what could be produced by domestic SME (I will be soft and not care about litho). If China can produce DDR5 (which starts 2 nodes ahead of where CXMT currently is) using mostly domestic tools by early 2025 it will be great news.

Wahid145 said:

Was about to mention, ARM ISA or RISC-5, China really needs to get on board etc LoongArch or Huawei should try to make a modern ISA which doesn't have the iteration redundancies which might be present in current mainstream ISA. I believe Memory (DRAM & NAND) aren't a huge thing anymore for China for they have world leading YMTC and CXMT closely trailing the best.

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Didn't ARM china split from its parent? China and RISC-V is fine, the west can't really do a thing except ruining their market access for services and hardware.

If they decide to block China from RISC-V china can just continue with a RISC-V with their own extensions. Given the population that fall under BRICS or SCO Chinese semi conductor design studios will always have access to the bigger market hence more users, more revenue etc etc.

BlackWindMnt said:

Didn't ARM china split from its parent? China and RISC-V is fine, the west can't really do a thing except ruining their market access for services and hardware.

If they decide to block China from RISC-V china can just continue with a RISC-V with their own extensions. Given the population that fall under BRICS or SCO Chinese semi conductor design studios will always have access to the bigger market hence more users, more revenue etc etc.

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They cannot block China from using RISC-V. What they can do is to prevent American RISC-V companies from working with Chinese companies like having SiFive cores used on Sophgo servers

BoraTas said:

CXMT doesn't closely trail the best, unfortunately. China is 4 nodes behind in DRAM and even more so if you look at what could be produced by domestic SME (I will be soft and not care about litho). If China can produce DDR5 (which starts 2 nodes ahead of where CXMT currently is) using mostly domestic tools by early 2025 it will be great news.

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I wonder what's with CXMT's comparatively lackluster performance compared to other Chinese semi companies. Is it the fact that DRAM has a greater litho requirement than NAND that's holding back CXMT, or are there other potential reasons?

BlackWindMnt said:

Didn't ARM china split from its parent? China and RISC-V is fine, the west can't really do a thing except ruining their market access for services and hardware.

If they decide to block China from RISC-V china can just continue with a RISC-V with their own extensions. Given the population that fall under BRICS or SCO Chinese semi conductor design studios will always have access to the bigger market hence more users, more revenue etc etc.

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Who is making or using RISC-V processor on smartphone？Huawei is not

measuredingabens said:

I wonder what's with CXMT's comparatively lackluster performance compared to other Chinese semi companies. Is it the fact that DRAM has a greater litho requirement than NAND that's holding back CXMT, or are there other potential reasons?

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It’s not lithography. Dram is tricky to make in part because it’s not just scaling down the size of a transistor but a transistor plus a capacitor, and the capacitor brings with it a bunch of design and scaling challenges.

Some reading for people who want brush up.

tphuang said:

They cannot block China from using RISC-V. What they can do is to prevent American RISC-V companies from working with Chinese companies like having SiFive cores used on Sophgo servers

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Pretty much this its not even clear how the west will react regarding the potential future wave of RISC-V chips from China.
Will the west draw the national security law card again and block those Chinese RISC-V chips.
It will be interesting to follow the potential semi conductor tech lawfare.

tonyget said:

Who is making or using RISC-V processor on smartphone？Huawei is not

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You have Alibaba's T-HEAD doing a lot of RISC-V design work.

RISC-V for smartphones is not that interesting at this moment. I see RISC-V for cloud infrastructure being a lot more interesting in the short term the next 3~4 years. Also RISC-V for general compute and AI in IoT devices is really interesting in the short term.

For smartphone usage I expect maybe lower and medium end smartphones to start using RISC-V socs in 2026 or so when more software has been ported. But then again google has already announced they will provide a lot more RISC-V support. Alibaba T-head already started ported android to RISC-V some years ago.

Google:

Alibaba RISC-V:

BoraTas said:

CXMT doesn't closely trail the best, unfortunately. China is 4 nodes behind in DRAM and even more so if you look at what could be produced by domestic SME (I will be soft and not care about litho). If China can produce DDR5 (which starts 2 nodes ahead of where CXMT currently is) using mostly domestic tools by early 2025 it will be great news.

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DDR5 is coming very soon.

measuredingabens said:

I wonder what's with CXMT's comparatively lackluster performance compared to other Chinese semi companies. Is it the fact that DRAM has a greater litho requirement than NAND that's holding back CXMT, or are there other potential reasons?

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add laziness as well.

recently local government and CXMT join hands with investing more than 6 Billion USD. get green signal from local equipment makers. so you will see dramatic change in coming year.

DDR5 is coming.

Alright, so Omnivision continues to accumulate orders.

Honor's new headline phone will use OV50K, it grabbed all the supplies for it

Huawei's medium series Nova 12 will use OV50E

Huawei's second flagship P70 will use OV50H

This is kind of where i see things. Once the Chinese supply chain finally reached competitiveness, domestic OEMs will use them more and more given de-risking effort and lower prices.

The rise of Omnivision basically in the past couple of months is quite astonishing. We are also seeing that in OLED and other field.

If YMTC can actually ramp up 232-Layer TLC next year, it will be a big deal, because it can then start supplying domestic OEMs, which will create a cycle of more revenue and more R&D. That's what we are seeing with BOE, Omnivision, Horizon, SemiDrive, GigaDevice, Maxscend and many other domestic chip suppliers