Chinese semiconductor industry

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caudaceus

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If the goal was to remove Chinese suppliers from 5G, than ORAN is a tremendously stupid and self defeating idea (guess what plug and play entails?)
I heard with ORAN, the plan is that to have a software-oriented stack instead of a hardware-oriented one, in which US companies are more comfortable.
 

ougoah

Brigadier
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Werent some folks here saying its 10x harder than fusion?

I dunno where you're getting this from. I said earlier that it's rarer than experimental fusion reactors, not that it's harder. Also commercial fusion is evidently much harder since it doesn't exist yet and EUVL does.

One or two drama queens were lamenting how China will never be able to master EUVL because it's n times harder than something hard like fusion lol. Stupid, wrong, and needlessly/comically dramatic.
 

WTAN

Junior Member
Registered Member
@WTAN and others,

Do the Taiwanese and TSMC specifically manufacture anything materially towards the semiconductor fabrication chain?

I'm pretty sure there ought to be some suppliers. Surely Taiwan and TSMC isn't just betting on Human resource as its input in the manufacturing chain
No......Taiwan does not manufacture any Semiconductor Equipment of any importance to the FAB chain.
That is why the US has such great control over the future prospects of TSMC. The US can damage TSMC literally by restricting supply of EUV and equipment etc.
TSMC has to comply with orders by the US to build a FAB in the US to allow transfer of manufacturing knowledge and IP. Also the US can restrict who TSMC supplies to.
At the same time INTEL will also compete with TSMC in the same business.
The US will win and Taiwan will lose.
Thats the Game Plan.
 

hashtagpls

Senior Member
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TSMC has to comply with orders by the US to build a FAB in the US to allow transfer of manufacturing knowledge and IP. Also the US can restrict who TSMC supplies to.
This is the part that really sticks into my crawl; the IP and manufacturing knowledge is taiwan origin and taiwan borne- what right do anglos have to that IP?
 

ansy1968

Brigadier
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To the experts what is the significant of this breakthrough?

from CnTechPost

Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough​

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April 15, 2021
Chinese chip maker Loongson Technology on Thursday
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its fully in-house developed instruction set architecture, Loongson Architecture, or LoongArch, marking a major milestone for the Chinese IC industry.
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was previously one of the key proponents of the MIPS instruction system. The move making it the latest company to abandon MIPS after Wave Computing's move to the RISC-V camp.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost

Loongson commissioned LoongArch to be evaluated by a leading third-party IP evaluator. Beginning in the second quarter of 2020, the parties invested hundreds of people in an in-depth comparative analysis of LoongArch against information and tens of thousands of patents related to major international instruction systems such as ALPHA, ARM, MIPS, POWER, RISC-V, and X86.
In January 2021, the evaluation organization concluded that LoongArch has designed its own instruction system design, instruction format, instruction encoding, and addressing modes.

The LoongArch instruction system manual is significantly different from the major international instruction systems mentioned above in terms of chapter structure, instruction description structure, and instruction content presentation.
The LoongArch infrastructure has not identified any risk of infringement of Chinese patents on the above-mentioned major international instruction systems, the evaluation concluded.
The CPU instruction system is the hardware and software interface of a computer, and is the specification of the binary coding format of the software instructions executed by the CPU.

At present, the most well-known ones are the x86 instruction system based on the Wintel ecosystem and the ARM instruction system based on the Android operating system.
Both the x86 and ARM instruction systems need to be "licensed" in order to develop CPUs compatible with them, and it is possible to develop products using licensed instruction systems, but it is not possible to form an autonomous industrial ecosystem.

RISCV is a completely open source instruction system, but it comes from the University of Berkeley. Therefore, Loongson Architecture is a historical breakthrough for the Chinese IC industry.
The CPUs developed by Loongson since 2020 all support the LoongArch architecture.
Its first Loongson 3A5000 processor chip supporting LoongArch architecture has been taped out, and a complete operating system based on the new architecture is already running stably on the 3A5000 computer.
Binary translation systems from other mainstream instruction systems to LoongArch have been demonstrated on the 3A5000 computer running complex applications based on other mainstream instruction systems.
Currently, Loongson has published the LoongArch infrastructure instruction system manual on a limited basis. Upon completion of further IP evaluation, including offshore patent analysis, Loongson will release a more complete LoongArch instruction system manual on a larger scale.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost
 

BoraTas

Captain
Registered Member
To the experts what is the significant of this breakthrough?

from CnTechPost

Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough​

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April 15, 2021
Chinese chip maker Loongson Technology on Thursday
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
its fully in-house developed instruction set architecture, Loongson Architecture, or LoongArch, marking a major milestone for the Chinese IC industry.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
was previously one of the key proponents of the MIPS instruction system. The move making it the latest company to abandon MIPS after Wave Computing's move to the RISC-V camp.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost

Loongson commissioned LoongArch to be evaluated by a leading third-party IP evaluator. Beginning in the second quarter of 2020, the parties invested hundreds of people in an in-depth comparative analysis of LoongArch against information and tens of thousands of patents related to major international instruction systems such as ALPHA, ARM, MIPS, POWER, RISC-V, and X86.
In January 2021, the evaluation organization concluded that LoongArch has designed its own instruction system design, instruction format, instruction encoding, and addressing modes.

The LoongArch instruction system manual is significantly different from the major international instruction systems mentioned above in terms of chapter structure, instruction description structure, and instruction content presentation.
The LoongArch infrastructure has not identified any risk of infringement of Chinese patents on the above-mentioned major international instruction systems, the evaluation concluded.
The CPU instruction system is the hardware and software interface of a computer, and is the specification of the binary coding format of the software instructions executed by the CPU.

