You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please, join our community today!
"Few commercial customers". Biren and Huawei are supposedly using it and both are sanctioned. Those are two of the largest players in AI chips in China. Biren is supposedly aiming for an IPO soon. You would think they wouldn't do that unless they had some kind of product to sell.
Look, China is...
The PRC announced recently, just this year, the availability of the 65nm lithography machine. But they did not say who is the manufacturer. It could be SMEE but it could also be someone else. Several parameters of the machine are also unknown. For example its wph output is unknown.
There was a...
This is an investment that makes sense. By moving more capacity towards such specialty processes GlobalFoundries can avoid the race to the bottom as more legacy node capacity in silicon wafers comes online worldwide. At the same time the DoD ensures production of GaN wafers critical for several...
SMIC also has an older fab in Beijing which probably has a high amount of Chinese fab equipment. But right now the Chinese immersion lithography machine still does not seem to have hit production. I expect it to be available in production sometime over the next two years.
The claim by many is that SMIC cannot supply Huawei's smartphone demand. At this point the US government cut licenses of Qualcomm 4G chipsets to them, right after Huawei had switched its entire phone lineup to use SMIC produced chips. So at this point you can expect all their smartphones to use...
I heard rumors that initial production is expected to be at 65nm. That this fab will use only Chinese fab equipment:
https://www.yicaiglobal.com/star50news/2024_01_296651925059080290365
Remains to be seen. But it is true that the Chinese local government at the capital in Beijing is way more...
Does not sound like an easy fix. Maybe they should just underclock it.
The other changes sound like they would take a substantial amount of time to be implemented and could be offered later.
Huawei Mate 70 pre-orders started yesterday. The current count at Vmall is 2.42M pre-orders.
This is all just in China. In China Huawei currently has more market share than Apple.
In China if you consider the sales numbers of Huawei and Honor combined they have roughly the same market share as...
Taiwan never had much of an internal market to speak of. They always focused on exports.
But TSMC, UMC, and MediaTek were originally based on the same government funded research institute I think. ITRI.
Tariffs were a bigger factor into creating the Japanese and South Korean electronics industries.
There are 1.936 million pre-orders of the Mate 70 thus far according to Vmall.
Huawei, from today, kicked off pre-orders for its upcoming Mate 70 series smartphones, exactly a week ahead of their official launch on November 26. And within the first 10 hours, the pre-order window has attracted...
You would think right? This is just a typical example of how the slavish devotion to anthropomorphism in robotics leads to nonsensical solutions to problems.
There have been rumors of mergers of the three largest, the companies I mentioned, with the smaller players in China. One rumor is they could acquire companies which offer semi tools they currently do not produce. For example AMEC make etchers but have no CMP tools. The main CMP tool maker in...
AMEC had $0.88 billion USD in revenue in 2023. 33% of that is $0.29 billion USD.
They are quite far from being the largest semi tools company in China. That would be NAURA with around $3 billion USD in revenue and 50.3% annual revenue growth rate last year.
ACM Research had $0.56 billion USD...
The EU and German government were going to foot half the bill. But given Intel's US fab projects are further along it is more likely those will be finished first. I doubt there will be demand for this German plant in two years time but we will see.
The border between both countries has been delineated by treaty. A solid defensive line against a river. The Russian Far East is also sparsely populated while China's population core is nearby. It is way more likely the opposite would happen i.e. a Chinese invasion.
I doubt it would happen...
The US is the world's largest arms dealer by far. The big issue is what if China switches its civilian economy to an war footing much like the US did prior to WW2. As the world's factory you can imagine the results.
China already has more wafer capacity than either the US or Japan. They are...
That 12% is without HiSilicon, Pythium, Biren, and other Chinese chip companies which used to be TSMC customers.
SMIC used to have difficulty finding customers for its 28nm and FinFET processes. Their FinFET fab was frozen at 35,000 wpm for years and kept operating under capacity. Part of this...
If the US government wanted to play the semiconductor card against China it would have made much more sense to use it when it mattered. By telegraphing this years in advance the Chinese will just adjust and replace the imports with their own production.
I think the EUV semi tool export ban was...
