Chinese semiconductor industry

9dashline said:

The US has calculated that semiconductor chokehold on China is the one thing that will slow it down the most... When Fort Knox was empty of gold and Brentwood came to end in early 70s that would have been the end of dollar as reserve currency but the US having all those military bases and aircraft carriers came up with the so called petrodollar hegemony... American cannot really directly tax the entire world, but the whole world needs energy in the form of oil and the Middle East had the most of it, so US hatched up the plan to offer the OPEC "protection" in exchange for their agreement to export only by accepting USD. This meant the rest of the world had to by extension use the USD as reserve currency and thereby allowing the US to harvest and usurp the wealth of the rest of the world for the last 50 years...those that didn't play this game got Saddam'd and Gadhafi'd

Now oil age is over one way or another its coming to end soon... US hatch up new plan, digital OPEC will be the semiconductor sanctions, long arm, and eventually a total chip ban/embargo against China...

Who here three years ago would have thought that TSMC was going to be forced to drop Huawei and then kneel in front the US Empire by sharing its client secrets with the US, by being forced to technology transfer to America and building up fabs in Arizona etc... Soon the US will force TSMC to give priority to the US companies (GM, Ford, Intel, etc) and basically ban all business with Chinese firms.... (DJI, Xaomi, etc etc)

China spent more money buying chips than it did oil... so yes this is how the US plans to keep its dollar reserve status for the next say 20 years by tying it into the chip industry and basically in the age of the 4th industrial revolution and Internet of Things, everything needs a chip (5nm or less) and by controlling this semiconductor chokepoint the US can essentially force China and the rest of the world to keep propping it up for another 2 or 3 decades just like how the US used oil as economic hostage against the economies of the world for the last 50 years....

You guys read the 700 page report that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote to US congress right? He details how US can stay ahead of China technologically and economically by doing whatever it takes to deny China access to <14nm, and this is the critical threshold (anything like say 7nm and lower) where AI is really able to takeoff and shine...

AI is the final frontier, the nation that masters and dominates AI/AGI/etc first will get the decisive edge and most likely maintain it for the rest of the century... Solving deep AI is the penultimate solution to all other problems of the world, with that we can use it to solve for fusion, the climate situation, future pandemics, etc etc.... US is using all its leverages to make sure China never catches up in semiconductors so that it will also by extension be hopelessly behind in the application and deployment of future advanced AI and other advanced technologies...

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We can say a lot about this. To keep it short, let's just say one thing.

No one controls the battlefield.

@horse The FOG OF WAR, maybe Sun tzu had an answer like Chi is the force that sets the world and everything in it into motion. Bro I believe in WAR momentum is critical. Trump tech war is like an artificial WEIR DAM design to slow but not hinder the flow of water. He knows that constructing such a dam is within the American capability to prolong its rein doing otherwise like a permanent DAM with cost associate and other factors alone will cause its downfall.

ansy1968 said:

continue....

Some Chinese companies, including Huawei Technology itself, have been working hard to develop their own lithography machines. There are reports of successes in making prototypes of a lithography machine using deep-ultraviolet argon-fluoride excimer-laser immersion technology, the most advanced among non-EUV lithography technologies.
In addition, Yangtze Memory, an affiliate of Unigroup, announced in June that it had succeeded in developing a manufacturing capability for 128-layered 3D flash memory chips and will start commercial production by the end of the year.
The U.S. seems to have focused on EUV in efforts to block China from obtaining advanced semiconductor technologies. It has been reported that the U.S. successfully persuaded the Dutch government to block ASML from selling EUV machines to SMIC. But, as Yangtze shows, China is accumulating know-how in 3D chipmaking skills, which will eventually be applicable to advanced logic chips and will help the country avoid dependency on EUV-based miniaturization.
Of course, there is a harsh reality that most of the non-lithography equipment items handling dozens of chipmaking-process stages are made almost exclusively by U.S. and Japanese companies. The thin-layer deposition process, critical in pursuing multilayer 3D chipmaking, is dominated by Applied Materials of the U.S. And surface inspectors of KLA-Tencor of the U.S. are indispensable in completing each such layer.
No matter whether 3D tech is involved, if access to U.S. equipment is blocked, it will disable any chip manufacturer in building or expanding its manufacturing capacity.
However, in the longer run, experts believe China is capable of enhancing its capabilities in all related sectors -- materials, optics, chemical, wafer-fabrication process control, surface inspecting, function testing and so on.
Toshiaki Ikoma, former president of Texas Instruments' Japanese subsidiary and former chief technology officer at Canon, was SMIC's chief technology officer in the mid-2000s. Based on his experience there, he believes China has a sufficient number of capable scientists and engineers to develop its own chipmaking equipment and chip-design software.
"Their national strategy to send many students to U.S. schools and companies and then repatriate them like sea turtles, which has been going on for decades, is bearing fruit," he told Nikkei.

