Love your videos. Do you have a video about solar cells manufacturing ? I am mostly interested in the latest solar cells technologies such as type-n TOPCon back contact, and heterojunction back contact cells. Thanks for your help.
Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it!
I had some chinese colleagues in my research lab. They were the most hard working and resilient folks I have ever seen. I am from India, and I have deep respect for them. These guys deliver and keep quite about it, move on to the next project. A lot of the local European colleagues made fun of them, but they were too gentlemanly to engage in any bitter conflict. They pursued a PhD with little knowledge of English, still wrote excellent theses although the time was too short to master the speaking part of it. They completed their studies and went back to China, left gifts for us all the colleagues (the mean ones as well). I wish India follows the Chinese no nonsense attitude to living life.
As the old saying goes: "Neccessity is the Mother of Invention". Thru out history every country that has faced trade embargo or sanctions - has gone on to develop its own technology fix to get out of trouble. Thanks, Anastasi as always fir a great presentation.
I would reckon China already had the tech for the 7 NM chips before the sanctions. The true test is if they can develop even more advanced chips than that in the future. The 7 NM chips are still 9 years old and that tech was already all over the world
Beautifully clear, concise & topical. All my experience of using Chinese tech & meeting Chinese physicists/ engineers has been one of remarkable ability, determination & achieving. It seems certain to me that China will develop what ever is needed to make it a major player in this exciting AI world & that the sanctions forcing them to do it alone are a blessing in disguise. My biggest concern is that these sanctions are fostering yet more hate & distrust between the super powers risking military conflict. Still the blessings of AI are potentially so powerful that we as a species may enter a golden age of plenty & forget all the old difficulties & quarrels that created such a bloody history of humanity. Thank you for sharing where the Chinese have reached & potential bottle necks that they will have to solve. It is one of the most exciting adventures of our time.
U.S. sanctions in disguise encouraged the development of China's own chip industry. No one wants their suppliers to be in an unstable state at any time.
Well this is pretty optimistic. I hope you're right but I'm pretty sure this is going to be weaponized in a million ways. The cold war is about to get way more intense and something's going to go wrong.
In 2011, the United States restricted China's aerospace development through the "Wolf Clause". Over the past decade, China's aerospace progress has been obvious to all.
Chinese will catch up to all the western innovation like EUV etc. if not by innovation then by espionage. There are so many people who will trade their soul for money. CCP has a lot of money to buy loyalty or spies.
The Chinese were caught with their pants down by American sanctions and secondary sanctions. The fact that they can recover so fast can only mean one thing.....They have a very strong tech ecosystem and it is only a matter of time before they catch up and even surpass the US.....Furthermore, they have a big market for their own products while American tech companies will have a tough time finding a market of China size....
Not only US chips manufacturers. But also Taiwanese, S.Koreans and Japanese manufacturers. Japan will feel it quicker as Chinese Manufacturers have "replaced" much of the chemicals for chip manufacturing including robotics for chip manufacturing.
The restrictions are a setback but will make china stronger atvthe end... They will end up having a full solution from design like ARM, machines like ASML, manufacturing like TSM, and the end product with software like Nvidia...
I highly doubt it , chinese are really slow to replicate ... Chinese took 10 years just to replicate a ball point pen... highly doubt they have good enough engineers and scientist for that unless some people go from america to work for them...
@@Lifeless11111not to mention the flood of Chinese leaving the country, especially the ones with the funds to do so. Brain drain is going to hit China so hard in the next decade. Even if they have chip manufacturing now, it’s will continue to fall behind other nation. The population decline will also destroy the consumer market even more so then it already has been.
@@Lifeless11111China alone has the best space station, who else has it alone? Does US has it? Does Indian has it? Funny you mention the pen ball, and I find it very amusing and can see how sour 🍇 grapes you feel about China. Suggest you get use to it.
First China was 10 years behind compared to TSMC with ASML machinery, now it seems only 5. Another year of Moore's law it will be 2. With these types of investments i'm sure China will close the gap.
There is no doubt the US sanctions are making life difficult for the Chinese companies that relied on semiconductor products. However, your analysis missed out on how fast the local alternatives are progressing. They are creating breakthroughs of so many things that were thought to be impossible in such short timeframe. For example, the fact that Huawei is able to produce 7nm chips at this point was thought to be impossible just a year ago. It is also reported the SMIC and Huawei will likely produce 5nm chips in 2024. Some will say the leading edge is now 3nm going to 2nm. What's the big deal of 5nm? They are awfully late. No. That's a huge deal. Because this shows how powerful the current movement of self-sufficiency in China is. Without the sanctions, Chinese companies have been buying up to $400 billion of foreign semiconductor products annually. There was no intention to build local alternatives nor could anyone justify financially to do so, but the sanctions changed all that. The sanctions created a national obsession, aligned diverse groups, and put laser focus on a single industry with an intensity and urgency no less than that of the Manhattan project or the Apollo initiative. With such movement, it's hard to imagine China not being able to completely change the landscape of the global semiconductor industry in 5 to 10 years time. To those who say China is still 2 generations behind the state of the art, the reality is 90% of the applications don't require advanced chips. Only a handful of applications such as the most advanced smart phones truly require the state of the art. For all other applications, mature nodes of 14nm and up are good enough. In fact, the development costs of 5nm or better are so astronomical, very few companies are able to afford. The fact that SMIC is able to prove they could product 14nm chips that are capable of 7nm chips performance is a great opportunity for others. Despite lower yield, the overall cost over the lifetime of a product might be significantly lower by using SMIC's N+2 approach. In addition, the mature technology (28nm and up) markets will provide the local Chinese startups with the necessary profits to feed into R&D, which will eventually make them globally competitive. When that happens, the global semiconductor industry will be trashed. Not just foundry and chips, but also semiconductor equipment, EDA and other supporting tools will see their prices halved. Just look at what happened to the solar industry, EV and shipbuilding industries once the Chinese becomes technologically competitive.
Lengthy but on point. One thing, the global semiconductor industry won’t be trashed, though, the share split will look different. Anyway, we will pretend that nothing happened and start to use “commodity” more often in the context of semiconductors.
Thank you for the thoughtful commentary on the effort Chinese companies are making. As well as other companies. This was very interesting and insightful to watch.
60% of viewers not subs?! no no no, we must get Anastasi to 250K at least! 300K, 400K, more, go go go 😉 I'm simply a GPU consumer. If China improves what hits the market then I'm all for it.
The USA will put sanctions on whichever country imports Chinese GPUss. That's what they do when China puts up high tech competition. First they lie by making made up allegations against them, like they did for Huawei, then they invoke "national security" to ban them from the US and put sanctions on the Chinese company. The sanctions extend to any country that would want to do business with the Chinese company.
I'm impressed with the amount of research you must have put into looking into the China startup scene for this. The TFLOPS is not the limitation, it's the memory bandwidth, which you did mention later in the video. So no, 910B and the other China chip startups will not be even comparable to the A100. But in a few generations, I'm sure the gap will be smaller. Throw enough brainpower and money at it and it'll just be a matter of time.
This is what we get when an engineer that is also professional and passionate in their field covers the topic of their interest, instead of political pundits overblown by any negative news or double down on improvement of their political smear target.
@@adamgibbons4262It took over 7 years for Southern California Transportation Department to build a railway under-pass. The similar project was done in Taiwan within three months, even shorter in China. So you are right, 10+ year to build a fab in USA! Let’s wait and see!
@@adamgibbons4262China buys what it wants and then make it better and cheaper. Scales decide prices. They destroy greedy Western manufacturers that charge premium for their fossil grade products.
Is not about who have the most advanced chips right now, is more about what fastest is China adapting to these tech after cowardly sanctions, I mean, decades of work in Oxident are reaching by just some years in China, they say "okay, you don't want to sell me your chips, no problem, I will show you, how can I do it too", and they are doing it !
