Cheap as Chinese Chips?

China manufactures a billion ICs every day

Before his election in 2012, planners warned President Xi of China’s vulnerability to restrictions on integrated circuit imports. Xi’s chief troubleshooter, Liu He, below, who designed Dynamic Covid Zero¹, to craft a $50 billion crash program that would put Chinese ICs a generation ahead of the US by 2030. The first fruits of the program will appear on the market next year, ten years after it began.

Workforce

Chinese researchers utterly dominate global math, engineering and computer science, in both quality and quantity of their published papers, and will graduate 1.4 million engineers this year.

America will graduate 197,000 engineers, 20% of whom will be Chinese, and five of whom will be super geniuses with IQ 160+. The kind of people who play viola in a symphony orchestra and invent new fields of engineering mathematics.

China will graduate 40,000 of such smartypants – a numerical advantage it sustains across its entire workforce (who cost employers as much as Americans cost theirs). Together, as a coordinated teams of hundreds of thousands of young people, they planted, nurtured, and developed the products that are about to change our lives and their country’s future.

First Fruits

• Early this month, China lifted its chip manufacturing to one billion a day, up 44% on 2021. China leads the world with 8 out of 19 new fabs under construction.

• At the high end, China’s own chips power its three exascale computers, with the fourth – of a promised ten – is under construction. The US produced one such machine, a year after China.

• Shenzhen's RoboSense launched the Holy Grail of self-driving sensors: the first automotive, flash, solid-state LiDAR chip. With a simple bill of materials and no moving parts, it excels in detection, cost, safety and reliability. Built in China with Chinese IP and protected by a thicket of patents. 

• Cambricon builds the fastest AI chip.

• Biren's BR100 GPU is 3x faster than NVIDIA’s A100

• YMTC introduced the first 200+ layer 3D NAND Flash chip before Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron and will be the segment’s uncontested leader by 2030”. NAND Flash retains data without power, ideal for consumer electronics. Read full article

• China dominates the exploding market for EV chips.

• Tsinghua University demonstrated the next generation of ICs, "Sidewall transistors”. Much smaller than current chips, they use one-atom-thick graphene sheet for gates, easily manufactured with current technology.

  

• Recently, the CEO of Dutch etching company, ASML said, "A Chinese customer told us, "We make mature power ICs. We need your help building a 300-millimeter (wafer diameter) fab”. Chip guru Dylan Patel says 300 nm wafers have twice the yield of 200 nm wafers, so "ASML will teach China everything and they will destroy power semiconductors’ profitability for every US and European fab."

Coming Attractions

A team of researchers, led by Jian-Wei Pan at UST China, created a tunable superconducting processor, called Zuchongzhi, features 66 functional qubits. When presented with an extremely complex sampling problem, estimated by the researchers to be 2-3 times more demanding than previous problems assigned to quantum processors, Zuchongzhi finished it in 1.2 hours. Pan and colleagues expect the same problem would require 8 years to be completed by the most powerful supercomputers. In this case, the researchers only utilized 56 qubits for the sampling problem, which is 3 qubits more than a previous claim to primacy by Google . More..

Huawei Files Patent For Quantum Chip & Computer

Conclusion

After banning Huawei and ZTE, the FCC banned CCTV leaders Hikvision and Dahua, and two-way radio maker Hytera. 

The USA is falling further behind China each year. US bans, intended to inhibit China’s development, inhibit America’s. ZTE, for example, provides better 5G coverage across Tibet than San Francisco’s. Americans pay tariff-driven higher prices for imports and, increasingly lack access to affordable, leading edge Chinese technologies.²

1. 82% of Chinese support DCZ after 3 years of Covid because US GDP grew 3.4% + 1M deaths + 3M Long Covids. China GDP grew 13.8% + 7K deaths + 38K Longs. Chinese now live 77.1 years, Americans 76.1. 91% of them fully vaxed vs. 69% of Americans

2. National semiconductor tax subsidies are $150 billion and local subsidies larger with a 5:1 private-to-public investment ratio. The CHIPS Act ratio, which will reach 4.2:1, will only boost US semiconductor manufacturing value from 10.5% of to 14% by 2026, when China will exceed 20%. By 2030 the US will fabricate 10% of the world’s semiconductors and China will make 30%.

‘Assuming a normal distribution, there are 10,000 Americans performing at +4SD, IQ 140+, and a similar number in Europe, the top few hundred high school seniors each year in each. Extrapolate NE Asian numbers to 1.4 billion Chinese produces more than 300,000 at this level, which is pretty overwhelming’. Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results.

China has submitted the most accepted research papers at a prestigious international academic semiconductor conference, bumping the US to number two. Of 629 papers submitted, 59 from China were selected for presentation, 42 from the US, and 32 from South Korea. 

Guangdong IP Court hears more patent cases annually than the entire United States court system.

Graphene is lightweight, two hundred times stronger than steel, with thermal and electrical conductivity and heat dissipation better than copper, for efficient batteries and more. China's Graphene Copper Innovation Consortium is with bringing graphene to chip manufacturing, offering ten times the performance of silicon-based chips at one-tenth the cost.