Hideki Wakabayashi, a Tokyo University of Science professor, says developing the whole supply chain of chipmaking equipment and materials cannot be done quickly. But "there is a possibility for China to become a dominant country in the field in 10-20 years because of its abundance of talent in all science and engineering fields," he said.
And technology trends are a plus for latecomers like China. "New technologies such as new materials, 3D, advanced packaging, AI-assisted chip design and cloud-based manufacturing collaboration will all create new opportunities for emerging players," said Samuel Wang, research vice president at Gartner.
James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reminds that a U.S. ban on satellite components to China led non-U.S. companies to become alternative suppliers. "Overly broad restrictions will harm the U.S. more than China," he warned on his blog in May, commenting on U.S. efforts to block China's access to semiconductor technologies.
Sakamoto said he had been impressed when he was chatting with a Chinese business leader earlier this year. "He told me that Chinese tech leaders are now grateful to Mr. Trump for helping them become resolutely determined to develop technologies on our own," Sakamoto said.
It may be true that the U.S. tech squeeze has crushed President Xi Jinping's public dream of China supplying 70% of its own semiconductor demand by 2025. In 2019, China fed 16% of its own demand, according to IC Insights. But the U.S. policy may be raising the longer-term probability of China realizing Xi's dream.
Additional reporting by Nikkei staff writer Masaya Sato.

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This article mentions not a single Chinese manufacturer of semiconductor and IC chip manufacturing equipment, their components, and particular materials. No mention of such as SMEE, Naura, AMEC, or Nata Opto.

As the article below prove once again its the person behind the machine that create a masterpieces. SMIC is lucky that they got their hands on LIANG MONG SONG a true master. The architect of SMIC revival now they may challenge TSMC its a David and Goliath contest and I'm betting on the underdog to win!

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CC

Last year, Meng-Song Liang revealed that since he joined SMIC in 2017, he has led a team of thousands of people to advance from 28nm to achieve 14nm mass production, and 7nm chip technology has also been developed and will be able to risk trial production in April this year. TSMC's next rival The company's 28nm yield rate was very low before Meng-Song Liang joined SMIC, but it has made a qualitative leap since then, and has gone to 7nm step by step. if not for Meng-Song Liang, a technical powerhouse, I am afraid it would have taken more than ten years to go from 28nm to 7nm. Likewise, if Meng-Song Liang had joined SMIC earlier, perhaps 28nm to 7nm would not have taken 7 years. Now that Meng-Song Liang continues to serve as the CEO of SMIC, more progress will definitely be made in the future, and SMIC may become the next rival of TSMC. The reason is simple, because the needs of the times have prompted SMIC to keep moving forward, step by step, closer to TSMC. And once SMIC successfully achieves 7nm mass production, then it will become the third largest chip foundry in the world, after TSMC, Samsung. Into the 7nm, and then to develop 5nm will be much easier. And TSMC also faces a major problem, that is, the physical limits of the chip, Moore's Law myth will eventually be broken. Moore's law emphasizes that every 18 months the number of integrated circuits can accommodate transistors will double, according to this argument chip manufacturing is no end. But obviously, 5nm can be followed by 3nm, 3nm followed by 2nm, 1nm, and then what? Naturally, the end is reached. By that time, rivals will have enough time to catch up, and SMIC is undoubtedly that rival. Although there is still a gap in the chip process, SMIC has achieved several generations of process leap in only 7 years, and now the 14nm process achieved has been able to reach more than 95% yield, just short of 7nm risk trial production, if the EUV lithography arrives, the 5nm chip can also start research and development.

CHINA HAS ALREADY REACHED EXASCALE – ON TWO SEPARATE SYSTEMS​

The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is set to unveil some striking news based on quantum simulation results on a forthcoming homegrown Sunway supercomputer.

The news is notable not just for the calculations, but the possible architecture and sheer scale of the new machine. And of course, all of this is notable because the United States and China are in a global semiconductor arms race and that changes the nature of how we traditionally compare global supercomputing might. , of which HPC is but one workload, and these are some big steps.