One way to think of double patterning is having a low DPI printer and printing out an image with it. You then take the same paper image and put it back in the printer and print over it again but ensuring that it is very slightly off to achieve a higher DPI
some additions to your video: 1) SMIC X huawei can already produce 5nm (and possibly 3nm) chips using DUV technology. the trick is fine tuning the correction using SADP (self aligned double patterning) and etching and exposure processes. this was liang mengsong's pet project when he was at TSMC and apparently he has taken it to a whole new level at SMIC. the yield is between 72% - 85% after about a year of quantity production. note: there are also drawbacks to current EUV technology as the A17 has illustrated. apart from the cost of the EUV machine, the production costs of an EUV chip are far higher (~30%) than DUV chips due to increased energy usage and other process costs. because the conductor nodes are more compact, there have been massive overheating issues with the A17. they have not found a way around this and therefore the A18 has been "nerfed" in terms of raw performance to counter this issue. 2) huawei has already developed it's own in house EDA software far beyond 14nm. what we know is that the kirin 9000S and 9006C chips (5nm) were designed using huawei's own in house software - and uses huawei's own architecture which is completely different from others - taishan (12) core architecture, maleeon GPU architecture etc. p.s. the recent western media reports regarding the 9006C being made by TSMC are fake news - this chip was 100% made in china. 3) GAA FET while obviously superior to FIN FET has it's current roadblocks in the low yields achieved by existing manufacturers (samsung ~20%, TSMC ~30%) due to the more complex patterning, immersion and exposure processes required. there are reports that CXMT has achieved higher yields using it's own EDA software X SMIC's DUV production technology (note: this was substantiated by frederic chen an expert at winbond electronics who was allowed to witness the development process). wait and see on this one but china just might be the first in the GAA FET race.
Thank You for keeping your fingers on the pulse of the tech industry and delivering the updates to us in easy to understand and concise terms! With great beauty & brains comes great responsibility!
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🌐 *Semiconductor technology is crucial for economic competition between the US and China, leading to restrictions on China's access to critical technology.* 01:28 🧠 *Challenges faced by Chinese AI chip companies include design, manufacturing, and software stack development.* 03:21 💻 *Huawei's 910b GPU is a top competitor in China, potentially surpassing Nvidia's H20 GPU in performance.* 04:42 📈 *High demand for Huawei's 910b GPU poses a challenge for manufacturing capacity.* 06:00 🏭 *SMIC is expanding fabs to meet demand, exploring alternative lithography techniques beyond 5nm.* 08:13 💾 *China's focus on high bandwidth memory production is crucial for AI chip self-sufficiency.* 09:06 🔬 *Developing an efficient software stack is a key challenge for Chinese AI chip companies.* 09:56 🚀 *Despite challenges, Chinese startups like Biren and More Threads are innovating in AI chip design.* 11:42 💡 *Startups like Hygen Technology and Intelifusion are entering the market with promising GPU designs compatible with Nvidia's CUDA platform.* 13:58 🌱 *Despite current challenges, China aims for self-reliance in AI chip manufacturing in the future.* Made with HARPA AI
These Chinese companies must be *loving* the American boycott. It has opened a door for them to grow inmensely by guaranteeing them customers and therefore funding. They literally have no competition but each other.
Yes and no. When you are 90-100% dependend on someone its hard for you when you are abandoned. But after same time, you tell to yourself "it would be hard but I need to give my best to overcome this situation". Same can be said for Germany and their 90% dependacy on Russian Gas/Oil. Same can be said to Huawei and their Android dependacy. Same on the Europeans dependacy on USA when it comes to military support and so on. Getting out of something or getting abandoned by others over night basically is very hard in beginning. its not easy task to build something on your own, all from scratch. Its just human nature, comfort zones and over time you are getting relaxed too much.....
No cause many areas of China's economy have no real competition. Look at their real estate collapse. China only copies other people they are literally incapable of doing anything original or of any decent quality.
Always great to have more competition, especially non-US ones. We all know that US companies are almost always anti-competitive, hence why the constant fines by the EU on US companies.
The TFLOPS is not the key problem in current AI - it's memory bandwidth. And you can see NVidia with an enormous lead, there. So, I would expect that chip to have ~20-25% of the training and inference performance based on the specs. I am absolutely certain they will get better after a few generations, though. Whether they can "catch" NVidia this year isn't going to be that important in the overall AI "arms race." If they are right on Nvidia's heels in 1-2 years, that will be incredibly impressive. And that should be around the time we'll really see some of these technologies widely used for "real work" around the globe. Today, they are a bit niche, but we are finding new ways to use them and apply them every day. As they get better, this combination will create a productivity feedback loop until a large swath of "knowledge work" can be done directly by AI in a couple of years. If China has chips capable of that at that time, things are going to get crazy ...
Jai Hinduja. We Indians are more worried that the China will ramp up their AI chip production by routing around Silicon EUV and Software blockade and, jumping straight into newer manufacturing like Quantum, Photonic, Graphene etc, AI chips.
instead of worries, why dont you and your people move your A *** and work harder to compete instead of complaining. no one likes to a lapd@@tedchandran
Based on the year-end report of SMIC and sales/shipping records of Mate60 Pro, I am confident that Huawei's chip is NOT produced by SMIC ALONE. SMEE is now able to mass produce 38nm metal pitch machines, so when teaming with Huawei's EDA, predictive patterning, SAQP, chiplet, and other supplemental technology, manufacturing 7mn or performance thereof with FULL China tech is NOT a dream. One thing most bloggers may have grossly overlooked is that Huawei may have been producing some of its chips under its own hood. It has been able to keep it secret for so long that no one can forecast it could have so many Kirin 9000S 7mn/5mn chips to start the Mate60 Pro campaign
People these days get fed too much BS about China.. Trust me bros.. I'm a Brazilian and I have been listening to bad shit about China since I was a boy. Then I traveled here because my wife ( shes chinese ) and the reality is EXTREMELY DIFFERENT. A safe,fun,full of culture,delicious food,more modern than ANY country I have been too and extremely convenient. I simply don't wan't to move out anymore..
hahahaha good joke bro, why not moving to China then? Is it becuase of the authoritarian police state, the censoring or you will miss youtube too much?
Troll. My nephew lived in china, taught English and has a Chinese wife. They left the mainland for Singapore then to Taiwan. All due to the anti western attitude in the cities especially and the severe downturn in the economy.
I suspect the Chinese will try to go down the free-electron laser (a particle accelerator) approach for lithography, which is being touted as a successor to ASML EUV systems anyway.
Everyone is probably going to have to switch to switch to electron beam accelerators to power lithography to solve the power issues. It's just a matter of spending half a billion plus being economically viable in ROI to power lithography tools.
Perhaps not everyone! China has to do it because of the sanctions, so they will. But ASML might retain its market elsewhere. I doubt that China will sell their synchrotron-based EUV tech to others. And it's too expensive for others to develop their own version. It might result in that China gets better semiconductor production tech than others. An unforced error from the sanctioning cohort. But I guess it will take some time to develop. We haven't heard anything about it being built yet, and it would take some years from that to be producing any chips. So, at least 5 years.
Not gonna happen. There is a reason that tech is not used outside of research and perhaps mask creation. It simply does not scale. China won't get past the current level of tech for at least a decade. It took the brightest minds of the developed world combined 40 years to get EUV fully to market. This is not something a dictatorship can do from the top down with pouring money on the fire.
anastasia, another great video. I am invested in NVidia, but I love to know about the competition. I also own asml and tsmc, thanks in part to all the knowledge of the industry that you share!
Just FYI, the H in Huawei is not silent. It is "HWA-WEI", not "WAH-WEI". I have no idea why Westerners think the H is silent. I suspect it's because Cantonese pronounce it that way. But in Mandarin, the H is voiced clearly. I am a native Mandarin speaker.
Automated subtitles mangling "Biren" at 11:08: "until TSMC suspended the manufacturing of beer and CPUs" 🤣 Edit: 11:08, thanks @benkennington for the correction.
Tencent has recently terminated employment contracts with numerous Chinese game developers who relied on foreign-manufactured chips. Instead, they are now recruiting Chinese talent who utilize domestically produced chips, rather than those from TSMC, Intel, Nvidia, etc.
Game development is irrelevant to which chip is being used. Also you cannot optimize for Chinese GPUs because it is leaving 99% of the market. It seems by growing this channel attracted too may people who chases gossips and unfounded stories as there are 23 upvotes in this comment currently.
@@emperorprotects590 Yeah, I have no idea what game dev has to do with CPU/GPU. That type of thing is on the OS. @screenapple1660 is talking out of his arse, and it's clear he couldn't code even a Hello, World program
@@emperorprotects590 leaves 99% of the market??? ummm - China is every year either #1 or #2 video game market. Most of it is mobile gaming - but still. In revenue - check Tencent.
❤❤❤❤ Anastasi, vielen Dank für deinen sehr ausführlichen Kommentar zur aktuellen Chipentwicklung. Ich liebe Ihr wunderschönes Englisch mit Akzent und Ihre Fähigkeit, ein so obskures Thema so verständlich zu machen. Vielen Dank.🌹🌹🌹🌹😘😘
Thank you Anastasi, very interesting to learn new technical details from you as you explain it very clearly and unpack relevant details. Subscribed and liked!
Actually I have been watching your channel for a whilr, but didn't notice that I was not a subscriber :) Thanks for reminding, and I have just subscribed!
