At least they can go back to China when all is said and done.
Chinese semiconductor thread II
- Thread starter vincent
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At least they can go back to China when all is said and done.
ACM Research is planning to build a pilot line. Pretty much the same as Naura, SMEE and others had since 2021, SMEE interacted their lithography scanners including the immersion lithography scanner in those pilot lines.
Shengmei Shanghai adjusts the fundraising quota for investment projects, and the investment amount of the test platform is reduced to 922 million yuan
On May 21, Shengmei Shanghai issued an announcement stating that on May 20, the company reviewed and approved the "Proposal on Adjusting the Company's 2024 A-share Stock Issuance Plan to Specific Objects". The total amount of funds raised was changed from 450,000 million yuan to 448,200 million yuan, and the amount of funds to be invested in the "R&D and Process Testing Platform Construction Project" was changed from 94,034.85 million yuan to 92,234.85 million yuan. In addition, there are no other changes to the content of the company's issuance plan.
Previously, Shengmei Shanghai planned to raise 4.5 billion yuan in a private placement to be used for R&D and process testing platform construction projects, high-end semiconductor equipment iterative R&D project construction, and to supplement working capital.
Among them, the R&D and process testing platform construction project is the project for which the investment amount has been reduced. This project will draw on the experience of international leading semiconductor equipment companies in setting up their own process testing lines, use the company's existing process testing clean rooms to simulate the production environment of a wafer manufacturing plant, configure necessary R&D testing instruments and purchased equipment such as lithography machines, CMP machines, and ion implanters, and combine it with a variety of self-made process equipment to create an integrated circuit equipment R&D and process testing platform to improve the company's industrial layout in the R&D and testing links.
The estimated construction period of this project is 4 years, with a total planned investment of RMB 940.3485 million, of which RMB 922.3485 million will be raised funds.
a look at XRING-01's CPU, GPU and ISP. So, it has also developed its own 4G modem called XRING-T1.
I think given what it has done already, we can put Xiaomi better at chip designing than Unisoc.
Now, if it can develop a competitive 5G modem, then that would be another huge leap for their design team.
Let's see if they can develop lower cost 5G chips so that they can use their own designed chips instead of Helio SoC from Mediatek
None of this is saying Xiaomi is better at semiconductor than Huawei! Nobody here is suggesting that.
5G is several orders of magnitude more difficult, and Unisoc has 5G.
I'm not making this judgment based on the modem, but rather the full chip they have developed.
It's unclear why Unisoc hasn't even attempted to develop a competitive flagship SoC, but that is their decision.
Since they lack such a product, it makes me question what they are capable of designing.
Unisoc is a much smaller company, probably have much less project funding, and more uncertainty of profitability for their new chip, since they need coustomer for their chip. Xiaomi on the other hand can just simply use their chip for their own product, phones and tablets and watches etc.
Domestic integrated circuit test equipment company Pengwu Electronics completed A+ round of financing of tens of millions of yuan
Shanghai Pengwu Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. (Pengwu Electronic), a domestic integrated circuit test equipment company, announced that it has successfully completed the A+ round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. The injection of new funds will be mainly used for new product research and development and large-scale production capacity layout, further promoting independent innovation and domestic substitution of integrated circuit test equipment.
According to official data, Pengwu Electronics was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Shanghai Pudong New Area. It has a sales center in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, a research and development center in Suzhou Industrial Park, and a manufacturing base in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Through continuous innovation in high-speed digital, high-precision analog and wireless radio frequency fields, it provides engineering experts and scientists with equipment for integrated circuit wafer and chip testing and verification.
Since its establishment, Pengwu Electronics has focused on the testing needs of digital chips, mixed analog chips, and high-precision analog chips. Through independent research and development, it has achieved a number of breakthroughs. Pengwu Electronics' equipment for integrated circuit mass production testing achieves the unity of high precision, high efficiency, and high reliability, and provides general-purpose testers for domestic and foreign mid-to-high-end companies, which can cover the testing requirements of digital, mixed analog, and analog power supplies with a single unit.
