Chinese semiconductor thread II

tphuang

tphuang

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Looks like Sany group is working with American chip designer Ambarella for this new AI chip CV3 in order to support ADAS on commercial and specialized vehicles. Expecting for new models to start production in 2025

The previous generation 10nm process CV2 had over 20million sales, so this is a boost on that. It is unclear to me why they use such a no name American chip designer when there are so many domestic options
 
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huemens

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Micron Starts Construction of New Plant in Xi’an​

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Micron Technology Inc., America’s largest memory-chip maker, Thursday kicked off construction of a new semiconductor packaging and testing plant in Xi’an, northwest China’s Shaanxi province, eyeing production to begin in the second half of 2025.
The facility is part of a 4.3 billion yuan ($602 million) investment plan announced by Micron last year, signifying the U.S. firm’s deepening commitment to the China market.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration on Friday revised rules aimed at making it harder for China to access U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) chips and chipmaking tools, part of an effort to hobble Beijing's chipmaking industry over national security concerns.

The rules, released in October, seek to halt shipments to China of more advanced AI chips designed by Nvidia and others as Washington cracks down on Beijing over concerns its advancing tech sector could help boost China's military.

The new rules, which run 166 pages in length, go into effect on Thursday. They clarify, for example, that restrictions on chip shipments to China also apply to laptops containing those chips.


The Commerce Department, which oversees export controls, has said it plans to continue updating its restrictions on technology shipments to China as it seeks to bolster and fine-tune the measures.
 
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supersnoop

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tphuang said:
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1773885100675014659

This is actually just showing how much VCSEL tech has been industrialized. You can see that they are even putting it in smart vacuum cleaners now. Just absolutely crazy how cheap these things are getting
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I think that these robo-vacuums have been a bit of an unsung hero in Chinese tech, and very similar to the rise of the auto industry.

They made LDS sensors very common place (for some reason iRobot always refused to adopt this). They used to be very expensive, but now even found on no name Amazon specials.

The LDS equipped robovacs became much preferred due to faster cleaning (from more accurate mapping) and less heavy furniture collisions.

Now the VCSEL technology is actually not super-cheap, but what has happened is that the high end robovac market is now dominated by Chinese brands (Ecovacs, Roborock), that they are able to add these features because they now sell at a higher price point (the LDS formerly needing a raised mechanical “tower”, but the new tech allowing for a lower profile since it is embedded).

Ecovacs is also using Horizon’s Sunrise AI chips, a lower power companion to their Journey line used in auto applications.

iRobot, still the leader in market share, but has bled heavily in the last 10 years, recently had an acquisition by Amazon blocked by EU authorities which put them in financial distress owing a 200B debt at 9% and laying off 30% of staff.
 
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supersnoop

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tphuang said:
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Looks like Sany group is working with American chip designer Ambarella for this new AI chip CV3 in order to support ADAS on commercial and specialized vehicles. Expecting for new models to start production in 2025

The previous generation 10nm process CV2 had over 20million sales, so this is a boost on that. It is unclear to me why they use such a no name American chip designer when there are so many domestic options
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This company sounded familiar, so a quick Google gave me a reminder. They are one of those fabless logic companies like Amlogic founded by a Chinese person with primarily Chinese customers, but HQ’d in USA.

Amberella’s 2 biggest customers were HikVision and Dahua who got blacklisted and now they really need to find new business.
 
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paiemon

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AssassinsMace said:
Yes the commercial market at its fullest is always more profitable. China alone before the US’s chip ban was 60% of world’s semiconductors business, larger than all the West combined.

When China develops equivalent to better chips than the West, their semiconductor business will eventually die. Yeah sure they can force their own companies to buy their own more expensive chips but in the commercial market cheaper always wins or else whatever commercial business that needs them goes bankrupt because there will be international competitors that will be using cheaper Chinese semiconductors. Not to forget also that in Western stock markets making the most money possible is paramount to a company’s stock value. More expensive chips means less profits.
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If they want to keep Chinese chips out of their supply chain or products with Chinese chips out of their market a possibility is they will introduce regulatory changes and tax credits to favor use of chips from certain regions and discourage use of chips from the other for use in various electronic products. The best example is the US regulatory changes from the IRA regarding the sourcing of clean energy components and raw materials with tax credits favoring certain countries of origin. Its byzantine and raises costs requiring subsidies and offsets but its not a price that corporations and their shareholders will end up shouldering since its on the taxpayers burden or passed onto the consumer. Their markets are still large and rich enough to drive sufficient demand, so worst-case they will continue in their own fenced off market, similar to automakers.

gelgoog said:
The time when the US MIC was the main driver in semiconductor development ended in like the early 1980s.

If you look at current MIC programs the emphasis is on COTS hardware and using FPGAs when they need some sort of custom logic.
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I feel like the US MiC driving technology development was the result of factors that are hard to replicate today. There was the massive increase in overall military/r&d spending due to the cold war, big shifts in operational requirements as a result of the space race and "smart/precision" weapons that enabled pushed industry revolutions (i.e., vacuum tube to solid state electronics) to meet them. Government spending and debt levels are already elevated across most rich countries, so returning to cold war spending levels is probably a non-starter. While we continue to develop and improve technologies, many of them (e.g., internet/telecoms, semis, satellites, AI) evolve and build from foundations developed in the 80s and 90s. Maybe quantumn computing might be that radical operational paradigm shift that could push things into high gear, but so far its been more iterative improvements as you noted.
 
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gelgoog

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paiemon said:
Government spending and debt levels are already elevated across most rich countries, so returning to cold war spending levels is probably a non-starter.
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The West will just renege its debt to other countries. The talk about "confiscating" Russia's foreign reserves are precisely that. This is money that Russia earned from sales of mineral resources to the West that they want to take for themselves.

paiemon said:
Maybe quantumn computing might be that radical operational paradigm shift that could push things into high gear, but so far its been more iterative improvements as you noted.
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I thought similarly in the past, but one thing you can see with the proliferation of AI assisted weapons like the Lancet is that they require enough processing power to perform image matching algorithms. The Lancet uses a NVIDIA Jetson TX2 board to do this. That board uses a Tegra X2 ship made with a TSMC 16nm FinFET process. So yes these processes are in fact militarily relevant.
 
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