Culture does make big differences. When I was studying at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid60's, there were at least 15 Hongkong students in the PhD programs of engineering, chemistry and physics, while there were virtually no students from the Phillipines, Malasia, Vietnam and other southeastern countries.
I would not underestimate China's ability to do anything they prioritize. And creating an adequate supply of advanced GPUs for training/running AI models is obviously a priority. I expect in just a few years time they will be at a world class, if not industry-leading, level.
They have been prioritizing domestic chip production for a long time. They haven't meaningfully caught up yet. Yes, SMIC can do 7nm, but not using domestic lithography machines.
@@Steamrick because they think in globalization era, they can rely chip making machine from the globe, but thanks to shit country like USA, they need to manufacture it themself
The prevailing narrative often touts it as a long-term strategy, but it's becoming increasingly evident that it's not truly sustainable. Just consider their zero-COVID policy debacle. It seems like there's a tendency to overhype a nation that heavily relies on pilfered intellectual property.
I guess that in the long run, the US ban over China is actually benefitting and even boosting the grow of China over the few leading aspects remaining that the "west" were still holding to, so China can establish itself as a world leading power in every single part of the "production chain", from research, to pioneering development, scalability and market dominance
The US government didn't understand semiconductor manufacturing economics when they imposed these sanctions. Making chips is all about scale and volume. It's relatively easy to make an advanced node chip. The challenge though is that it is very hard to do it at yields that are economical. Additionally, most sub 10nm designs require aggressive multipatterning that drastically reduces factory throughout, and thus, the economics again. But we are talking about China here, a nation that dumps money into its "private" sector without hesitation or regard to the inflationary impact on its own people. If China really thinks this is a critical strategic advantage, then they'll absolutely offset the previously mentioned economic factors. Who cares if it takes you twice as long to get a wafer through your fab and it has abysmal yield when the government is going to provide the safety net. And that leads to the next point. Improving yields and manufacturing efficiency is all about data and that means having enough content to run through your fab. If the government is off setting the cost then you don't have any disincentive to run more content, and get the data you need to refine and optimize your process to actually make it work. It may take a really long time but it's totally doable. the perfect example here is Intel. It took them 5ish years of delays to get their 10nm process working using aggressive multipatterning. They could only do it because they manufacture their own chips and thus, could run as much content as they wanted. It wasn't cheap and there has been massive fallout to them for this delay but now imagine Intel was a Chinese company and they were being heavily subsidized to offset that cost. They absolutely had working 10nm chips early on, but not at the scale that made sense in a competitive free market but if that cost was being covered by the government then we would have seen those chips in the market "on time" cause they would have happily thrown millions of wafers away to get enough working chips to meet market demands. Now, some credit to the US. It could very well be the case that China was planning to ramp it's semiconductor sector regardless. And in that case, these restrictions may not have been intended to choke them of semiconductors but perhaps they were intended to ensure that a China semi ramp didn't consume all of the limited supply of advanced manufacturing tools that are required to make the sub 7nm chips economically that companies like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel need. In other words, if China was going to try to ramp their semi industry anyways, they would absolutely been willing to oay more than anyone else to get their hands on EUV and other advanced tools which could have potentially robbed the rest of the ecosystem the tools they need to stay competitive. We already see how only Intel has been able to purchase the new High-NA tools and we know ASML has a massive backlog for most of its tools. So in the end it may have been the right decision but for the wrong reason.
@foxooo "Tech hurdle", my brotha. But to answer your question, increased social programs for mothers, robotics, and others will help. They have 1.4 billion people....their growth won't stop
Thank you for your research. It is an eye opener on chip design and testing, deployment and vertical software stack. It would be how this is going to integrate into 3D memory design.
Even now, there are 3 channels that used to talk about Chinese chip industry and US tech sanctions after Huawei release of the Mate 60...... Those channels disappeared towards the end of 2023 you can't find them even when you search for them
I'm not worry about Huawei catching up at all in terms of AI, afterall, Huawei was the first to design and devoloped and released chip with AI features in their Kirin 9000 chip fews year back for their Mate 40 series phones...
I practice Karate and play the guitar. Over the years, in both disciplines, one of the main challenges has been maintaining the willpower to keep training and playing when there seems to be nothing new or exciting to be learnt. When I look at what is happening in China on the technology front, I think the US sanctions have given the Chinese a sense of purpose or drive, a goal to be achieved, a target to be aimed at, something that pumps up the adrenaline. If the US government thought the sanctions will discourage the Chinese researchers, they are mistaken, the sanctions are encouragement.
These restrictions are just dumb, we should be working together to find solutions to the worlds problems, but the US and its allies are instead focused on their own prestige. In the end the incentive to develop their own methods will likely benefit China though, necessity tends to breed innovation, and China is investing heavily here, they certainly have no shortcomings of smart people, many of them trained across the world.
@@ameserich I wouldn't be so sure about that, there are plenty of areas where China has caught up and more despite being far behind a couple of decades ago.
Those Biren GPUs should almost be compared to MMA ASICs rather than GPGPU, that seems to be all they are good for. No FP64 support is a joke for HPC applications beyond ML
Thank you Anastasi, I've been following you're channel for the past couple of years. Thank you for keeping us tech-nerds up to date. It's exiting isn't it!!?
But they can't make an adapter that works, from a 2.5mm headset plug, being changed to a 3.5mm thst works. Or how about a shrink tube that actually shrinks, and doesn't rip? Need I go on?
@@bugstomper4670 , while u are going on with ur claims the chinese had all ready built their moon station. But no one are so afraid of chinese low quality skill as the american or the west that need to tackles chinese development as fast as they can. Lol
I'm confused how the U.S. has as their official publicly stated policy of One China while simultaneously purchasing the bulk of their military technology supported chips and AI from the Republic Of China and then also claiming to restrict "Chinese made chips". Has their been an official publicly stated change of policy that magically now makes those same chips not "Chinese Made", even though they are in the hands of Han Chinese who speak Mandarin Chinese?
I think China can use the GAA layout tools, and scale them up to the reticle limit for 7nm and convert back to finfet. Run the bigger chips cooler. Also bandwidth can be solved by using wider channels. China has no shortage of people that can optimize code so the latency deficit from the lack of HBM can be mitigated.
TSMC's Secret Weapon: An Ecosystem of Innovation More than 500 industry-leading suppliers form the bedrock of TSMC's success, creating a formidable ecosystem far exceeding the capabilities of single competitors. This collaborative force of 300,000 individuals across upstream, midstream, and downstream supply chains fuels TSMC's dominance, leaving rivals like Intel and Samsung in its dust. TSMC's true strength lies not just in its own prowess, but in the collective brainpower and innovation driving its entire ecosystem. This intricate network fuels continuous advancement, allowing TSMC to tackle groundbreaking projects like the recently announced 1nm chip manufacturing facility. This move sent shockwaves through the industry, as it underscores TSMC's leadership in orchestrating a massive 300,000-strong workforce towards achieving the seemingly impossible. While competitors struggle to match TSMC's sheer numbers, the real advantage lies in the collaborative spirit and shared expertise fostered within this ecosystem. Each supplier brings unique capabilities to the table, creating a synergy that propels TSMC to the forefront of innovation.
China will overcome its steep learning curve, like back in the days of building its first space station and look what has happened since those early days when China, now is the only country in the world, other than ISS, has its own operational space station, Tiangong in orbit. The Chip game will be accelerated once China overcomes the high end chip development soon & when the full scale chip production starts for the global market, the U.S. Chip dominance will end sooner than expected.!
Fantastic overview. For the specs and stats are you relying on self-published information though, or have these products been evaluated by disinterested parties?
Chinese have been happily buying American chips until they couldn’t, so they are forced to compete. Resilience is one key reason why China lasts for so long.
Curiously, many startups died in the 1980s because of capacity issues. (1) New startups needing chips for new desktops and (2) quality issues with the new chips meant a lot of new production went into replacing broken in-warrenty chips. Only the buyers with the best suppliers survived.
The success of the Accelerator on a Chip International Program to make an electron accelerator on a silicon microchip was very exciting (if you'll forgive the pun) when I first heard about it. If it could increase the amperage from a few electrons per shot to a few amps per second -- very, very hard, but perfectly possible -- then it would be the perfect tool for not only shrinking the die size of a chip fab but also making such a fab smaller less expensive. Electron beam lithography is long in the tooth. Sure it has its issues but if such a fab could be built with a cheap and small accelerator then one-off production suddenly becomes economically viable. If such a chip accelerator could be mated to a similarly manufactured free-electron laser on a chip (basically the inverse of the accelerator) then you could create a photo-lithographic chip fab of any specific frequency you please. Both these "if"s are very hard engineering... But quite possible. IMHO, this is the future of chip manufacture.