According to reports, Pengwu Electronics' high-end ATE test equipment "P2" and high-speed digital instrument "HSS10G" have been introduced to clients. The entire solution can test high-end chips with thousands of pins and IOs and speeds up to 10Gbps, filling the gap in the field of domestic high-end integrated circuit test equipment, indicating that Pengwu Electronics can compete with international high-end products in this technology.
Maxwin Technology Zhuhai Semiconductor Equipment Industrial Park Project Officially Started
On the morning of May 22, the groundbreaking ceremony for the second section of Maxsun Technology Zhuhai Semiconductor Equipment Industrial Park (Phase II) project was grandly held.Maxwin Technology Zhuhai Semiconductor Equipment Industrial Park (Phase II) Project, Section 2, is located in the south of Jinhuan Road and the east of Jinding West Road in the Jinding area of Zhuhai High-tech Zone, with a planned construction area of approximately 95,000 square meters. The project aims to build a domestic top semiconductor high-end equipment industrial base and resource base, covering the full chain of R&D design, core component manufacturing, complete machine assembly and test verification, aiming to accelerate the semiconductor industry's leap to high-end, intelligent and clustered development by improving the supporting capabilities from R&D to mass production.
As a benchmark enterprise in Zhuhai High-tech Zone, Maxwin Technology (Zhuhai) Co., Ltd. has always focused on the breakthrough of localization of high-end equipment in the field of semiconductor integrated circuits and semiconductor optoelectronics since its establishment. The company invested 2.1 billion yuan to build the "Maxwin Technology Zhuhai Semiconductor Equipment Industrial Park" with a total construction area of over 480,000 square meters. It plans to build three product lines and five R&D centers, aiming to fill the gap in domestic semiconductor high-end equipment through the R&D, manufacturing and sales of intelligent high-end equipment, lead the innovation and development of the industry, and inject new momentum into the process of independence of my country's semiconductor industry.
As a benchmark enterprise in Zhuhai High-tech Zone, Maxwin Technology (Zhuhai) Co., Ltd. has always focused on the breakthrough of localization of high-end equipment in the field of semiconductor integrated circuits and semiconductor optoelectronics since its establishment. The company invested 2.1 billion yuan to build the "Maxwin Technology Zhuhai Semiconductor Equipment Industrial Park" with a total construction area of over 480,000 square meters. It plans to build three product lines and five R&D centers, aiming to fill the gap in domestic semiconductor high-end equipment through the R&D, manufacturing and sales of intelligent high-end equipment, lead the innovation and development of the industry, and inject new momentum into the process of independence of my country's semiconductor industry.
I think they do this on purpose. Their design is not bad. Their chips performance is comparable to any other chips that use the same ARM-stock-cores and the same fab process. It's just that they never use the latest or even the second-latest TSMC fab process. If they were to produce a chip using the same ARM Cortex cores, and the same TSMC fab process as this Xiaomi chip then the resulting performance will not be that different (of course there will be some differences). Their most advanced chip currently use 6nm.
So why don't they just use TSMC's latest process and make a chip that could compete with MediaTek? If they did that very likely they would immediately get sanctioned and cut off from TSMC. They cannot also leverage SMIC the same way Huawei does. Their situation is different from both Huawei and Xiaomi. Huawei is a device manufacturer that has total control over their design of their cores as well as the design of device hardware and software, which allows them to optimize those in many ways to reduce the disadvantage of having to fab with an inferior process node. Unisoc is not a device manufacturer like Xioami so they can't just build some chips in-house and then buy some from Qualcomm to keep Qualcomm's US lobbying on their side either. Whatever they do they would have to compete with Mediatek and Qualcomm. Their current strategy of focusing on the low-end allows them to stay afloat and maintain the knowhow until such time mainland fabs can compete with TSMC on the high-end nodes.
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UMOptics is expanding the mass production of high precision optical components. Including large size CaF2 crystals, the main component of 193nm DUV lithography machines
