Chinese semiconductor industry

Status
Not open for further replies.

krautmeister

Junior Member
Registered Member
They served in silence.

That aside do we know the current status of Chinese FPGA?
Last I heard, the China domestic FPGA scene is fugly. Over 99% of the market is owned by giants like Xilinx and Intel with the local leaders trailing far behind, mostly due to patent portfolios held by those same leaders. Here's a good article describing the ugly situation.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Quote: "The biggest obstacle to the development of FPGA in China is patent technology. The two companies, Xilinx and Intel, have set up barriers from cell architecture, IP, interconnection and other core technologies. In the past 20 years, the development of domestic FPGA companies has been very difficult to break through, and now they are still in the dilemma of passive innovation and high R & D cost. According to the data of global market insights, it is estimated that by 2022, the FPGA market in the Asia Pacific region will exceed 4 billion US dollars, while foreign manufacturers will account for 99% of the market share. In the background of self-improvement, how to break through has become the biggest challenge for domestic FPGA manufacturers."

Quote: "Compared with nearly 1700 IC design enterprises in the Chinese market, the number of domestic FPGA manufacturers is pitiful. In fact, it is not the low profit of FPGA products, but the insurmountable technical barriers. In order to succeed in FPGA industry, we need to build a complete ecosystem, including FPGA chip, EDA tool, IP library, etc."
 

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
Over 99% of the market is owned by giants like Xilinx and Intel
it is estimated that by 2022, the FPGA market in the Asia Pacific region will exceed 4 billion US dollars, while foreign manufacturers will account for 99% of the market share
Yikes!
Thats just asking for a future export ban from certain countries..

Is the Gov helping the domestic players?
 

krautmeister

Junior Member
Registered Member
So the solution (Moore's Law )is now focus on advance packaging and 3D stacking chiplet? @krautmeister @FairAndUnbiased bro on your previous post China is known to be good at packaging especially with the newly recruited JIANG SHANGYI of SMIC, So they have a chance to at least stay within a generation behind as TSMC and Samsung hit those technical barriers? And also the video talks about TSMC investment in Photonics chip, is this the same as the Huawei FAB in Wuhan? If it does this mean that Huawei had strategically invested in this new technology as they try to overcome the restriction and had found a solution? Sorry for being a nuisance but I really like to hear your opinion.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

309 views23 minutes ago

CC
Imo, heterogenous chiplet designs with DUVi 7nm 3D stacking is absolutely "THE" great equalizer, even if the process node leaders are able to do something like multi-patterning with high-NA EUV. Even so, I think EUV process nodes will stall with high-NA EUV double patterning, and from there will also move to 3D chiplets. Also, this will only be a good idea with EUV for premium chips like for smartphones, AI, high performance computing, etc. For all other categories, the extra design cost beyond say 5nm EUV makes no sense, but heterogenous >=5nm EUV 3D chiplet designs would have potential.

Which interconnect packaging schemes China ends up using is still a mystery, it's all a black box right now, but we know it's being planned at SMIC for sure, and probably others. The challenge is more about how the chips work in unison rather than the interconnect schemes between the dies. 3D chiplet stacking primary advantages are the shorter distances between each disparate chip whereas with a monolithic chip design like a SoC, the circuit traverses the entire circuit on a 2D plane. So, for example, say we were maxing out the clock frequency on a 7nm chip to something like 3.5 GHz, for every cycle, there would be massive performance improvement simply on the number of cache hits because of the shorter physical distance between the memory on a SoC vs the memory on a 3D chip where the cache could be layered directly above or below. You could extend this logic to stacking cores on top of each other, rather than tiled, and accessing memory through a vertical data bus to shared memory instead of across a 2D bus. You could fiddle with the pipelines to work vertically and create a design roughly resembling a "kernel" with all the most accessed critical elements within the "kernel" die(s). The potential problems mostly revolve around heat dissipation, something to keep in mind since cores and cache generate by far the most heat.

Most of the design choices for 3D chiplets take advantage of this logic. The beauty is, this kills 2 birds with 1 stone. It dramatically improves performance while improving 7nm DUVi yields which together will bring the cost benefit sweet spot for EUV from 7nm down to 5nm, possibly even 3nm. Given the probable cost advantages of a fully China semicon supply chain, this cost discrepancy will warp EUV economics even more. Fun days ahead.
 

krautmeister

Junior Member
Registered Member
Yikes!
Thats just asking for a future export ban from certain countries..

Is the Gov helping the domestic players?
I don't know enough about this other than to say it is freaking fugly, like F**king Ugly. From the description, even with the talent, skills and experience, it will still be an uphill battle because of the overwhelming patent portfolios controlling every corner of FPGA development. The global giants basically started very early and patented things like the shape of a circle.
 

