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Opinionated - China Chipping Away to Semiconductor Dominance

Tencent pledges to advance China's chip industry after ZTE 'wake-up' call: reports

CGTN
2018-05-28

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The problems Chinese telecoms firm ZTE affair has been experiencing with US authorities are being seen as a wake-up call by Tencent Holdings chairman Pony Ma.

Ma pledged to advance China’s semiconductor industry, citing the blow to ZTE Corp from Washington’s ban on US firms supplying the company for seven years, according to Chinese media reports.

The US claims that China’s No.2 telecom equipment maker violated US sanctions against Iran and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK).

American firms are estimated to provide 25 to 30 percent of the components used in ZTE’s equipment.

While the US administration said on Friday it had reached a deal to put ZTE back in business after the company pays a 1.3-billion US dollar fine and makes management changes, the plan has run into resistance in Congress, indicating ZTE was still far from out of the woods. Also, ZTE is yet to confirm the deal.

“The recent ZTE incident made everyone more clearly realize that however advanced one may be in mobile payment, without the mobile, the chips and the operating system, you still cannot compete,” Ma was quoted as saying at a forum in Shenzhen on Saturday.

'More research needed'

Tencent, which alternates with Alibaba Group to be Asia’s most-valuable listed company, is the largest social media and gaming company in China and operates the popular WeChat app.

Ma said that “even though the ZTE situation was in the process of being resolved, we must not lose vigilance at this time and should pay more attention to fundamental scientific research.”

Tencent is looking into ways it could help advance China’s domestic chip industry, which could include leveraging its huge data demand to urge domestic chip suppliers to come up with better solutions, or using its WeChat platform to support application developments based on Chinese chips, Ma said.

“It would probably be better if we could get in to support semiconductor R&D, but that is perhaps admittedly not our strong suit and may need the help of others in the supply chain.”

China has been looking to accelerate plans to develop its semiconductor market to reduce its heavy reliance on imports and has invited overseas investors to invest in the country’s top state-backed chip fund.

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Looks like Trump has really taught a tough lesson that normally would be hard to learn. Sometimes it is needed. A good friend will give the bitter medicine to cure the problem :lol:

@qwerrty , @cirr
 
Tencent pledges to advance China's chip industry after ZTE 'wake-up' call: reports
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Looks like Trump has really taught a tough lesson that normally would be hard to learn. Sometimes it is needed. A good friend will give the bitter medicine to cure the problem :lol:

@qwerrty , @cirr

this is great! jack ma and robin li are saying the same thing. the BAT is very big in china. nearly all chinese are using their products. the BAT and big chinese phone makers should form an alliance to create an OS. chip and software companies then can design their sh1t around it. that's how an ecosystem created. our great agent, DJT, can only help china this far. the BAT need stop fighting each others and join forces and make motharland great again :D!
 
IC sector prospering in Hefei, China
Cindy Yu, Taipei; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES
Wednesday 30 May 2018

The IC industry in Hefei is one of the fast-growing IC industry clusters in China. In less than three years, a total of 129 IC companies including fabless firms, foundries and backend houses have set up operations in Hefei, building a complete supply chain locally.

The complete IC industry supply chain in Hefei has drawn investment from international equipment and materials providers, such as lithography tool vendor ASML and photomask company Photronics. ASML has opened recently a new branch office in Hefei to service its local customers, while Photronics is constructing a new photomask plant in Hefei.

Development of the Hefei IC industry during the period of China's 13th Five-year Plan is focused on memory chips, LCD driver ICs and other specialty chips. The industry has set a goal of surpassing CNY50 billion (US$7.8 billion) in 2020, and entered both China's top-5 IC manufacturing and design sectors by the year.

The output value of the Hefei IC industry increased about 31% on year to CNY23.56 billion in 2017, when tax revenues grew 11.6% to CNY2.12 billion. Total investment in the industry came to CNY7.25 billion in 2017, up 39.4% on year.