Seriously doubtful. China isn't even allowed to buy EUV lithography machines from ASML. China's technology industry model has been letting foreign companies come and establish offices there. Then they steal the technology and designs and start their own government backed company. It's happened countless times. But they're still very far behind in semiconductor design and manufacturing.
Almost 20 years ago I got to see a 300 mm chip Fab. It was owned by IBM and it was using the latest equipment. It had robots to move everything. So the 300 mm wafers were held in cases that had it's clean room environment in the case. The pods were dropped down by four wires in front of the machines. And when the machine was done it would pick them back up and send them to a two large queues. I on the other hand was making substrates. A substrate is a ceramic of multiple layers to manage the connections between them chip and the PC board. The ceramics were a soft material and the wiring used was a sort of paste that was silk screened onto the ceramic. They would be stacked and sent into an oven to make the final substrate. The machines with tear up the mask. So I often got one mask and 40 sheets to finish a job. They gave it to me because one I got good at running the machines and two most people don't understand how electrical connections are made so they were rejecting perfectly good sheets. 20 years later and now they're up to 500 and 700 wafers. Well if you're getting 80% yield and they don't cost any more than 300 mm I could understand it. But I'm wondering where did the 300 mm equipment go to?
It seems US efforts to date have failed to produce stated results of walling off Chinese semiconductor technology and manufacturing at or below 14nm, what would you suggest as the better course to achieve American objectives? Is it even possible to stop Chinese progress and keep it one or two generations behind Western technology?
any country needs to take care og the globalisation (it's more westernalisation lol) Specialy when USa is becoming a ùmaster of sanctioning anyone that is not obeying their rules !lol. Everycountry should have their own computer OS, weapons manufacturing, chip manufacturing. etc...or make it sure the country when it is done is a neutral country.
Great topic! I have been following the Chinese semiconductor development a bit. It will be great for global competition. And the Chinese semiconductor industry is extremely impressive! That's my impression. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a Chinese 3nm microchip released in 2024. Chinese companies often downplay their progress until they have something to release.
Preparation for war looks very different in 21. century. Even if I only understand it superficially from a technical point of view - this is damn valuable content :)
Thank you for posting information about China chip industry. I don't see any benefit to the USA by limiting access to the TSMC fab etc ... . These sanctions have hurt everyone, I just want chips at competitive prices. I suspect that companies in China will be moving in a big way to Huawei's MindSpore stack, in other words they will be moving away from Cuda much faster then market forces would have thanks to America's self destructive policies. It will be nearly impossible for people to move back to NVidia's Cuda even if they relax these sanctions. Total loss for NVidia, these nutty sanctions will likely destroy a lot of American industry, in a couple of years they may also do great harm to ASML and TSMC etc ....
@@G-gh1no the stake is US corporation profit, that's why, US is a piece of shit, they've don't this shit to japan before, basically USA is anti competition and controlled by corporation
Love the deep dive into the the chip tech. As you said part of the equation is building software on the chip hardware. All of this is an advantage to large, well funded companies that can attract talent. Everyone else settles for AI platforms and tools.
Am I the only only one who thinks these chip sanctions against China are a bit unfair? I mean, I get the geopolitical logic of it, but I don't really see how it can be morally justified.
It’s China trade and business practice fair? Have you ever do business in China? Do you understand that by the end of 5th years your company have to completely transfer all technology and know how to another Chinese company and you can only owned 45% of your company by year 5. You have to sell the 55% to a Chinese national, business, or government. So it’s that fair. It is fair for China, maybe the largest economy in the world with buying parity that they classified themselves as an emerging market, so they can leverage World Bank and IMF loan at at a low interest and give out loan to other emerging market at a high interest rate. It’s is fair as an emerging market they ship their product worldwide by air and do not get charge so their price is cheaper than other countries??😊
@@LanNguyen-vd4zt No that's BS. Just Google your own BS and see if you can find it lol. Go read the actual Chinese gov policy regarding foreign investment and ownership in various industry. You don't like the policy then don't do business. China is not forcing you to do anything.
Morality is being shoved to the western public by their elites so that they feel a sense of superiority and used to control the masses so that you do not take over their domain. If you look at western history, the elites are not concerned with morality. They claim to be a good Christian but they slaughter and colonize the world. For those of us in the global south, we are fighting this monster and yet we are often portrayed by them as the monster.
@@turtlesoup8134 How you going to tell me that not B.S. My partner and I used to manufactured our toy in Guangzhou and we have to transfer out product manufacturing method to another company.
Let me know what you think and please share this video with those who might be interested !
Love your videos.
Do you have a video about solar cells manufacturing ?
I am mostly interested in the latest solar cells technologies such as type-n TOPCon back contact, and heterojunction back contact cells.
Thanks for your help.
I think it's a pity that we've let China steal so many technologies.
Please try not to hit the mic. I keep hearing a boom sound 😅
Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it! Don't drop it!
Only thing that surprises me is TSMC would help China build anything when China wants to invade Taiwan.
I had some chinese colleagues in my research lab. They were the most hard working and resilient folks I have ever seen. I am from India, and I have deep respect for them. These guys deliver and keep quite about it, move on to the next project. A lot of the local European colleagues made fun of them, but they were too gentlemanly to engage in any bitter conflict. They pursued a PhD with little knowledge of English, still wrote excellent theses although the time was too short to master the speaking part of it. They completed their studies and went back to China, left gifts for us all the colleagues (the mean ones as well). I wish India follows the Chinese no nonsense attitude to living life.
China is all nonsense, that's why they're banned from having chips. Wish China and India would grow a pair of balls and condemn Putin...
As the old saying goes: "Neccessity is the Mother of Invention". Thru out history every country that has faced trade embargo or sanctions - has gone on to develop its own technology fix to get out of trouble. Thanks, Anastasi as always fir a great presentation.
Well, "yes and no." But...this would be the Tao, "the enlightened path."
I would reckon China already had the tech for the 7 NM chips before the sanctions. The true test is if they can develop even more advanced chips than that in the future. The 7 NM chips are still 9 years old and that tech was already all over the world
Wrong.
@@Ace-mw9pmSMIC is preparing to start mass produce their 5nm process.
Russia has trouble with arctic oil wells. They still haven't developed the technology.
Beautifully clear, concise & topical. All my experience of using Chinese tech & meeting Chinese physicists/ engineers has been one of remarkable ability, determination & achieving. It seems certain to me that China will develop what ever is needed to make it a major player in this exciting AI world & that the sanctions forcing them to do it alone are a blessing in disguise. My biggest concern is that these sanctions are fostering yet more hate & distrust between the super powers risking military conflict. Still the blessings of AI are potentially so powerful that we as a species may enter a golden age of plenty & forget all the old difficulties & quarrels that created such a bloody history of humanity. Thank you for sharing where the Chinese have reached & potential bottle necks that they will have to solve. It is one of the most exciting adventures of our time.
U.S. sanctions in disguise encouraged the development of China's own chip industry.
No one wants their suppliers to be in an unstable state at any time.
Well this is pretty optimistic. I hope you're right but I'm pretty sure this is going to be weaponized in a million ways. The cold war is about to get way more intense and something's going to go wrong.
brave new world indeed...
It should be noted, there are no Sanctions of Chinese Tech to Western Market. Westerner are just cutting their own
wrrr
In 2011, the United States restricted China's aerospace development through the "Wolf Clause". Over the past decade, China's aerospace progress has been obvious to all.
How? With their CGI representations of what they pretend doing in space?
@@kosinski-musicSeriously? Common
@@pembalama9626 If you can cheat, then cheat “能骗就骗“
@@kosinski-music
Time to take you meds
You don't like chinese sayings?@@ajaykumarsingh702
in China the word "impossible" has no room in technology sector its only a matter of time
Nothing is "MPOSSIBLE" in CHIPS technology for the Chinese.
Yeah, nothing is impossible to copy!
made in China does not mean make by Chinese.
China leadership is not to be trusted ..bad world actors (not the worst..just the biggest)
Chinese will catch up to all the western innovation like EUV etc. if not by innovation then by espionage. There are so many people who will trade their soul for money. CCP has a lot of money to buy loyalty or spies.
The Chinese were caught with their pants down by American sanctions and secondary sanctions. The fact that they can recover so fast can only mean one thing.....They have a very strong tech ecosystem and it is only a matter of time before they catch up and even surpass the US.....Furthermore, they have a big market for their own products while American tech companies will have a tough time finding a market of China size....
Maybe Engdia market same population as China
They are just awakened by sanctions. US just created a big competitor!
