Chinese semiconductor thread II

[european_guy]

SMIC Q1 2025

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1920444110541881492

Here is the financial report:

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Monthly capacity increased to 973,250 standard logic 8-inch equivalent wafers in 1Q25 from 947,625 standard logic 8-inch equivalent wafers in 4Q24

Capacity of 432K wpm at 12" equivalent, it is an increase of 11K wpm (12") in the last quarter. In the last quarter of 2024 the increase was of 28Kwpm, so it is a bit slowed down, but the cumulative of last 2 quarters (6 months) is 28+11 = 39K wpm in half a year

Fun fact, there is an increase in market share by US




IMHO this could be due to stockpiling before tariffs....noteworthy that forecasts for next quarter are going down, we can expect US market share will be sensibly lower next quarter.

 

[tokenanalyst]

SMIC releases first quarter financial report with profit up 12766.6% year-on-year​

On the evening of May 8, 2025, SMIC, the leading wafer foundry in mainland China, released its first quarter financial report for 2025. Sales revenue hit a new high of US$2.2472 billion, a year-on-year increase of 28.4%. The gross profit margin was roughly the same as the previous month. The operating profit was US$395.71 million, a year-on-year increase of 12,766.6%, and the capacity utilization rate increased to 89.6%.

Financial report details
In the first quarter, SMIC's revenue by application was divided into: smartphones 24.2%, computers and tablets 17.3%, consumer electronics 40.6%, Internet and wearables 8.3%, and industrial and automotive increased to 9.6%. Looking at the revenue contribution of each region, the revenue from China accounted for 84.3%; the proportion of the United States increased slightly to 12.6%, and the Eurasian region accounted for 3.1%.

By wafer size, 12-inch wafer revenue accounted for 78.1% in the first quarter, and 8-inch wafer revenue accounted for 21.9%. In terms of production capacity, SMIC's monthly production capacity continues to increase, from 947,625 pieces of 8-inch standard logic in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 973,250 pieces of 8-inch standard logic in the first quarter of 2025. The capacity utilization rate in the first quarter was 89.6%, and a total of 2,292,153 wafers equivalent to 8-inch standard logic were sold. SMIC's capital expenditure in the first quarter of 2025 was US$1.4155 billion, and R&D expenditure was US$148.9 million.

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[tokenanalyst]

Shanghai Jiao Tong University published new progress in wafer-level manufacturing of nanoring optical antennas with integrated nanogaps in Advanced Functional Materials​

Recently, the team led by Associate Professor Zang Faheng from the State Key Laboratory of Micron and Nanofabrication Technology, School of Integrated Circuits, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has made important progress in the field of nanomanufacturing. The related results were published in the internationally renowned journal Advanced Functional Materials under the title “Narrow-Gap-Integrated Ring Arrays (GRA) as Ultrahigh Field-Enhancement Optical Resonators” (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2025, 35, 2417739).

Background
Nanophotonic devices are increasingly being used in the field of high-performance biosensing due to their high sensitivity and flexible signal reading methods. Among them, nanoplasmonic optical devices produce local high-field intensity "hotspot" areas under optical resonance conditions, which improves the interaction efficiency of light field energy with biological/chemical target molecules. It is one of the research hotspots of nano-optical biosensors in recent years. As a typical structure of plasmonic optical devices, nanorings have become a popular optical biosensing structure with their characteristics such as spreading surface spectral enhancement areas, self-focusing surface optical radiation patterns, and adjustable electric field hotspot spatial distribution. However, the electric field enhancement factor of traditional nanoring structures is relatively limited, making it difficult to further improve the sensitivity of the sensor. To improve this problem, innovative design concepts such as split rings, nanoring pairs, and multilayer nanorings have proposed to combine gap structures into traditional nanorings, which have been proven to significantly increase the field enhancement factor by two orders of magnitude. Therefore, how to achieve the integrated manufacturing of nanorings and nanogap structures through a low-cost, large-area, and process-controllable process route is of great research significance.
Highlights
This study proposed a three-dimensional nano-optical antenna array with multi-wavelength resonance characteristics, which uses thin-film micro-nano processing to achieve a characteristic structure with a line width of ≤10 nanometers for high-sensitivity biosensing and fluorescence imaging enhancement. The nanoantenna array combines the three-dimensional structural features of nanorings and nanogaps to achieve a simultaneous improvement in the amplitude and distribution area of the electric field intensity. Its core nanomanufacturing method is based on metal sputtering and ion beam etching, which is suitable for low-cost batch manufacturing of nanostructure gaps with a characteristic size of less than 10nm, without relying on high-cost nanopatterning processes such as electron beam lithography or scanning probe lithography.

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[tokenanalyst]

 

[Michael90]

If it gets completely cut off that would be actually a good thing for China because it would accelerate adoption of domestic solutions. But those who want to smuggle will continue to do so. Even if this law comes to pass, whatever measures Nvdia implement would likely be minimal and easy to defeat and just enough for them to claim plausible deniability. Even now Nvidia would have fairly good idea of how much gets smuggled and through which countries. They don't need a tracker for that, but they continue to sell because they could claim plausible deniability.

Also there's some indication Trump may allow Nvidia to sell H20 after all. The Korean guy tweeted that Nvdia has still not asked to stop the manufacture of HBM's used in H20. He says based on that some industry sources believe Nvidia will get a permit for H20 soon. Or it may just be a rumor started by someone to pump Nvidia stock.

Either way, even if China can get Nvidia chips, the best thing for China would be to to move on to completely domestic solutions as soon as possible.

I don't think it's a lack of will to move to domestic solutions that's the problem. The issue is that Chinese companies are not at Ndivia level in both capabilities and eco-system . So most Chinese companies still prefer to buy Ndivia products even though they have to rely on the substandard /downgraded ones unlike those used by American and western countries. So until domestic companies reach parity with Ndivia the shift will be slow.