Huawei Claims To Have Built Its Own 14nm Chip Design Suite - Slashdot

Huawei Claims To Have Built Its Own 14nm Chip Design Suite

›

• The EDA software is the easy part.

  Let's see them build their own EUV steppers.

  • Re:

    It's only a matter of time. In addition to the knowledge they've 'acquired' from others, they also have intelligence, motivation. and deep pockets. They'll get there, and possibly a lot sooner than Biden and company think they will.

    I'm no fan of China, but underestimating them is a mistake. America has gained a short-term advantage; but goading Beijing into developing these capabilities - and the additional ones that necessarily go hand-in-hand with them - will come back to bite the US in the ass.

    • Re:

      Apparently in fewer and fewer fields. And this one will not last long either. It should also be noted that 14nm is plenty for almost all things.

  • Re:

    Making basic place and route tool isn't that hard, but to make a good one takes a long time especially with the complex design rules with modern processes. The good ones can you higher frequency, higher silicon utilization, and lower power.

    China has no choice and must invest in this, but just know that having something functional doesn't mean they caught up. I'm not saying that they won't, but that it'll take some time.

• China has plenty of talented engineers who can write compilers. That is easy. A lot of that fancy banned software has 'include and import' of others building blocks - introducing incompatibilities and integration module testing issues. This is harder. Then they have a parameters of contamination and litho bleed - lines are not always as sharp. This is trial and error or even guesswork. But thanks to tunneling microscopes, they can soon work of how far behind they are, and reduce bad guesses. Now given that there are known flaws and backdoors in many purchased modules, China will do well to write their own. I suspect trial and error on round gates is still in its infancy (cant be copied, as it does not yet exist). The upshot is China has to some some expensive R&D and pump out larger dies - but pay zero royalties to nobody. The outcome will be a glut, and a price war, and banning low priced imports on good-enough product. One is confident that China will find an export market in developing price conscious markets.

• Re:

  Explain why they are bad at R&D. Because like this it sounds really racist/xenophobic. It is not hard to imagine that a country with 1.4 billion people and a good economy is able to find great scientists(same reason why they are always on podium at olympic games). Granted industrial secrets exist but research is by nature very open and they don't pretend to be number 1 in chip design. Reverse engineering and industrial espionage is limited to China? Every companies do these things since forever even if

  • Re:

    China is not bad at R&D. They will surpass US technologically given time. China values education unlike US and if you look at US high tech companies a lot of employees are first or second generation Chinese.
    US has some deluded sense of exceptionalism, but in reality the country appears past its prime. Constant political infighting and disdain for education do not make a recipe for technological success.
    I worked with several engineers from China and many of them are quite good. My coworkers visited Chi

    • Re:

      Indeed. The US deeply believes it is so far ahead that it does not need to try anymore. Probably the only thing that keeps the population in line, because if they know how mediocre and sometimes really bad the living conditions in the US actually are compared to the rest of the developed world, that would likely cause a civil war. The downside of that strategy are things like the disdain for knowledge and education that is rampart in the US. All it takes for the US to collapse economically within a few dec

• Re:

  Sigh. We are going to keep losing, aren't we?

  Huawei recently demonstrated 50Gbps over passive optical fibre in a consumer router. Product to launch later this year. We've got nothing, nobody in the West is close to having a carrier grade POF system capable of 50Gbps to customers ready to install.

  Obviously it wasn't stolen, since there was nothing to steal.

  Of course we won't be able to benefit from that technology, because we banned Huawei products. Maybe it will make it into a standard and our guys can pay

  • Re:

    Yes we are. Remember than during the last 2000 years, China was a big economic power during a good chunk of it [weforum.org].

    We used our fossil fuels peak (in 1940, the US were producing 60% of the world oil, in 1920 Great Britain passed its coal extraction peak) to make some great innovations: cars, trains, planes, chemical industry advancements, electronics...
    Since then, China invested and planned a lot on tomorrow technologies: EV, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, rare earth mining, nuclear, chip manufacturing

    • Re:

      Steps to push towards more in-house manufacturing almost inevitably work against globalization and international competition.
      If Europe does something similar, access to EU markets will be reduced for US products as well. That on top of current sanctions against China may eventually break the global economy into three big blocks:
      - The US and probably the rest of North America.
      - The EU
      - China and whatever associates they can find (Russia?)
      I'm not sure where Africa and South America wou

      • Re:

        Not necessarily against all aspects of globalization: innovations can still cross borders, patents too, a company could have manufacturing plants on several continents...

        International competition: maybe.
        Would it be a bad thing though? When there is a competition, it means there are winners and losers. I am not talking about the consumer being part of the equation here: the fact that consumers get cheaper products in the short-term is exactly what it is. A short-term side effect. I am talking about long-term

      • Re:

        You left out the rest of Asia and Africa. As for whatever associates China can find you can probably count on the EU, S-America, Asia and Africa continuing to do business with China even if the US and their vassals like the UK and Australia have decided to go full 'Yellow Peril!!' and isolate themselves. This will continue until the Chinese do something blatantly hostile to piss any of these factions off (and, no, balloons do not qualify). This is probably why the Chinese, despite their 'partnership without

      • Re:

        China has already made [cfr.org] significant [economist.com] inroads [forbes.com] into gaining control over Africa. And given the past behaviour of European countries and the US in Africa, I'd guess the Chinese are receiving a fairly warm welcome.

      • Re:

        This is a good thing.

        Every nation must look to the needs of it's citizens first. Trade is good, but dependence to the point of vulnerability is bad. International standards do not necessitate single sourcing.

        • Re:

          No, it is not. And it fails their citizens. The universal effect of protectionism is crappy products for high prices and generally falling farther and farther behind. Of course, the proponents of protectionism always claim that everything is going to be different this time because reasons, but that never happens because it cannot happen.

  • Re:

    The US is going to lose this "war" for sure. As to Europe, not necessarily. There is still real R&D going on here and people are not resting their minds on a flawed perception of superiority. Also, education is valued. As to the UK specifically, it really depends on the next few years. If it is "Brexit was the right thing to do and I insist on it while I starve!" then it will look really bleak for a long time. If, however, some sanity can be found, then things may still stabilize on an acceptable level,

• Re:

  Every tech is built on prior ideas, they might have illicitly acquired those prior ideas but it doesn't mean they won't be able to build and expand on it. It's like a Chinese claiming the west simply made improvements to the original Chinese idea of rockets, gunpowder, and guns.

• Re:

  Don't kid yourself. 14nm and the EDA for it is well within reach of the Chinese without the need to steal anything. At this tech-level, stealing also does not work, because you need to be able to adapt the tech and that works a lot better if you built it yourself. Grossly underestimating an enemy is a very stupid move.

• Re:

  China is also extremely good at circumventing software licensing. I suspect that many private enterprises will pretend to be using the homegrown tools but is secretly using bootlegged tools from the west. Perhaps EDA vendors should watermark the mask.