Not only US chips manufacturers. But also Taiwanese, S.Koreans and Japanese manufacturers. Japan will feel it quicker as Chinese Manufacturers have "replaced" much of the chemicals for chip manufacturing including robotics for chip manufacturing.
Apple is in India 😊 But unfortunately the future is countries nationalizing tech. Jensen Wong has even said as much with his sovereign A.I. talk
Same population = same market? Nice logic. @@mariodellara-bj4kr
The restrictions are a setback but will make china stronger atvthe end... They will end up having a full solution from design like ARM, machines like ASML, manufacturing like TSM, and the end product with software like Nvidia...
I highly doubt it , chinese are really slow to replicate ... Chinese took 10 years just to replicate a ball point pen... highly doubt they have good enough engineers and scientist for that unless some people go from america to work for them...
@@Lifeless11111 yes you are right :) good luck !
@@Lifeless11111not to mention the flood of Chinese leaving the country, especially the ones with the funds to do so. Brain drain is going to hit China so hard in the next decade. Even if they have chip manufacturing now, it’s will continue to fall behind other nation. The population decline will also destroy the consumer market even more so then it already has been.
@@Lifeless11111China alone has the best space station, who else has it alone? Does US has it? Does Indian has it? Funny you mention the pen ball, and I find it very amusing and can see how sour 🍇 grapes you feel about China. Suggest you get use to it.
Tell you one thing for sure. Nothing is impossible for the Chinese! That is the big difference between you, your country and Chinese.
First China was 10 years behind compared to TSMC with ASML machinery, now it seems only 5. Another year of Moore's law it will be 2. With these types of investments i'm sure China will close the gap.
yes by the end of the year we can expect to see the first domestically chinese made 5nm chips which would put china at late 2021 levels
There is no doubt the US sanctions are making life difficult for the Chinese companies that relied on semiconductor products. However, your analysis missed out on how fast the local alternatives are progressing. They are creating breakthroughs of so many things that were thought to be impossible in such short timeframe. For example, the fact that Huawei is able to produce 7nm chips at this point was thought to be impossible just a year ago. It is also reported the SMIC and Huawei will likely produce 5nm chips in 2024.
Some will say the leading edge is now 3nm going to 2nm. What's the big deal of 5nm? They are awfully late.
No. That's a huge deal. Because this shows how powerful the current movement of self-sufficiency in China is. Without the sanctions, Chinese companies have been buying up to $400 billion of foreign semiconductor products annually. There was no intention to build local alternatives nor could anyone justify financially to do so, but the sanctions changed all that. The sanctions created a national obsession, aligned diverse groups, and put laser focus on a single industry with an intensity and urgency no less than that of the Manhattan project or the Apollo initiative. With such movement, it's hard to imagine China not being able to completely change the landscape of the global semiconductor industry in 5 to 10 years time.
To those who say China is still 2 generations behind the state of the art, the reality is 90% of the applications don't require advanced chips. Only a handful of applications such as the most advanced smart phones truly require the state of the art. For all other applications, mature nodes of 14nm and up are good enough. In fact, the development costs of 5nm or better are so astronomical, very few companies are able to afford. The fact that SMIC is able to prove they could product 14nm chips that are capable of 7nm chips performance is a great opportunity for others. Despite lower yield, the overall cost over the lifetime of a product might be significantly lower by using SMIC's N+2 approach.
In addition, the mature technology (28nm and up) markets will provide the local Chinese startups with the necessary profits to feed into R&D, which will eventually make them globally competitive. When that happens, the global semiconductor industry will be trashed. Not just foundry and chips, but also semiconductor equipment, EDA and other supporting tools will see their prices halved. Just look at what happened to the solar industry, EV and shipbuilding industries once the Chinese becomes technologically competitive.
Lengthy but on point.
One thing, the global semiconductor industry won’t be trashed, though, the share split will look different.
Anyway, we will pretend that nothing happened and start to use “commodity” more often in the context of semiconductors.
中国有一个称呼：发达国家粉碎机，只要中国掌握了的高端技术，就能把它的价格变得非常低。 这样那些发达国家就不能靠这些先进技术去收割落后国家了。
Thank you for the thoughtful commentary on the effort Chinese companies are making. As well as other companies. This was very interesting and insightful to watch.
60% of viewers not subs?! no no no, we must get Anastasi to 250K at least! 300K, 400K, more, go go go 😉
I'm simply a GPU consumer. If China improves what hits the market then I'm all for it.
The USA will put sanctions on whichever country imports Chinese GPUss. That's what they do when China puts up high tech competition. First they lie by making made up allegations against them, like they did for Huawei, then they invoke "national security" to ban them from the US and put sanctions on the Chinese company. The sanctions extend to any country that would want to do business with the Chinese company.
I'm impressed with the amount of research you must have put into looking into the China startup scene for this. The TFLOPS is not the limitation, it's the memory bandwidth, which you did mention later in the video. So no, 910B and the other China chip startups will not be even comparable to the A100. But in a few generations, I'm sure the gap will be smaller. Throw enough brainpower and money at it and it'll just be a matter of time.
the only source I can trust about anything (good or bad) related to china and semiconductor. I trust your objectivity and unbiased reporting.
Indeed and agreed
This is what we get when an engineer that is also professional and passionate in their field covers the topic of their interest, instead of political pundits overblown by any negative news or double down on improvement of their political smear target.
Considering that China has only recently started investing in this area heavily... By 2025 we should see a lot of advancement and new tecnologias...
It takes 10+ years to bring a fab online
HOLD ON FOR SAM 7T
@@adamgibbons4262It took over 7 years for Southern California Transportation Department to build a railway under-pass. The similar project was done in Taiwan within three months, even shorter in China. So you are right, 10+ year to build a fab in USA! Let’s wait and see!
Cheaper, more advanced, constant improvement, faster, more reliable.
@@adamgibbons4262China buys what it wants and then make it better and cheaper. Scales decide prices. They destroy greedy Western manufacturers that charge premium for their fossil grade products.
Is not about who have the most advanced chips right now, is more about what fastest is China adapting to these tech after cowardly sanctions, I mean, decades of work in Oxident are reaching by just some years in China, they say "okay, you don't want to sell me your chips, no problem, I will show you, how can I do it too", and they are doing it !
One way to think of double patterning is having a low DPI printer and printing out an image with it.
You then take the same paper image and put it back in the printer and print over it again but ensuring that it is very slightly off to achieve a higher DPI
some additions to your video: 1) SMIC X huawei can already produce 5nm (and possibly 3nm) chips using DUV technology. the trick is fine tuning the correction using SADP (self aligned double patterning) and etching and exposure processes. this was liang mengsong's pet project when he was at TSMC and apparently he has taken it to a whole new level at SMIC. the yield is between 72% - 85% after about a year of quantity production. note: there are also drawbacks to current EUV technology as the A17 has illustrated. apart from the cost of the EUV machine, the production costs of an EUV chip are far higher (~30%) than DUV chips due to increased energy usage and other process costs. because the conductor nodes are more compact, there have been massive overheating issues with the A17. they have not found a way around this and therefore the A18 has been "nerfed" in terms of raw performance to counter this issue. 2) huawei has already developed it's own in house EDA software far beyond 14nm. what we know is that the kirin 9000S and 9006C chips (5nm) were designed using huawei's own in house software - and uses huawei's own architecture which is completely different from others - taishan (12) core architecture, maleeon GPU architecture etc. p.s. the recent western media reports regarding the 9006C being made by TSMC are fake news - this chip was 100% made in china. 3) GAA FET while obviously superior to FIN FET has it's current roadblocks in the low yields achieved by existing manufacturers (samsung ~20%, TSMC ~30%) due to the more complex patterning, immersion and exposure processes required. there are reports that CXMT has achieved higher yields using it's own EDA software X SMIC's DUV production technology (note: this was substantiated by frederic chen an expert at winbond electronics who was allowed to witness the development process). wait and see on this one but china just might be the first in the GAA FET race.
hope its as you say! I really hate bully and unfair policies.
Thank you for sharing well though of reflections. Would you kindly share some of the sources that you think are useful to reach the conclusions.
Thank You for keeping your fingers on the pulse of the tech industry and delivering the updates to us in easy to understand and concise terms! With great beauty & brains comes great responsibility!
