Chinese semiconductor industry

WTAN said:

This will be great for EDA development in China.
Now we have locally owned EDA Vendors working with Huawei, SMIC and SMEE.
This will backfire on US companies.

Click to expand...

Hi WTAN,

Did Huawei already develop the EDA tools for 7nm? If they already do then it can shared it with SMIC and SMEE, or establish a EDA subsidiary company?

mderfox said:

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] On October 9, a person familiar with the matter told Jiwei that after AMD and Intel, TSMC has also obtained a license from the US Department of Commerce and can continue to Huawei supplies some mature craft products.

According to the person familiar with the matter, the license obtained by TSMC mainly covers products manufactured with mature technology, and advanced node products such as mobile phone SoCs still cannot be found for Huawei.

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p/s google translate.

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China needs a US independent manufacturing line for these older processes and to get that production out of TSMC ASAP.
They are proven unreliable.

ansy1968 said:

Hi WTAN,

Did Huawei already develop the EDA tools for 7nm? If they already do then it can shared it with SMIC and SMEE, or establish a EDA subsidiary company?

Click to expand...

Huawei developed a EDA Tool for 7nm Chips as part of the 02 Special Project. Developing something for the 02 project would mean that it is available for use by SMEE and also by the Fabricators(SMIC) which use the SMEE Lithograph.

It must be remembered that Huawei and other FABless Companies in China were forced to use American EDA as their main Fabricator TSMC used ASML Lithographs and American EDA. The EDA was integrated with the ASML machine.

Currently Huawei, SMIC and SMEE are all under sanction, so they have to use their own EDA. American EDA Vendors are banned from cooperating with these companies.

In any case the new 40nm and 28nm FABs being built by SMIC and Huawei with 100% domestic equipment would definitely be using locally made EDA. American EDA companies would not be involved in any stage of the design or production process.

As more of China's Semiconductors are produced using locally made equipment, the market share of American EDA will drop by a large margin.

A ready/future customer for SMIC , if they able to put its 7nm N+1 to fruition. Right now they contracted their production to TSMC for their 28nm and 6nm chips.

from cnTechPost

Chinese chip maker Unisoc released Tiger T710 development board
2020-10-10 20:05:32 GMT+8 | cnTechPost
0


Unisoc, a China-based supplier of mobile communications chipsets and IoT chipsets, announced on October 10 the Tiger T710 development board, an octa-core high-performance artificial intelligence motherboard powered by Unisoc AI processor Tiger T710.

It has a built-in neural network processor NPU and powerful AI computing performance of up to 3.2 TOPS.

In addition to the typical scenario of smart healthcare, the Tiger T710 development board can also be used in a variety of scenarios and meet its computing performance needs, including smart retail, smart healthcare, smart education, smart agriculture, smart driving, and other fields.
The Unisoc Tiger T710 development board is powered by the T710 octa-core processor, which adopts a quad-core Cortex-A75 + quad-small Cortex-A55 architecture and is clocked at 2.0GHz.
It integrates AI neural network processor NPU, supports INT8/INT16/FP16 multiple neural network quantization methods, with a combined computing power of 4.2 TOPS and an energy efficiency of over 2.5TOPS/W. The T710 development board has strong model compatibility.



T710 development board has strong model compatibility and can directly apply the TensorFlow/TensorFlow Lite/Caffe/ONNX general-purpose model, provide model conversion, and end-side conversion API and other AI development tools.

T710 development board has multiple external interfaces, supporting I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, USB2.0/3.0, I2S, and TF Card interfaces.
Tiger T710 can support a wide range of scenarios, including face recognition, intelligent driving assistance, smart warehousing, smart retail, smart payment, smart agriculture, smart healthcare, and smart education.


It supports HDMI 1.4, MIPI-DSI multiple display output interfaces, has powerful hardware codec capability, supports 4K@30fps, H.264, H.265, vp8, and vp9 codec formats.

It supports Linux operating system, in line with the 96board standard CE specification, standardized design according to the 96board CE specification, and provides a standard 40pin low-speed expansion port, 60pin high-speed expansion port, you can use the 96board standard expansion board to achieve more functions.
The Tiger T710 development board supports dual MIPI cameras with dual MIPI CSI interfaces for simultaneous data input from both cameras.

It has a built-in hardware ISP up to 24Mpixel + 8Mpixel and supports both wired and wireless networks.

It supports Gigabit Ethernet wired interface and Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/n/ac.

Harmony will be an awesome OS, Huawei had leverage its 5G technology and from what I read this OS will leave google/ android OS obsolete.

from cnTechPost

Huawei said to release in-vehicle smart screen with HarmonyOS
2020-10-10 18:46:26 GMT+8 | cnTechPost
1


Huawei is about to release an in-vehicle smart screen with Huawei HarmonyOS, according to the Weibo digital blogger .




Huawei consumer business CEO Richard Yu said last year, Huawei smart screen strategy covers four major scenes: home, office, car, sports.
On September 8, Huawei Electric Technology Co Ltd was established with a registered capital of RMB 250 million, with Huawei holding 100% of the shares.
In September this year, during Huawei Developer Conference 2020 (HDC), Huawei held the HMS for Car smart travel sub-forum to introduce HMS for Car's new smart in-vehicle cloud service solution.