At present, the most well-known ones are the x86 instruction system based on the Wintel ecosystem and the ARM instruction system based on the Android operating system.
Both the x86 and ARM instruction systems need to be "licensed" in order to develop CPUs compatible with them, and it is possible to develop products using licensed instruction systems, but it is not possible to form an autonomous industrial ecosystem.

RISCV is a completely open source instruction system, but it comes from the University of Berkeley. Therefore, Loongson Architecture is a historical breakthrough for the Chinese IC industry.
The CPUs developed by Loongson since 2020 all support the LoongArch architecture.
Its first Loongson 3A5000 processor chip supporting LoongArch architecture has been taped out, and a complete operating system based on the new architecture is already running stably on the 3A5000 computer.
Binary translation systems from other mainstream instruction systems to LoongArch have been demonstrated on the 3A5000 computer running complex applications based on other mainstream instruction systems.
Currently, Loongson has published the LoongArch infrastructure instruction system manual on a limited basis. Upon completion of further IP evaluation, including offshore patent analysis, Loongson will release a more complete LoongArch instruction system manual on a larger scale.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost
Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) = computer architecture. So what makes a computer architecture?
- Supported data types
- Instructions (can be thought of as processor functions like addition, matrice multiplication, data move etc...)
- Input/output
- Memory management including addressing modes
.
.
.
It is the first Chinese ISA. I think that's the significant part.
 

wxw456

New Member
Registered Member
To the experts what is the significant of this breakthrough?

from CnTechPost

Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough​

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
April 15, 2021
Chinese chip maker Loongson Technology on Thursday
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
its fully in-house developed instruction set architecture, Loongson Architecture, or LoongArch, marking a major milestone for the Chinese IC industry.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
was previously one of the key proponents of the MIPS instruction system. The move making it the latest company to abandon MIPS after Wave Computing's move to the RISC-V camp.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost

Loongson commissioned LoongArch to be evaluated by a leading third-party IP evaluator. Beginning in the second quarter of 2020, the parties invested hundreds of people in an in-depth comparative analysis of LoongArch against information and tens of thousands of patents related to major international instruction systems such as ALPHA, ARM, MIPS, POWER, RISC-V, and X86.
In January 2021, the evaluation organization concluded that LoongArch has designed its own instruction system design, instruction format, instruction encoding, and addressing modes.

The LoongArch instruction system manual is significantly different from the major international instruction systems mentioned above in terms of chapter structure, instruction description structure, and instruction content presentation.
The LoongArch infrastructure has not identified any risk of infringement of Chinese patents on the above-mentioned major international instruction systems, the evaluation concluded.
The CPU instruction system is the hardware and software interface of a computer, and is the specification of the binary coding format of the software instructions executed by the CPU.

At present, the most well-known ones are the x86 instruction system based on the Wintel ecosystem and the ARM instruction system based on the Android operating system.
Both the x86 and ARM instruction systems need to be "licensed" in order to develop CPUs compatible with them, and it is possible to develop products using licensed instruction systems, but it is not possible to form an autonomous industrial ecosystem.

RISCV is a completely open source instruction system, but it comes from the University of Berkeley. Therefore, Loongson Architecture is a historical breakthrough for the Chinese IC industry.
The CPUs developed by Loongson since 2020 all support the LoongArch architecture.
Its first Loongson 3A5000 processor chip supporting LoongArch architecture has been taped out, and a complete operating system based on the new architecture is already running stably on the 3A5000 computer.
Binary translation systems from other mainstream instruction systems to LoongArch have been demonstrated on the 3A5000 computer running complex applications based on other mainstream instruction systems.
Currently, Loongson has published the LoongArch infrastructure instruction system manual on a limited basis. Upon completion of further IP evaluation, including offshore patent analysis, Loongson will release a more complete LoongArch instruction system manual on a larger scale.
Loongson unveils in-house developed instruction set architecture LoongArch in historic breakthrough-CnTechPost

Not a surprising development if you look back at previous Loongson chips. In 2009 the Loongson 3A1000 chip was released that supported two ISAs (MIPS64 Release 2 and LoongISA 1.0). The latest Loongson 3A4000 chip released in 2019 also supports two ISAs (MIPS64 Release 5 and LoongISA 2.0). Since 2009 Loongson has adopted a strategy of supporting the MIPS architecture as well as its own LoongISA architecture.

What is not completely clear in the article is the direction of future ISA development. The articles implies that Loongson has developed a new LoongArch architecture and will drop MIPS support in the future. That leaves two possibilities:
(1) Loongson drops MIPS and supports RISC-V and its new LoongArch ISA architecture.
(2) Loongson drops MIPS and supports just its new LoongArch ISA architecture.
Given that many other Chinese companies are evaluating and performing R&D towards RISC-V, option (1) is the most likely. I can't imagine option (2) happening because previously Loongson was never confident enough to drop support for MIPS and support its own ISA architecture.

Why is Loongson dropping MIPS support now? Simply because MIPS is not popular and the architecture already lost to ARM and x86 decades ago. RISC-V is new (lots of interest) and there are a lot of companies doing R&D with the open source ISA. Furthermore there are no dominant/established RISC-V CPU chips in the market. That means Loongson has the possibility to create the first (or early) commercial RISC-V CPU and establish a first-mover advantage. Loongson's first commercial MIPS chips in 2009 never had the same opportunity since MIPS by that time already fell out of favor.
 
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