MediaTek, Phison Electronics, GigaDevice Semiconductor, Ingenic Semiconductor and Brite Semiconductor are among the fabless firms participated in the IC industry cluster in Hefei. MediaTek, for example, has set up a R&D center locally where over 1,000 R&D employees are stationed.

In the IC manufacturing segment, Powerchip Technology has formed a joint venture with the Hefei city government of China's Anhui province. The JV, named Nexchip Semiconductor, is a 12-inch foundry which entered volume production at the end of 2017. Monthly capacity at the JV fab is scheduled to reach 40,000 wafer starts by 2020 and will expand further to 160,000 units when the construction of its planned four phases completes.

Nexchip will target initially orders for LCD driver ICs with BOE Technology being its main customer, Powerchip CEO Frank Huang was quoted in previous reports. Nexchip will also be engaged in the manufacture of image sensors, and could expand its foundry services to cover NOR flash products when Powerchip's Taiwan-based fabs run at full utilization, Huang said.

Innotron Memory, previously known as Hefei ChangXin or Hefei RuiLi, is also building a 12-inch fab in Hefei. Despite being a startup, Innotron will enter directly the manufacture of 19nm DRAM chips. Innotron CEO David NK Wang disclosed recently the company will start trial production of 8Gb DDR4 chips at the end of 2018, followed by volume production in 2019. Innotron also expects to complete its 17nm process technology R&D in 2021.

Tongfu Microelectronics and National Center for Advanced Packaging (NCAP China), with the latter company developing fan-out packaging technology, are both among the IC backend houses involved in the IC industry cluster in Hefei.
 
chip and software companies then can design their sh1t around it. that's how an ecosystem created. our great agent, DJT, can only help china this far. the BAT need stop fighting each others and join forces and make motharland great again :D!

Indeed, ecosystem is very important. And, China's big three should be capable of creating one as they have firm control over the market.

And I also agree that while DJT is doing his best to MCGA, China Inc. also need to join him and assume responsibility :D
 
Chinese AI startup Rokid will mass produce their own custom AI chip for voice recognition · TechNode
Nicole Jao
6-8 minutes

The recent actions against ZTE have acted as a catalyst for China’s chipmaking and AI sector. But well before all the international spotlight, there were a group of companies who already started to bolster their core tech capabilities.

Rokid, a Hangzhou-based startup which specializes in robotics research and AI development, is about to launch and mass-produce its own dedicated voice-first AI chip after two years of research and development. The company told TechNode that the custom AI chip is more power efficient, lower in cost, and better designed for third-party vendors, OEMs, and small appliance manufacturers. The chip’s specifications will be unveiled at the “Rokid Jungle” event in Hangzhou on June 26, along with new product developments and major partnerships.

Founded in 2014, the company’s product lineup includes smart speaker Rokid Pebble, home AI assistant Alien, and AR Glass which are currently available in China.

TechNode spoke to Dr. Zhou Jun, who headed Samsung’s Semiconductor Institute in China prior to joining Rokid as vice president in April, about the new AI chip and its significance in the AI chip wave that we’re witnessing now.

Voice recognition is all the rage

In China, voice recognition is an increasingly competitive market that has bred a handful of prominent AI companies like iFlytek (科大讯飞), Aispeech (思必驰), and Unisound (云知声). Chinese tech powerhouses have also been scrambling to get their share in the smart speaker market. iFlytek and Huawei recently announced that they have signed a cooperation agreement, in a large part, to enhance consumer voice recognition technology.

Despite tough competition, Zhou said, Rokid is doing well in the vertical because it has an obvious advantage. Unlike some companies that focus on specific aspects of AI product development (for example signal processing), Rokid has experience and knowledge in developing both the front-end and back-end technologies for their products.

The 4-year-old startup has been innovating and optimizing its voice-recognition algorithms such as noise reduction in the front-end, and speech recognition and speech understanding in the back-end.