Huawei said that HMS for Car can also realize the interconnection and intercommunication between mobile phones, watches, speakers, smart screens, and other devices and vehicle data, which will create a full-scene smart travel experience.

WTAN said:

Huawei developed a EDA Tool for 7nm Chips as part of the 02 Special Project. Developing something for the 02 project would mean that it is available for use by SMEE and also by the Fabricators(SMIC) which use the SMEE Lithograph.

It must be remembered that Huawei and other FABless Companies in China were forced to use American EDA as their main Fabricator TSMC used ASML Lithographs and American EDA. The EDA was integrated with the ASML machine.

Currently Huawei, SMIC and SMEE are all under sanction, so they have to use their own EDA. American EDA Vendors are banned from cooperating with these companies.

In any case the new 40nm and 28nm FABs being built by SMIC and Huawei with 100% domestic equipment would definitely be using locally made EDA. American EDA companies would not be involved in any stage of the design or production process.

As more of China's Semiconductors are produced using locally made equipment, the market share of American EDA will drop by a large margin.

Click to expand...

Hi WTAN,

Question, I think Skywatcher may answer this as well, can TSMC and Samsung buy and use SMEE lithograph equipment and not be sanction by the US? Since SMEE is under sanction will this prohibit other FAB company to do business with them?

WTAN said:

Huawei developed a EDA Tool for 7nm Chips as part of the 02 Special Project. Developing something for the 02 project would mean that it is available for use by SMEE and also by the Fabricators(SMIC) which use the SMEE Lithograph.

It must be remembered that Huawei and other FABless Companies in China were forced to use American EDA as their main Fabricator TSMC used ASML Lithographs and American EDA. The EDA was integrated with the ASML machine.

Currently Huawei, SMIC and SMEE are all under sanction, so they have to use their own EDA. American EDA Vendors are banned from cooperating with these companies.

In any case the new 40nm and 28nm FABs being built by SMIC and Huawei with 100% domestic equipment would definitely be using locally made EDA. American EDA companies would not be involved in any stage of the design or production process.

As more of China's Semiconductors are produced using locally made equipment, the market share of American EDA will drop by a large margin.

Click to expand...

I suspect it is more complicated than that. EDA tools are across a wide gamut. I suspect what that project made was basically a compiler of sorts which turns the EDA design into low level instructions for the machine tools to make the chip. Rather than being an high end logic design or verification tool or whatever. If you are designing smartphone SoCs or any other SoC which uses an ARM designed core how will you get the softcore datafiles you licensed from ARM into your fully native EDA toolchain eh? It isn't as simple as that.
I think China needs to somehow put a damper into NVIDIA's ARM acquisition or this will be another major sticking point.
With regards to the EDA vendors you just need to pirate the software it's as simple as that. It's not like it can be sold to you anyway so any court claims of loss of revenue or whatever would be bunk. If China has its own compiler of those files into the tapeout to be sent to the factory who knows which EDA design tools were used until the final file was generated? It's a don't ask don't tell situation.

ansy1968 said:

Hi WTAN,

Question, I think Skywatcher may answer this as well, can TSMC and Samsung buy and use SMEE lithograph equipment and not be sanction by the US? Since SMEE is under sanction will this prohibit other FAB company to do business with them?

Click to expand...

No need. Canon and Nikon (Japan) make DUV immersion lithography machine tools which would likely not be under sanctions.
Those basically do that SMEE's lithograph that's expected to come out next year will do. But there are more tools than just the lithograph you need chip verification tools and bunch of other tools. Some of them are produced by Tokyo Electron but others might only be available or might only have top performance if they come from an US tool vendor. This is a production pipeline. You need loads of machine tools.

The problem is the EUV lithography tools and other things in the component chain and consumables like mask materials and other chemical products which China doesn't manufacture either. You would expect China, for example, to at least have a huge monocrystalline silicon production industry for all the wafers it uses for solar cells but AFAIK it doesn't and this is incredible. There is an industry for cutting the silicon ingots and recently a large capacity for polycrystalline silicon has been built in China. Polycrystaline silicon is used in cheap solar cells but can't be used for chips. You need monocrystaline silicon that's used in higher end solar cells. It's as simple as that. I won't even get into details of all the other chemicals involved in the chip production process which also aren't produced in China because frankly it's above me.

gelgoog said:

There is an industry for cutting the silicon ingots and recently a large capacity for polycrystalline silicon has been built in China. Polycrystaline silicon is used in cheap solar cells but can't be used for chips. You need monocrystaline silicon that's used in higher end solar cells. It's as simple as that. I won't even get into details of all the other chemicals involved in the chip production process which also aren't produced in China because frankly it's above me.

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You sure about that?

SPOOPYSKELETON said:

You sure about that?

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Like I said they cut wafers from silicon ingots but AFAIK they don't produce the ingots. I would be glad to be proven wrong though.
Latest generation chip fabs use 300mm (~12in) diameter silicon wafers which are cut from ingots.