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:00 🌐 *Semiconductor technology is crucial for economic competition between the US and China, leading to restrictions on China's access to critical technology.*
01:28 🧠 *Challenges faced by Chinese AI chip companies include design, manufacturing, and software stack development.*
03:21 💻 *Huawei's 910b GPU is a top competitor in China, potentially surpassing Nvidia's H20 GPU in performance.*
04:42 📈 *High demand for Huawei's 910b GPU poses a challenge for manufacturing capacity.*
06:00 🏭 *SMIC is expanding fabs to meet demand, exploring alternative lithography techniques beyond 5nm.*
08:13 💾 *China's focus on high bandwidth memory production is crucial for AI chip self-sufficiency.*
09:06 🔬 *Developing an efficient software stack is a key challenge for Chinese AI chip companies.*
09:56 🚀 *Despite challenges, Chinese startups like Biren and More Threads are innovating in AI chip design.*
11:42 💡 *Startups like Hygen Technology and Intelifusion are entering the market with promising GPU designs compatible with Nvidia's CUDA platform.*
13:58 🌱 *Despite current challenges, China aims for self-reliance in AI chip manufacturing in the future.*
Made with HARPA AI
These Chinese companies must be *loving* the American boycott. It has opened a door for them to grow inmensely by guaranteeing them customers and therefore funding. They literally have no competition but each other.
Now all they need is the advanced wafer fabs in Taiwan and they'll have all they could want.
Yes and no. When you are 90-100% dependend on someone its hard for you when you are abandoned. But after same time, you tell to yourself "it would be hard but I need to give my best to overcome this situation". Same can be said for Germany and their 90% dependacy on Russian Gas/Oil. Same can be said to Huawei and their Android dependacy. Same on the Europeans dependacy on USA when it comes to military support and so on. Getting out of something or getting abandoned by others over night basically is very hard in beginning. its not easy task to build something on your own, all from scratch. Its just human nature, comfort zones and over time you are getting relaxed too much.....
No cause many areas of China's economy have no real competition. Look at their real estate collapse. China only copies other people they are literally incapable of doing anything original or of any decent quality.
Always great to have more competition, especially non-US ones. We all know that US companies are almost always anti-competitive, hence why the constant fines by the EU on US companies.
@@samfkt But they aren't 100% dependant. They can produce chips.
Your channel growth is amazing right now. Congratulations.
Thank you Anastasi I had read some other articles about this topic but your analysis has all the cool details the others missed.
The TFLOPS is not the key problem in current AI - it's memory bandwidth. And you can see NVidia with an enormous lead, there. So, I would expect that chip to have ~20-25% of the training and inference performance based on the specs. I am absolutely certain they will get better after a few generations, though. Whether they can "catch" NVidia this year isn't going to be that important in the overall AI "arms race." If they are right on Nvidia's heels in 1-2 years, that will be incredibly impressive. And that should be around the time we'll really see some of these technologies widely used for "real work" around the globe. Today, they are a bit niche, but we are finding new ways to use them and apply them every day. As they get better, this combination will create a productivity feedback loop until a large swath of "knowledge work" can be done directly by AI in a couple of years. If China has chips capable of that at that time, things are going to get crazy ...
Thanks for this video! Unbiased and technical videos on the topic are few and far between.
Jai Hinduja. We Indians are more worried that the China will ramp up their AI chip production by routing around Silicon EUV and Software blockade and, jumping straight into newer manufacturing like Quantum, Photonic, Graphene etc, AI chips.
instead of worries, why dont you and your people move your A *** and work harder to compete instead of complaining. no one likes to a lapd@@tedchandran
Based on the year-end report of SMIC and sales/shipping records of Mate60 Pro, I am confident that Huawei's chip is NOT produced by SMIC ALONE. SMEE is now able to mass produce 38nm metal pitch machines, so when teaming with Huawei's EDA, predictive patterning, SAQP, chiplet, and other supplemental technology, manufacturing 7mn or performance thereof with FULL China tech is NOT a dream.
One thing most bloggers may have grossly overlooked is that Huawei may have been producing some of its chips under its own hood. It has been able to keep it secret for so long that no one can forecast it could have so many Kirin 9000S 7mn/5mn chips to start the Mate60 Pro campaign
it seems they produce chips for their network equipment.... but not sure about for phones though
@@Amidat Sun Tzu: All warfare is based on deception.
People these days get fed too much BS about China..
Trust me bros.. I'm a Brazilian and I have been listening to bad shit about China since I was a boy.
Then I traveled here because my wife ( shes chinese ) and the reality is EXTREMELY DIFFERENT.
A safe,fun,full of culture,delicious food,more modern than ANY country I have been too and extremely convenient.
I simply don't wan't to move out anymore..
hahahaha good joke bro, why not moving to China then? Is it becuase of the authoritarian police state, the censoring or you will miss youtube too much?
Agreed, Australia is no different. If our media say anything about China, it's always anti-china
Troll. My nephew lived in china, taught English and has a Chinese wife. They left the mainland for Singapore then to Taiwan. All due to the anti western attitude in the cities especially and the severe downturn in the economy.
@@Jonasbarbury lol dude..maybe he is a failure.
I earn a lot.
Everything is modern af.
If you don’t live here maybe you are the troll.
@@Jonasbarbury Anti-Chinese attitude provokes anti-Western attitude. Most Westerners are happy in China.
I appreciate your channel a lot, you're one of the few unbiased sources when it comes to Chinese semiconductor developments.
Chinese don’t develop they copy
I suspect the Chinese will try to go down the free-electron laser (a particle accelerator) approach for lithography, which is being touted as a successor to ASML EUV systems anyway.
I think Russia is trying something similar as well.... I know it's a novel technique but not sure if the exact same one
Everyone is probably going to have to switch to switch to electron beam accelerators to power lithography to solve the power issues. It's just a matter of spending half a billion plus being economically viable in ROI to power lithography tools.
Perhaps not everyone!
China has to do it because of the sanctions, so they will.
But ASML might retain its market elsewhere.
I doubt that China will sell their synchrotron-based EUV tech to others.
And it's too expensive for others to develop their own version.
It might result in that China gets better semiconductor production tech
than others. An unforced error from the sanctioning cohort.
But I guess it will take some time to develop. We haven't heard anything
about it being built yet, and it would take some years from that to be producing
any chips. So, at least 5 years.
Not gonna happen. There is a reason that tech is not used outside of research and perhaps mask creation. It simply does not scale. China won't get past the current level of tech for at least a decade. It took the brightest minds of the developed world combined 40 years to get EUV fully to market. This is not something a dictatorship can do from the top down with pouring money on the fire.
AI is going to change everything, absolutely everything, within the next decade... This whole East vs West thing will be a moot point.
anastasia, another great video. I am invested in NVidia, but I love to know about the competition. I also own asml and tsmc, thanks in part to all the knowledge of the industry that you share!
I would love to subscribe again every time I see one of your videos...and this already for quite a long time! 😊
Interesting video, I've worked in IT since the early 80's and technology knows no bounds, todays science fiction is tomorrows science fact
Science has borders and political correctness draws the borders of science.
Just FYI, the H in Huawei is not silent. It is "HWA-WEI", not "WAH-WEI". I have no idea why Westerners think the H is silent. I suspect it's because Cantonese pronounce it that way. But in Mandarin, the H is voiced clearly. I am a native Mandarin speaker.
Automated subtitles mangling "Biren" at 11:08:
"until TSMC suspended the manufacturing of beer and CPUs" 🤣
Edit: 11:08, thanks @benkennington for the correction.
...I'll take both? 🙃😄😎
11:08
Tencent has recently terminated employment contracts with numerous Chinese game developers who relied on foreign-manufactured chips. Instead, they are now recruiting Chinese talent who utilize domestically produced chips, rather than those from TSMC, Intel, Nvidia, etc.
Game development is irrelevant to which chip is being used. Also you cannot optimize for Chinese GPUs because it is leaving 99% of the market. It seems by growing this channel attracted too may people who chases gossips and unfounded stories as there are 23 upvotes in this comment currently.
@@emperorprotects590 Yeah, I have no idea what game dev has to do with CPU/GPU. That type of thing is on the OS. @screenapple1660 is talking out of his arse, and it's clear he couldn't code even a Hello, World program
Is that the Tencent that has a big stake in Epic Games.?
@@TheReferrer72 yep. The dude just said a company name he knows and started talking shit 🤣
@@emperorprotects590 leaves 99% of the market??? ummm - China is every year either #1 or #2 video game market. Most of it is mobile gaming - but still. In revenue - check Tencent.
❤❤❤❤ Anastasi, vielen Dank für deinen sehr ausführlichen Kommentar zur aktuellen Chipentwicklung. Ich liebe Ihr wunderschönes Englisch mit Akzent und Ihre Fähigkeit, ein so obskures Thema so verständlich zu machen. Vielen Dank.🌹🌹🌹🌹😘😘
Ok sure, Anastasi, I subscribed and look forward to your videos about technology. Thanks for all the excellent information about tech !!