Rokid started developing its voice-first AI chip back in 2016, when the AI voice recognition hardware space was—relatively speaking—a no man’s land. Getting a head start bid well for Rokid since AI chip development is generally a year-long process. The company said they initially developed the AI chip for their own smart devices because even though tech pioneers like Google, Apple, Amazon had started developing voice recognition technologies, there weren’t many companies in China developing voice recognition hardware.

But the market has been heating up since last year as an increasing number of companies bet on smart speakers—consumer voice recognition biggest application—as the “next big thing” in consumer electronics. Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, Xiaomi’s MI AI Speaker, JD’s DingDong, and most recently in April Tencent launched its own smart speaker, TingTing.

General purpose vs. custom chips

“We discovered that developing AI products on general-purpose chips is more power-consuming and costly, which is a clear disadvantage to the implementation and development of such a powerful technology,” Zhou explained.

Zhou explained that Rokid’s self-developed algorithms could not run or load optimally on general purpose chips, which don’t have the custom digital signal processor (DSP) nor Neutral Processing Unit (NPU).

“Developing AI products like smart speakers involves other front-end algorithms like noise reduction and acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) algorithms, which, in reality, need more powerful computational capabilities [than what general purpose chips can offer],” he added.

Rokid’s AI chip is tailored to voice recognition systems—they’ve developed their own DSP and NPU tailored for smart speakers. General purpose chips perform well for a broad range of applications but are less efficient for specific tasks.

The development of voice recognition technologies is still in early stages and there are still many areas that still need a breakthrough, such as multi-person voice recognition, Zhou said.

Towards the edge

“Back in 2014, there were discussions in academic circles surrounding AI applications but there weren’t many real-world edge AI applications like smart speakers.” But the trends in AI applications are becoming more and more apparent: it is moving towards the edge.

In the age of AI, data is being generated and gathered from different sources like smartphone, drone, sensor, or autonomous vehicle. The massive data computing demands gave rise to information processing closer to its source (or the edge of the network) instead of sending it to data centers or clouds.

Now that chipset and system software are being integrated more tightly, and many big companies are moving their processing capability from cloud to the edge—to share the processing load and overcome some of the vulnerabilities associated with the cloud.

“I still think Rokid’s decision to make its own standalone edge product is forward-thinking,” Zhou said as AI moves rapidly into edge devices, more standalone edge products are surfacing. Voice recognition was previously used in cloud or smartphone like Siri, but in standalone devices are quite recent.

The ZTE ban is now commonly referred to as a wake-up call for the Chinese chip industry to see the heavy reliance on foreign technology. Although China may be lagging behind technology advanced nations like the US, with the government’s AI development plan and the “Made in China 2025” strategic plan, it is hard to say how quick the tables will turn.

“I reckon that with or without the recent ZTE ban, the development of integrated circuit technology in China is moving forward steadily,” Zhou said.

Code:
https://technode.com/2018/06/05/rokid/

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Eye Engine Technology Announces AI Vision Imaging Chip: Solving the Problem of Low Recognition Rate in Complex Environments
眼擎科技发布AI视觉成像芯片:解决复杂环境识别率低问题

Abstract: Eye Engine Technology officially released the "eyemore X42" AI visual imaging chip. Allegedly, this chip can solve AI vision from the front-end to recognize the problem of low accuracy under complex lighting, output stable and reliable high-quality visual images to AI vision algorithms, and improve the efficiency and accuracy of AI image recognition.
摘要:眼擎科技日前正式对外发布“eyemore X42” AI视觉成像芯片。据称,这款芯片可以从前端解决AI视觉在复杂光线下识别准确率低的问题,给AI视觉算法输出稳定可靠的高品质视觉图像,提高AI图像识别的效率和准确率。

Code:
http://www.icsmart.cn/16769/
http://www.eyemore.ai/
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Chinese AI Firm Mobvoi Beefs Up Smart Hardware Offerings And Releases AI Chip Product – China Money Network
3-4 minutes

Mobvoi's TicKasa Fox is a palm-sized, waterproof and dust-proof speaker in the shape of a fox, designed for children.

