Chinese semiconductor industry

dfrtyhgj said:

Silicon Valley starts at 200k now, more like 300k for the hotter area (and that's just starting). Chinese housing is similar in cost to Silicon Valley, so the deal is still not good. China needs to build more houses, especially suburban ones.

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200k is a very competitive FAANG offer in Silicon Valley (only top candidates with multiple competing offers would be able to negotiate for that much) for a fresh grad, most offers will be in mid to upper 100s even for FAANG. 300k would be a pretty competitive offer for mid-level engineers at FAANG with 4-10yrs YOE.

Chinese chipmaker YMTC's 128-layer memory chip achieves mass production

BoraTas said:

Yes. It will never be like the times before 2016. And the effect wasn't only on China. Even Japan and the EU started their own semiconductor initiatives. They suddenly started planning their future supercomputers with their own chips.

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ansy1968 said:

@BoraTas Sir if that's the case then TSMC should accept the offer of Japan and the EU to open up a FAB in their respective country and region. By 2024 the FAB in Taiwan seems redundant with the opening of the Arizona Fab, the Samsung and Intel FAB. With China by then fully sufficient.

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When you think of it, the most sensible thing both for Taiwan and TSMC is to drop the US altogether and help mainland. It would be a win win for all. It would solve a political problem, it would solve a chip problem for China, it would solve the economy of Taiwan and it save TSMC.

I am not so sure building factories in the US is a smart move.

Wangxi said:

Chinese chipmaker YMTC's 128-layer memory chip achieves mass production

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Samsung and Micron were developing the 176 layer chip. At the same time YMTC was and is developing a 192 layer chip which will make it the top dog technology wise as far as 3D NAND is concerned.

Way to go!

FairAndUnbiased said:

A total chip ban would hand Chinese foundries, IDMs and equipment suppliers a monopoly inside China while themselves cutting off 50% of their market. No new market will replace China as to even use the outputs of the semiconductor sector you need a highly sophisticated fabless and PCB sector which in turn requires a highly sophisticated electronics and software sector. Costs would skyrocket and their newly built zombie fabs would collapse rapidly or go on subsidy life support permanently.

It'd be a stupid move.

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Well... “Stupid is as stupid does” and boy, have they been doing stupid!

caudaceus said:

Force AMD to fab their chips in TSMC AZ

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If the TSMC Arizona fab gets built, it is likely to be the most advanced fab on American soil for a while (unless there's a technology transfer to Intel) and therefore it would likely be used by more than AMD. Despite having access to ASML EUV litho for years Intel has been unable to come up with what they previously called 7nm.

Instead in their most recent road-map outline a few days ago they announced that their existing 10nm SuperFin version would be renamed as 7nm. What they have been previously working on as 7nm has been renamed to 4nm. As you can see that's 1nm smaller than TSMCs most leading-edge target for Arizona. This may help please Intel investors and help Intel secure a bigger piece of the $52 billion that's been set aside by US government.

Intel's claim is that despite bigger transistor size, Intel's 10nm SuperFin can achieve same performance as TSMCs 7nm, through other optimizations. This claim may or may not be true. Unlike investors and government, the actual potential customers like AMD, Qualcomm and Apple are likely to verify it for themselves before making orders. So there's still a chance that TSMC's 5nm gets more orders from these companies than Intel's proposed 4nm.

Wangxi said:

Chinese chipmaker YMTC's 128-layer memory chip achieves mass production

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In the first quarter of the year, Samsung took the top spot in revenue in the NAND flash market across the world with a 33.5 percent share of the global market, according to market intelligence provider TrendForce.

Japanese memory manufacturer Kioxia ranked No.2 with 18.7 percent of the market, followed by US-based Western Digital with 14.7 percent, SK Hynix with 12.3 percent, Micron with 11.1 percent, and Intel with 7.5 percent, according to TrendForce data.

This means the six major memory firms held nearly 98 percent of the entire global market of NAND flash memories.

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Why is YMTC's production volume still so small? Is it just the matter of building more production lines or is there something else?

dfrtyhgj said:

Silicon Valley starts at 200k now, more like 300k for the hotter area (and that's just starting). Chinese housing is similar in cost to Silicon Valley, so the deal is still not good. China needs to build more houses, especially suburban ones.

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Those are software engineering salaries. People who work at fabs don’t get close in terms of pay. That’s why many people, me included, have transitioned from semiconductors/firmware to application development.

bettydice said:

Why is YMTC's production volume still so small? Is it just the matter of building more production lines or is there something else?

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They need to ramp up capacity and then displace Samsung and Micron.

bettydice said:

Why is YMTC's production volume still so small? Is it just the matter of building more production lines or is there something else?

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Samsung has multiple memory foundries, YMTC had 2. YMTC sales volume does not yet justify more foundries.