Thank you Anastasi, very interesting to learn new technical details from you as you explain it very clearly and unpack relevant details. Subscribed and liked!
How competent is she technically??😅
Actually I have been watching your channel for a whilr, but didn't notice that I was not a subscriber :) Thanks for reminding, and I have just subscribed!
Thanx for keeping us updated with your insights. 8)
Culture does make big differences.
When I was studying at the University of California at Berkeley during the mid60's, there were at least 15 Hongkong students in the PhD programs of engineering, chemistry and physics, while there were virtually no students from the Phillipines, Malasia, Vietnam and other southeastern countries.
I would not underestimate China's ability to do anything they prioritize. And creating an adequate supply of advanced GPUs for training/running AI models is obviously a priority. I expect in just a few years time they will be at a world class, if not industry-leading, level.
They have been prioritizing domestic chip production for a long time. They haven't meaningfully caught up yet. Yes, SMIC can do 7nm, but not using domestic lithography machines.
@@Steamrick because they think in globalization era, they can rely chip making machine from the globe, but thanks to shit country like USA, they need to manufacture it themself
Very comprehensive and up to date info, thanks.
China is playing the long game and is closing the gap, supporting china from uk here.
The prevailing narrative often touts it as a long-term strategy, but it's becoming increasingly evident that it's not truly sustainable. Just consider their zero-COVID policy debacle. It seems like there's a tendency to overhype a nation that heavily relies on pilfered intellectual property.
Very well done videos, just wish I could understand more than half of what you say.
I guess that in the long run, the US ban over China is actually benefitting and even boosting the grow of China over the few leading aspects remaining that the "west" were still holding to, so China can establish itself as a world leading power in every single part of the "production chain", from research, to pioneering development, scalability and market dominance
Thank you. Keep it objective as you are. You and TP Huang (on X) are my trusted source on China's tech development.
The US government didn't understand semiconductor manufacturing economics when they imposed these sanctions. Making chips is all about scale and volume. It's relatively easy to make an advanced node chip. The challenge though is that it is very hard to do it at yields that are economical. Additionally, most sub 10nm designs require aggressive multipatterning that drastically reduces factory throughout, and thus, the economics again. But we are talking about China here, a nation that dumps money into its "private" sector without hesitation or regard to the inflationary impact on its own people. If China really thinks this is a critical strategic advantage, then they'll absolutely offset the previously mentioned economic factors.
Who cares if it takes you twice as long to get a wafer through your fab and it has abysmal yield when the government is going to provide the safety net. And that leads to the next point. Improving yields and manufacturing efficiency is all about data and that means having enough content to run through your fab. If the government is off setting the cost then you don't have any disincentive to run more content, and get the data you need to refine and optimize your process to actually make it work. It may take a really long time but it's totally doable.
the perfect example here is Intel. It took them 5ish years of delays to get their 10nm process working using aggressive multipatterning. They could only do it because they manufacture their own chips and thus, could run as much content as they wanted. It wasn't cheap and there has been massive fallout to them for this delay but now imagine Intel was a Chinese company and they were being heavily subsidized to offset that cost. They absolutely had working 10nm chips early on, but not at the scale that made sense in a competitive free market but if that cost was being covered by the government then we would have seen those chips in the market "on time" cause they would have happily thrown millions of wafers away to get enough working chips to meet market demands.
Now, some credit to the US. It could very well be the case that China was planning to ramp it's semiconductor sector regardless. And in that case, these restrictions may not have been intended to choke them of semiconductors but perhaps they were intended to ensure that a China semi ramp didn't consume all of the limited supply of advanced manufacturing tools that are required to make the sub 7nm chips economically that companies like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel need. In other words, if China was going to try to ramp their semi industry anyways, they would absolutely been willing to oay more than anyone else to get their hands on EUV and other advanced tools which could have potentially robbed the rest of the ecosystem the tools they need to stay competitive. We already see how only Intel has been able to purchase the new High-NA tools and we know ASML has a massive backlog for most of its tools.
So in the end it may have been the right decision but for the wrong reason.
This is probably the last major tech hurdle that China must overcome.
What about the demographics?
But China will probably be gone by the end of this decade.
@foxooo "Tech hurdle", my brotha. But to answer your question, increased social programs for mothers, robotics, and others will help. They have 1.4 billion people....their growth won't stop
Corruption is the last major tech hurdle they need to overcome.
@@nntflow7058 we are talking about china not america
Thank you for your research.
It is an eye opener on chip design and testing, deployment and vertical software stack.
It would be how this is going to integrate into 3D memory design.
How you don’t have a million subs is beyond me.
You are an amazing presenter with such an impressive concise way of explaining New Chip tech Thank you so much
Amazing topic! Please do more on the problems that China is having in microchips and Artificial Intelligence!!
Excellent video. Keep up the good work.
Nice to see you. TH-cam had censored all channels that talk about Chinese chip development.... Your channel wasn't appearing even when being searched
this didnt happen to me
uh huh 🙄
@@TH-dr1kg it's not china, it's worse than china
Even now, there are 3 channels that used to talk about Chinese chip industry and US tech sanctions after Huawei release of the Mate 60...... Those channels disappeared towards the end of 2023 you can't find them even when you search for them
Huh? Bulls*** Google doesn’t censor channels about Chinese chips
I'm not worry about Huawei catching up at all in terms of AI, afterall, Huawei was the first to design and devoloped and released chip with AI features in their Kirin 9000 chip fews year back for their Mate 40 series phones...
A channel with beauty and brains not hitting subscriber target. Impossible ! I am subscribed !
I practice Karate and play the guitar. Over the years, in both disciplines, one of the main challenges has been maintaining the willpower to keep training and playing when there seems to be nothing new or exciting to be learnt.
When I look at what is happening in China on the technology front, I think the US sanctions have given the Chinese a sense of purpose or drive, a goal to be achieved, a target to be aimed at, something that pumps up the adrenaline.
If the US government thought the sanctions will discourage the Chinese researchers, they are mistaken, the sanctions are encouragement.
This content is what TH-cam needs more of!
Feed the TH-cam algorithm with a comment. Great video. Thank you.
Love your videos Anastasi
Imo comprehensive summary - thank you.
These restrictions are just dumb, we should be working together to find solutions to the worlds problems, but the US and its allies are instead focused on their own prestige. In the end the incentive to develop their own methods will likely benefit China though, necessity tends to breed innovation, and China is investing heavily here, they certainly have no shortcomings of smart people, many of them trained across the world.
Its a race about whoever is ahead will be ahead, like rich gets richer. They will never catchup.
@@ameserich I wouldn't be so sure about that, there are plenty of areas where China has caught up and more despite being far behind a couple of decades ago.
US is anti competition, they've done this before to japan, now china, world technology progress is hindered by shit country like USA
Those Biren GPUs should almost be compared to MMA ASICs rather than GPGPU, that seems to be all they are good for. No FP64 support is a joke for HPC applications beyond ML
Thank you Anastasi, I've been following you're channel for the past couple of years. Thank you for keeping us tech-nerds up to date. It's exiting isn't it!!?
Your site is the only place I go to find out what is happening in the semiconductor world. Your work and knowledge is outstanding !!
Chinese are smartest, assertives and hard work mindset. Dont worry honey, they will get to their goal.
But they can't make an adapter that works, from a 2.5mm headset plug, being changed to a 3.5mm thst works. Or how about a shrink tube that actually shrinks, and doesn't rip? Need I go on?
@@bugstomper4670 , while u are going on with ur claims the chinese had all ready built their moon station. But no one are so afraid of chinese low quality skill as the american or the west that need to tackles chinese development as fast as they can. Lol
I'm glad some1 such as yourself shows/keeps us updated on future events/projects
I'm confused how the U.S. has as their official publicly stated policy of One China while simultaneously purchasing the bulk of their military technology supported chips and AI from the Republic Of China and then also claiming to restrict "Chinese made chips". Has their been an official publicly stated change of policy that magically now makes those same chips not "Chinese Made", even though they are in the hands of Han Chinese who speak Mandarin Chinese?
one hypocrit country, name themself as world police, while actually they are the criminals of the world
such and a humble and polite way to ask for subscibers , You;ve got mine and many from Kenya
that said, so many Chinese researchers are a great example of doing a lot of new methods that may pan out...
I think China can use the GAA layout tools, and scale them up to the reticle limit for 7nm and convert back to finfet. Run the bigger chips cooler. Also bandwidth can be solved by using wider channels. China has no shortage of people that can optimize code so the latency deficit from the lack of HBM can be mitigated.