Mobvoi, a Chinese artificial intelligence firm backed by Google and Volkswagen Group China, unveiled a number of smart hardware products and an AI chip as the company continues to build up its product portfolio centered around voice recognition technology.

In a product launch event held in Beijing today, Mobvoi showcased an upgraded version of its smart watch, TicWatch, two portable smart speakers, an airpods-like wireless smart earphone, and an AI chip supporting voice recognition it claims to be the first such chip ready for mass production by a Chinese AI company.

Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro features dual-layered display technology to allow for longer battery life. Users can switch between smart watch mode, with a 1.4 inch HD AMOLED display, and power saving mode, with 1.4 inch monochrome LCD screen. Moderate use of the smart watch switching between these the two modes allows for a battery life of up to five days, the company said.

The smart watch utilizes Google’s Wear OS, an Android operating system designed for smartwatches and other wearables, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 2100 wearable platform. The watch enables mobile payment, and can directly be connected to 4G network without a SIM card.

The company also released two portable smart speakers, after unveiling its Tichome smart speaker products last year. The two new portable smart speakers including TicKasa Fox and TicKasa Nano for adults. TicKasa Fox is palm-sized waterproof and dust-proof speaker in the shape of a fox. The RMB499 (US$78) speaker is equipped with Mobvoi’s voice assistant. The speaker also comes with one gigabyte of pre-loaded content including stories, songs, games and English readings for children, so that it can be used when it’s not connected to the Internet.

In addition, Mobvoi partnered with Hangzhou Guoxin Technology Co., Ltd, a Chinese semiconductor company, to jointly develop an AI chip supporting voice recognition. The chip integrates Hangzhou Guoxin Technology-designed NPU and Mobvoi’s voice interaction technologies including echo cancellation, acoustic location, speech recognition, semantic analysis and speech synthesis. The firm said the price of the chip is 50% lower than similar products in the market.

Similar to other Chinese consumer-facing technology companies such as Xiaomi Inc. and flexible screen company Royole, Mobvoi has opened four offline experience centers in China to allow users to test their products. It plans to expand to 20 offshore stores across China by the end of this year.

Founded in 2012, Mobvoi started as a voice interaction mobile app

Code:
https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2018/05/24/chinese-ai-firm-mobvoi-beefs-up-smart-hardware-offerings-and-releases-ai-chip-product
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Home appliance giants have set foot on the "core" journey

家电巨头踏上“芯”征程:大有可为,道阻且长

changhong, TCL, haier, midea, konka, gree, etc, plan to design custom chips for use in their own products after zte bs. not good news for traditional chip suppliers. good job agent trump :enjoy:

Code:
https://www.sohu.com/a/233518374_123634
cYmePvc.jpg
 
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NEV startup making ai autopilot chip for their own cars.

they have more guts than many highly funded auto startups in china :D


Shanghai (Gasgoo)- At the CES Asia 2018, the Hangzhou-based vehicle startup Leapmotor announced on June 13 that the first domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chip, dubbed “Lingxin 01 (in Chinese)” has entered the phase of integration verification.
Code:
http://autonews.gasgoo.com/china_news/70014765.html

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Alibaba AI Labs’ Miffy Chen Announces $1 Bluetooth Mesh Chip At CES Asia 2018
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alibaba A.I. Labs, which leads the development of Alibaba's consumer artificial intelligent (AI) products, and MediaTek, a global fabless semiconductor company, today announced a strategic collaboration in Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives including smart home protocols, customized IoT chips and AI smart hardware, with the aim of fostering the development of a connected world in the IoT era.