The supercomputing community has long been used to public results on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful systems with countries actively vying for supremacy. However, with tensions at peak and the entity list haunting the spirit of international competition, we can expect China to remain mum about some dramatic system leaps. Including the fact that the country has already broken the (true/LINPACK) exascale barrier in 2021—on more than one machine.

We have it on outstanding authority (under condition of anonymity) that LINPACK was run in March 2021 on the Sunway “Oceanlite” system, which is the follow-on to the #4-ranked Sunway TaihuLight machine. The results yielded 1.3 exaflops peak performance with 1.05 sustained performance in the ideal 35 megawatt power sweet spot.

We’ve already published what little we knew about the and earlier this year (and now, in the absence of verified system information) our conjecture was that this new machine was a die shrink, allowing 2X the elements and 2X the performance per socket and with a doubling of sockets (and other engineering of course), Wuxi could create an exascale system. Clearly, Wuxi has.


Wuxi is using those 42 million cores for sustained exascale supercomputing in full-scale quantum simulation production, which we learned today via a preview ahead of the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC21). The TaihuLight follow-on is capable of running that can be parallelized across the entire machine. This simulation also bodes well for an AI/ML training and inference workloads as it highlights extensive use of mixed-precision math, including 16-bit floating point performance of a reported 4.4 exaflops.

Without delving into all the quantum details, the Wuxi team, along with collaborators at Tsinghua University and the Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences, have developed the tensor-based simulator for random quantum circuits that is optimized for compute density and can “reduce the simulation sampling time of Google Sycamore to 304 seconds from the previously claimed 10,000 years.” This is just a preview abstract and there aren’t a lot of details on this result but it’s worth mentioning to tee up what we find out in mid-November when a paper is released detailing the simulation.

But let’s get back to fully benchmarked (LINPACK) exascale systems in China. The same authority confirmed that a second exascale run in China, this time on the Tianhe-3 system, , reached almost identical performance with 1.3 exaflops peak and enough sustained to be functional exascale. We do not have a power figure for this but we were able to confirm this machine is based on the FeiTeng line of processors from Phytium, which is Arm-based with a matrix accelerator. (For clarity, FeiTeng is kind of like “Xeon,” it’s a brand of CPUs from Phytium).

This is not a new architecture. Here’s the when we first got wind of Phytium’s HPC ambitions, and here is . The “Mars” processor then was always intended for us in China’s supercomputers but of course, has had to evolve with the times. The matrix engine that adds the real “oomph” to these devices is still based on an updated variant of that Matrix 2000 DSP accelerator we saw in Tianhe-2A (another top supercomputer of its day), which is called the Matrix-2000+ accelerator. The whole software stack for Tianhe-2A took major footwork to tune to the DSP. It was never likely that National University of Defense Technology would swap all of that effort for an architecture that performed quite well, especially on LINPACK.

Recall that this Phytium emergence and the emergence of the Matrix 2000 DSP accelerators for the Tianhe-2A system came about because China couldn’t use an Intel Xeon Phi many core processors as planned due to trade restrictions at the time.

From what we can tell on these two exascale systems there are modest changes to architectures, doubling of chip elements and sockets. That is not to minimize the effort, but it we do not suspect new architectures emerging that can fit another coming bit of news, a so-called Futures program that aims to deliver a 20 exaflops supercomputer by 2025, according to our same source, who is based in the United States but in the know about happenings in China.

But here’s something to keep in mind as we go forward in this frigid international climate: perhaps we can no longer expect to have a clear, Top 500 supercomputer list view into national competitiveness in quite the same way. If China, always a contender with the United States, is running LINPACK but not making the results public, what happens to the validity and international importance of that list, which has been a symbol of HPC progress for decades? What does China have to lose, would it not be in the national interest to show off not one, but two validated exascale for both peak and sustained results?


Here is something subtle to consider: the forthcoming “Frontier” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in the U.S. is expected to debut with 1.5 peak exaflops and an expected sustained figure around 1.3 exaflops. Perhaps China has decided to quietly leak that they are first to true exascale without having to publish benchmark results that might show a slightly better performance figure for a US- based machine. Just something to think about.

And here’s another subtle detail. Our source confirms these LINPACK results for both of China’s exascale systems—the first in the world—were achieved in March 2021. When did the entity list appear citing Phytium and Sunway and the centers that host their showboat systems? In April 2021.

The politics at play are strange and muddled. But our source, as close as can be to issues at hand, confirms China was first to exascale and with two separate machines based on two different (but fully Chinese native) architectures.

