Chinese semiconductor industry

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tonyget

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they do have their own fabs as others have said here, but they are basically still on 28nm node and looking to solving 14nm. And they will try to produce a lot of the chips they need. Makes sense for them and others

I don't know any Hisilicon chip which they are producing uses 28nm,do you know any?
 

gelgoog

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A super computer using LA664 cores will be much better than this sunway core architecture
Both chips are totally different. Loongson uses a few large fat cores, while the Sunway uses lots of tiny cores. Sunway is more similar to IBM's Cell, as used in the Playstation 3, than a regular CPU. This is basically a competitor to GPUs for compute heavy applications.
 

tokenanalyst

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I’m pretty sure Huawei has it's own fab,which makes their chips now. I'm not talking about the new fab being build in ShenZhen,which is still under construction.

Remember back in 2020-2021,there were reports on several domestic equipment and material supplier(I think I did post some on this thread),mentioned about Huawei as one of their customers. Only fabs need to buy those stuff.

There was a rumour on internet that Huawei modified some second hand lithography machine to improve the accuracy. This rumour alone doesn't sounds very credible,but about a year ago,there was a news that SMEE was complaining to Shanghai local official that Huawei was poaching their engineers. Why would any fab need to poach lithography machine design engineers,if they are just a regular lithography machine user?Only those with the intention of creating new,or modify existing lithography machine would do so.
I think Hisilicon IOT chips could be made in a 28nm process.

Either way Hisilicon only design Huawei high end chips but Huawei consume more low end chips or analog chips also that cannot get from foreign companies because is blacklisted and also they can't get from Chinese companies, so I do think the current mission of Huawei is to reluctantly get into chip manufacturing to make whatever they can't get in the Chinese market with enough quality, enough quantity or is so weird that nobody is making it. They also are in the mission of learning the manufacturing process which is better to start low. Anything more advanced they will likely depend of Chinese fabs like SMIC, HHGrace and China memory makers.

Ask yourself the question why Huawei want to get alone, invest billions into the HV production of below 28nm process nodes or memory when they have access to China biggest fabs? Would that effort, time and money wouldn't better invested into filling that gaps in their current supply Chain, like making photonics, advance packaging, mems, RF Chips and so on?

I do think Huawei will eventually climb the learning ladder and get into high end chip manufacturing or even into equipment manufacturing itself to fill the gaps in their manufacturing process but for now I think they are not there... yet.​
 
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tonyget

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Ask yourself the question why Huawei want to get alone, invest billions into the HV production of below 28nm process nodes or memory when they have access to China biggest fabs? Would that effort, time and money wouldn't better invested into filling that gaps in their current supply Chain, like making photonics, advance packaging, mems, RF Chips and so on?​

Simple answer is,Huawei is in a position where invest billions into advanced node is worth it. The investment can be paid off in relative short period.

There is lots of areas where advanced processor from Huawei is needed in China. Mobile application,AI chips,ADAS for EV,CPU for server,supercomputing,WIFI chips,high speed ethernet chips etc. All of which requires logic chip with advanced node process,and Huawei is the dominate player in China in these fields. So the demand is huge,Huawei worried about not getting enough production capacity,rather than low utilization rate of production line once the fab is complete.
 

tphuang

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I think there is no question Huawei is going in that direction. If you look at a lot of the chips it designs, they are in the 14nm range. But in order to get to 14nm, you first have to conquer 28nm using de-americanized tools. Which I assume they have done based on what hvpc said before. So now they are looking to qualify 14nm tools. It's just normal. Maybe Huawei, wants to go from 0 to 100 in a year, but it's going to take them several years, so until it gets there, it will need to rely on SMIC.


but beyond 14nm, there is still plenty of need for 28/40/55nm chips. SMIC talked about it a lot. If you look at EVs right now, everyone is moving to 40nm. Clear reason for Huawei to develop expertise and increase production at these nodes.
 

tonyget

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but beyond 14nm, there is still plenty of need for 28/40/55nm chips. SMIC talked about it a lot. If you look at EVs right now, everyone is moving to 40nm. Clear reason for Huawei to develop expertise and increase production at these nodes.

The thing is,there is a massive buildup of mature node capacity in China right now,but no buildup of advanced node capacity. That means in near future,there is tons of "28/40/55nm" capacity readily available in China,there is really no need for Huawei to build mature node fabs themself,as it will be much cheaper to just outsource it. On the other hand,there will be woeful shortage of advanced node capacity in China,in which Huawei will have to help themself to fill the gap.
 
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