TSMC's Secret Weapon: An Ecosystem of Innovation
More than 500 industry-leading suppliers form the bedrock of TSMC's success, creating a formidable ecosystem far exceeding the capabilities of single competitors. This collaborative force of 300,000 individuals across upstream, midstream, and downstream supply chains fuels TSMC's dominance, leaving rivals like Intel and Samsung in its dust.
TSMC's true strength lies not just in its own prowess, but in the collective brainpower and innovation driving its entire ecosystem. This intricate network fuels continuous advancement, allowing TSMC to tackle groundbreaking projects like the recently announced 1nm chip manufacturing facility. This move sent shockwaves through the industry, as it underscores TSMC's leadership in orchestrating a massive 300,000-strong workforce towards achieving the seemingly impossible.
While competitors struggle to match TSMC's sheer numbers, the real advantage lies in the collaborative spirit and shared expertise fostered within this ecosystem. Each supplier brings unique capabilities to the table, creating a synergy that propels TSMC to the forefront of innovation.
Material used in microchip : Silicon : China is by far (70%) the largest producer.
China will overcome its steep learning curve, like back in the days of building its first space station and look what has happened since those early days when China, now is the only country in the world, other than ISS, has its own operational space station, Tiangong in orbit. The Chip game will be accelerated once China overcomes the high end chip development soon & when the full scale chip production starts for the global market, the U.S. Chip dominance will end sooner than expected.!
Fantastic overview. For the specs and stats are you relying on self-published information though, or have these products been evaluated by disinterested parties?
Chinese have been happily buying American chips until they couldn’t, so they are forced to compete. Resilience is one key reason why China lasts for so long.
Only been what... 75 or so years since the last revolution. That's not long.
@@4Fixerdavelike forest fires, sometimes you burn everything for the new sprouts to rise even taller
Curiously, many startups died in the 1980s because of capacity issues. (1) New startups needing chips for new desktops and (2) quality issues with the new chips meant a lot of new production went into replacing broken in-warrenty chips.
Only the buyers with the best suppliers survived.
The first U.S. chips also had many issues. With time, they got better. China will also succeed to correct its chips issues and flaw.
The success of the Accelerator on a Chip International Program to make an electron accelerator on a silicon microchip was very exciting (if you'll forgive the pun) when I first heard about it.
If it could increase the amperage from a few electrons per shot to a few amps per second -- very, very hard, but perfectly possible -- then it would be the perfect tool for not only shrinking the die size of a chip fab but also making such a fab smaller less expensive.
Electron beam lithography is long in the tooth. Sure it has its issues but if such a fab could be built with a cheap and small accelerator then one-off production suddenly becomes economically viable.
If such a chip accelerator could be mated to a similarly manufactured free-electron laser on a chip (basically the inverse of the accelerator) then you could create a photo-lithographic chip fab of any specific frequency you please.
Both these "if"s are very hard engineering... But quite possible. IMHO, this is the future of chip manufacture.
You asked so politely that I had to comply and subscribed
Great episode! Do you think we will see china gpu export ?
Seriously doubtful. China isn't even allowed to buy EUV lithography machines from ASML. China's technology industry model has been letting foreign companies come and establish offices there. Then they steal the technology and designs and start their own government backed company.
It's happened countless times. But they're still very far behind in semiconductor design and manufacturing.
暂时不太可能，中国的GPU现在只能满足自用，出口产品应该还要等等
Hi Anastasia, I would love to hear your opinion on the new Groq chip. Could be a nice topic for a next video, not?
Thanks for the nice work!
Working on this one! Thank you
You look more like a super model than chip dsigner😀
Almost 20 years ago I got to see a 300 mm chip Fab. It was owned by IBM and it was using the latest equipment. It had robots to move everything. So the 300 mm wafers were held in cases that had it's clean room environment in the case. The pods were dropped down by four wires in front of the machines. And when the machine was done it would pick them back up and send them to a two large queues.
I on the other hand was making substrates. A substrate is a ceramic of multiple layers to manage the connections between them chip and the PC board. The ceramics were a soft material and the wiring used was a sort of paste that was silk screened onto the ceramic. They would be stacked and sent into an oven to make the final substrate. The machines with tear up the mask. So I often got one mask and 40 sheets to finish a job. They gave it to me because one I got good at running the machines and two most people don't understand how electrical connections are made so they were rejecting perfectly good sheets.
20 years later and now they're up to 500 and 700 wafers. Well if you're getting 80% yield and they don't cost any more than 300 mm I could understand it. But I'm wondering where did the 300 mm equipment go to?
I hope you will think about working for Tesla.
Jim Keller could need some help from a knowledgeable person like you!
Great videos ❤
Tesla is a small player.
@@lagrangewei on Chips maybe but all in one they are one of the biggest players 😅
It seems US efforts to date have failed to produce stated results of walling off Chinese semiconductor technology and manufacturing at or below 14nm, what would you suggest as the better course to achieve American objectives? Is it even possible to stop Chinese progress and keep it one or two generations behind Western technology?
Anastasiia, would you please make a video where you could show and explain how you design a chip step by step?
Here is the whole University of Texas course in making chips:
th-cam.com/play/PLM2eE_hI4gSDjK4SiDbhpmpjw31Xyqfo_.html
That is not the matter of competition but no choice under restrictions.
any country needs to take care og the globalisation (it's more westernalisation lol) Specialy when USa is becoming a ùmaster of sanctioning anyone that is not obeying their rules !lol. Everycountry should have their own computer OS, weapons manufacturing, chip manufacturing. etc...or make it sure the country when it is done is a neutral country.
Solid 7nm production would be good. The manufacturing tools they have are not close to being 5nm capable.
Sooner the better...and even that may not keep us current. Thanks for the insights. Looking forward to more. Cheers.
concise and clear, thank you
Great topic! I have been following the Chinese semiconductor development a bit. It will be great for global competition. And the Chinese semiconductor industry is extremely impressive! That's my impression. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a Chinese 3nm microchip released in 2024. Chinese companies often downplay their progress until they have something to release.
Preparation for war looks very different in 21. century.
Even if I only understand it superficially from a technical point of view - this is damn valuable content :)
Thank you for posting information about China chip industry. I don't see any benefit to the USA by limiting access to the TSMC fab etc ... . These sanctions have hurt everyone, I just want chips at competitive prices. I suspect that companies in China will be moving in a big way to Huawei's MindSpore stack, in other words they will be moving away from Cuda much faster then market forces would have thanks to America's self destructive policies. It will be nearly impossible for people to move back to NVidia's Cuda even if they relax these sanctions. Total loss for NVidia, these nutty sanctions will likely destroy a lot of American industry, in a couple of years they may also do great harm to ASML and TSMC etc ....
g-no is kind of right, I think you should watch a few vids on politics and geopolitics to make a better conjecture @@G-gh1no
@@G-gh1no the stake is US corporation profit, that's why, US is a piece of shit, they've don't this shit to japan before, basically USA is anti competition and controlled by corporation
Love the deep dive into the the chip tech. As you said part of the equation is building software on the chip hardware. All of this is an advantage to large, well funded companies that can attract talent. Everyone else settles for AI platforms and tools.
Am I the only only one who thinks these chip sanctions against China are a bit unfair? I mean, I get the geopolitical logic of it, but I don't really see how it can be morally justified.
It’s China trade and business practice fair? Have you ever do business in China? Do you understand that by the end of 5th years your company have to completely transfer all technology and know how to another Chinese company and you can only owned 45% of your company by year 5. You have to sell the 55% to a Chinese national, business, or government. So it’s that fair. It is fair for China, maybe the largest economy in the world with buying parity that they classified themselves as an emerging market, so they can leverage World Bank and IMF loan at at a low interest and give out loan to other emerging market at a high interest rate. It’s is fair as an emerging market they ship their product worldwide by air and do not get charge so their price is cheaper than other countries??😊
@@LanNguyen-vd4zt No that's BS. Just Google your own BS and see if you can find it lol. Go read the actual Chinese gov policy regarding foreign investment and ownership in various industry. You don't like the policy then don't do business. China is not forcing you to do anything.
Morality is being shoved to the western public by their elites so that they feel a sense of superiority and used to control the masses so that you do not take over their domain. If you look at western history, the elites are not concerned with morality. They claim to be a good Christian but they slaughter and colonize the world. For those of us in the global south, we are fighting this monster and yet we are often portrayed by them as the monster.
@@turtlesoup8134 How you going to tell me that not B.S. My partner and I used to manufactured our toy in Guangzhou and we have to transfer out product manufacturing method to another company.
@@turtlesoup8134 My partners and I used to have a manufacturing toy plan in Guangzhou. So don’t tell me what I have to deal with in China.
They now need to solve the issue of scaling up but clearly its a matter of time.