In the absence of US chips and accelerators being made available, it is clear that the trade restrictions will satisfy concerns in the near term that China is using US technology to boost development of its nuclear programs but in the long term, this is major impetus for China to kickstart chip development, fab building, and gun all the engines needed for the semiconductor wars that will continue to simmer, if not yet boil over.

In Semiconductors, China Is In Commodity Hell (Part 4)​

The idea that there is – or will be, any time soon – a serious Chinese threat to American technological leadership in semiconductors is an illusion.

Why then is there so much alarmism on this subject?

A lot of it is due to the fact that so many analyses don’t use the right framework to understand competitive positioning.

Processors

In the most advanced processor categories – high-end CPUs (general purpose processors), GPUs (graphic processing units), and FPGA’s (field programmable gate arrays) – the U.S. share is nearly 100%.

China has less than a 1% share in these high-value product segments.

But for China, it’s really even worse. It is not just the small size of China’s market share. The quality of China’s share is also low. In the CPU product segment –

• “Chinese CPUs have few civilian customers, reflecting their lack of competitiveness on the open market. China’s large businesses depend on imports for 95 percent of the CPUs they consume. The country remains especially weak on CPUs with the x86 architecture.”

And in the GPU segment – seen as especially important for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – the picture is bleak

• “The United States monopolizes the design market for GPUs. Two U.S. firms, Nvidia and AMD, dominate the market. Intel is also developing a discrete GPU. China’s only significant GPU firm is Jingjia Micro, selling largely to military customers. However, its sales totaled only $36 million in 2019, and its GPUs are produced at the substandard 28 nm node.”

gadgetcool5 said:

In Semiconductors, China Is In Commodity Hell (Part 4)​

The idea that there is – or will be, any time soon – a serious Chinese threat to American technological leadership in semiconductors is an illusion.

Why then is there so much alarmism on this subject?

A lot of it is due to the fact that so many analyses don’t use the right framework to understand competitive positioning.

Processors

In the most advanced processor categories – high-end CPUs (general purpose processors), GPUs (graphic processing units), and FPGA’s (field programmable gate arrays) – the U.S. share is nearly 100%.

China has less than a 1% share in these high-value product segments.

But for China, it’s really even worse. It is not just the small size of China’s market share. The quality of China’s share is also low. In the CPU product segment –

• “Chinese CPUs have few civilian customers, reflecting their lack of competitiveness on the open market. China’s large businesses depend on imports for 95 percent of the CPUs they consume. The country remains especially weak on CPUs with the x86 architecture.”

And in the GPU segment – seen as especially important for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – the picture is bleak

• “The United States monopolizes the design market for GPUs. Two U.S. firms, Nvidia and AMD, dominate the market. Intel is also developing a discrete GPU. China’s only significant GPU firm is Jingjia Micro, selling largely to military customers. However, its sales totaled only $36 million in 2019, and its GPUs are produced at the substandard 28 nm node.”

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This article I read before and it is not even worthy of being published.

The most glaring flaw, is the obvious one, an expression from Wall Street.

He only knows where it has been, he does not know where it is going.

He is driving forward by looking at the rear view mirror.

gadgetcool5 said:

In Semiconductors, China Is In Commodity Hell (Part 4)​

The idea that there is – or will be, any time soon – a serious Chinese threat to American technological leadership in semiconductors is an illusion.

Why then is there so much alarmism on this subject?

A lot of it is due to the fact that so many analyses don’t use the right framework to understand competitive positioning.

Processors

In the most advanced processor categories – high-end CPUs (general purpose processors), GPUs (graphic processing units), and FPGA’s (field programmable gate arrays) – the U.S. share is nearly 100%.

China has less than a 1% share in these high-value product segments.

But for China, it’s really even worse. It is not just the small size of China’s market share. The quality of China’s share is also low. In the CPU product segment –

• “Chinese CPUs have few civilian customers, reflecting their lack of competitiveness on the open market. China’s large businesses depend on imports for 95 percent of the CPUs they consume. The country remains especially weak on CPUs with the x86 architecture.”

And in the GPU segment – seen as especially important for emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies – the picture is bleak

• “The United States monopolizes the design market for GPUs. Two U.S. firms, Nvidia and AMD, dominate the market. Intel is also developing a discrete GPU. China’s only significant GPU firm is Jingjia Micro, selling largely to military customers. However, its sales totaled only $36 million in 2019, and its GPUs are produced at the substandard 28 nm node.”