Agnus

Junior Member
Registered Member
Gordon Chang's [REAL] argument is as follows: I am of mixed race descent, people used to bully me back throughout my childhood for being a half-breed. I vowed to myself that for the rest of my life I would try to assimilate into my bullies race and culture as much as I can, even if it means being a token Mongoloid they use to prove they are not racist while shitting on my phenotype's ancestry as much as is possible. I will sacrifice everything, even my dignity and my ancestors respect, if it means being able to converse with them, to marry them, to sniff their holy Whiteness.

That's all his pathetic and servile 'arguments' boil down to.
Yes...........

But seriously, what are his arguments? Has anyone read his works?
 

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
I don't know enough about this other than to say it is freaking fugly, like F**king Ugly. From the description, even with the talent, skills and experience, it will still be an uphill battle because of the overwhelming patent portfolios controlling every corner of FPGA development. The global giants basically started very early and patented things like the shape of a circle.
Thats an IP law problem then. Normally they are only allowed to patent the specific way a product works and not the underlying physics.

How is it not possible for domestic players to workaround it? They will need huge investments from the state though.

This is just asking for a tech/IP ban from the US
 

krautmeister

Junior Member
Registered Member
Thats an IP law problem then. Normally they are only allowed to patent the specific way a product works and not the underlying physics.

How is it not possible for domestic players to workaround it? They will need huge investments from the state though.

This is just asking for a tech/IP ban from the US
I understand why IP protection is needed in order to protect innovation. However, when global giants use their leading position to crowd out smaller competitors via patent overload, what this does is force smaller competitors to simply avoid such patents and workaround them with MAJOR adjustments to what are often simple "inventions". A perfect example is Nikola Motors. This fraudulent company once sued Tesla for $2 billion for infringing on their patents of their truck design. Tesla's Semi truck had the look of a class 8 truck and Nikola Motors patented the look of a class 8 truck and sued. Guess what? Nikola Motors won the initial court ruling because Tesla's truck looked like....a truck. Since then, Nikola Motors former CEO and founder "Trevor Milton" has been charged with fraud and misleading investors about the existence of this truck which was actually nothing more than a shell that wasn't even able to move on its own power. This is the stupid state of IP law.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 

tokenanalyst

Brigadier
Registered Member
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
“Right now, all you have to do is say you manufacture substrates, and you get business—it’s insane," said Nicholas Stukan, chief business development officer at Zhuhai Access Semiconductor Co., a substrate manufacturer based in southern China. He said chip makers are begging for supply and are willing to pay much higher prices than usual to satisfy antsy customers.
 

Nutrient

Junior Member
Registered Member
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
Not really a big deal. Politics are turning right wing across EU. Worst comes to worst they can do Trump style tariffs/embargos.

Trump-like tariffs and embargos would hurt Europe.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
, in 2019 Volkswagen sold twice as many cars in China as in all of Europe. The company sold five times more cars in China than in Germany.

The sales are probably reckoned by number of vehicles. By revenue, we would expect the gap to narrow somewhat: Europeans probably buy more expensive vehicles. But if China's market were suddenly cut off, there's little doubt that Volkswagen would take a serious hit. And many other European companies would also suffer.

Of course, Europe's political system is almost totally enslaved to the US, so who knows what will happen. Europe's sanctions on the Russian Federation prove that they are willing to hurt themselves to please America.

But if the Euros sanctioned China, they would really hurt themselves. They know it, and there is probably a lot of resistance to American diktats. This may explain why Germany's warship, sailing down the Pacific in a show of Western solidarity, neverthethess asked to visit Shanghai.
 

AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
Trump-like tariffs and embargos would hurt Europe.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
, in 2019 Volkswagen sold twice as many cars in China as in all of Europe. The company sold five times more cars in China than in Germany.

The sales are probably reckoned by number of vehicles. By revenue, we would expect the gap to narrow somewhat: Europeans probably buy more expensive vehicles. But if China's market were suddenly cut off, there's little doubt that Volkswagen would take a serious hit. And many other European companies would also suffer.

Of course, Europe's political system is almost totally enslaved to the US, so who knows what will happen. Europe's sanctions on the Russian Federation prove that they are willing to hurt themselves to please America.

But if the Euros sanctioned China, they would really hurt themselves. They know it, and there is probably a lot of resistance to American diktats. This may explain why Germany's warship, sailing down the Pacific in a show of Western solidarity, neverthethess asked to visit Shanghai.

IIRC, for Volkswagen and BMW, China accounts for roughly half of all profits
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top