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GPU market is dictated by gaming.... it can no longer be used for bitcoin mining *need dedicated asic for that now* and on the AI front, specialized chips will be used instead of general purpose GPU (see Google with its homegrown Tensor Processing Unit TPU)

When it comes to gaming, there is really only Nvidia... Nvidia cornered the market with its hardware based RTX (which requires Windows 10 for DirectX12 API) and the so called DLSS... fact is without DLSS the RTX (real time ray tracing) is like only 10fps in 4k res even on the fastest rtx3090 latest gen, which is to say not playable.... DLSS is basically using the AI cuda cores on the graphics processor in order to smartly upscale/upsample using AI a 1080 image into 4k image etc... so really the graphics card renders the gaming engine at only 1080 but then scales it to 4k using its AI and hopes the player doesn't notice any difference from a native 4k...

DLSS requires CUDA, which is Nvidia hardware based, so AMD cannot copy it... Most triple A games already support DLSS, and Unreal Engine 5 has native support of DLSS....

For the foreseeable future Nvidia has cornered the PC gaming market, AMD doesn't stand a chance and Intel not a snowflake in hell... Intel has had its integrated (nondiscrete) graphics called the "HD" series as Soc (system on chip) embedded into its CPU for decades now... its not used for playing games lol.... you'd be lucky to get 1 frame per ten seconds in cyberpunk on that junk....

Making graphics card is easy, its the fabbing the 5nm chips required for 2022 state of the art GPU that is the hard part... this article tries to make it into many separate issues when its actually the same one underlining issue...

As someone who has been buying Nvidia cards since the original GeForce for gaming, I can report that for the last year and a half basically no one (other than if you are willing to play 4 times MSRP to pay a scraper on craiglist or ebay) has been any to buy a current gen graphics card anywhere... I used to be able to grab them at my local Fry's... Post COVID Fry's went bell up and a year and half after they debut of the RTX 3000 series you still cannot find a card anywhere unless you win the waiting lottery or are willing to shell out 3 to 4 times MSRP to buy already exorbitantly priced GPUs... so the fact that the US currently has "100%" of the market is a moot point if 100 times zero is still zero.

Outside the desktop PC and console market there are other GPU design companies. One example is ARM Mali GPU which is used in most Android smartphones and is designed by ARM Norway. Chinese investors also recently bought UK company Imagination Technologies which designs the PowerVR GPU family which until recently was used by Apple on their iPhones. Then there is Jingia Micro.

No, the problem China has is with the industry of tools and materials required for fabrication. Focusing on something like X86 performance is a misnomer since X86 is growing increasingly irrelevant outside the desktop market. It isn't used in smartphones, tablets, and the high-end server market is increasingly ARM based. Even then Zhaoxin has IP on X86 designs which are good enough for legacy applications.

If companies like Amazon and Alibaba can design their own high end server chips and fab them at TSMC what is the big deal with X86 anyway.

gelgoog said:

Outside the desktop PC and console market there are other GPU design companies. One example is ARM Mali GPU which is used in most Android smartphones and is designed by ARM Norway. Chinese investors also recently bought UK company Imagination Technologies which designs the PowerVR GPU family which until recently was used by Apple on their iPhones. Then there is Jingia Micro.

No, the problem China has is with the industry of tools and materials required for fabrication. Focusing on something like X86 performance is a misnomer since X86 is growing increasingly irrelevant outside the desktop market. It isn't used in smartphones, tablets, and the high-end server market is increasingly ARM based. Even then Zhaoxin has IP on X86 designs which are good enough for legacy applications.

If companies like Amazon and Alibaba can design their own high end server chips and fab them at TSMC what is the big deal with X86 anyway.

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The one thing that had been keeping Microsoft Windows alive all these years was PC gaming.... now with cloud gaming/pixel streaming, and with China deployment of 5G, later this decade 6G... the internet will be as fast as the local LAN or even the bus speed of the motherboard itself almost.... Whether its Google with Stadia or Amazon with Luna and even M$FT jumping on this bandwagon, gaming of the future will be rendered entirely in the cloud and then the image itself sent over the internet to the player's endpoint device.... so it will be entirely Operating system and hardware architecture agnostic...

This applies to not only gaming but also other computer applications in general... everything will be Software Defined, business logic reduced to code, and everything will be Software as Service... There will be far less a need for Intel processors or Windows operating systems... and in the datacenter China can run HiSilicon chips fabbed by SMIC with EUV machines by SMEE... Just the Chinese internal market alone is enough to self sustain, they don't need to sell cloud services to the US/EU... but conversely, gone will be the days that China will run enemy operating systems on enemy ('Intel' inside) chips