The two parties also announced the first Smartmesh connectivity solution in China that supports the latest many-to-many Bluetooth mesh technology, in an effort to speed up the adoption of this technology in smart home settings.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rel...th-mediatek-on-iot-initiatives-300580498.html

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anther big home appliance company joining in the ai chip trend too :D

skyworth hummingbird AI chip at CESasia
蜂鸟AI芯片加持,创维打造CESAsia智能家电馆!
PConline原创 | 2018-06-14 10:28

【PConline 资讯】缺芯少屏同样是中国彩电行业发展的短板。创维自主研发蜂鸟AI芯片,这款芯片搭载了三项画质优化技术,包括精密平滑处理、动态目标重塑和超级清晰度。一方面为人工智能图像处理和语音识别提供了强大动力,同时也打破了彩电“芯片”长期垄断。

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China to immediately cease providing subsidies and government support that fuels excess capacity in industries targeted by the Made in China 2025 plan.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...demanded-of-china-at-the-start-of-trade-talks



:lol: lolz



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Chipmaker Tsinghua brings China's national ambition within reach
Huge memory plant looks to supply domestic industry and cut reliance on US

KOTARO HOSOKAWA, Nikkei staff writer June 17, 2018 16:51 JST
TOKYO -- Tsinghua Unigroup is on the cusp of a massive output expansion for memory chips, with another $100 billion in investment on the way, playing a central role in China's drive to develop a world-class semiconductor industry.
Code:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Chipmaker-Tsinghua-brings-China-s-national-ambition-within-reach
 
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Such a big thread but conclusion from ZTE episode is that china is a assembly center and not a manufacturer of critical chips.
Technical people in this area already knew that , eg the iphone components are mostly made in non chinese companies and countries and assembled in china.
No easy way for china to get the tech required except for buying western cos but that route also looks trumpblocked.
Interesting days ahead.
 
Such a big thread but conclusion from ZTE episode is that china is a assembly center and not a manufacturer of critical chips.

zte is not the whole china. stupid zte deserve to go broke. they even buy simple components like power management and bluetooth chips from the US. they thought buying americans will get them american market access freely with no restrictions like huawei. fools..


Technical people in this area already knew that , eg the iphone components are mostly made in non chinese companies and countries and assembled in china.

you're not one of them. technical people know even supa powah USA rely on critical components made by non americans. technical people also know two chinese companies already added to list of apple's suppliers to supply depth sensing chips for their face id, and is in talk to buy 3d nand from yangtze memory. they also know apple is currently shopping around in china for flexible oled for their future foldable phones.

technicol peepo no:enjoy:
 
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zte is not the whole china.
But how many Chinese companies relies on US products like ZTE? More than China care to admit.

What ZTE did was the fastest way to grow and all Chinese technically oriented companies knew it. It make sound business and tactical sense. The components are R/D-ed and built. All you have to do is buy and assemble them to suit your business model. All these yrs people have been gloating that Chinese companies bought US companies. What do you think for?

So if you cannot buy the company, then buy its products and make your own devices.
 
But how many Chinese companies relies on US products like ZTE? More than China care to admit.

What ZTE did was the fastest way to grow and all Chinese technically oriented companies knew it. It make sound business and tactical sense. The components are R/D-ed and built. All you have to do is buy and assemble them to suit your business model. All these yrs people have been gloating that Chinese companies bought US companies. What do you think for?

probably many. nobody is denying. the title of this thread is 'chipping away' :D
thanks to the zte sanctions, there will be less in the future. lol. as you see giant home appliances, autos, big data companies like alibaba, baidu, tencent and many more are now starting to build their own chips now. those guys are very big buyers of chip components from the US. some companies gonna lose a lot of customers. thank you trump for waking 'em up :enjoy:
 
another chip away in professional market :enjoy:

GSENSE6060BSI, the world’s largest back-thinned CMOS image sensor, will be presented for the first time in SPIE Astronomical telescopes + Instrumentation!
GPixel claims it has created the world's largest BSI CMOS sensor, GSENSE6060. The pixel array area of the 37.7MP, 10um pixel sensor is 61.44 x 61.44 mm2 large, and the pixel full well and DR are large too: Image Sensors World

s8kEqPW.png


looks like our russian friends are interested in using this new shiny chinese big BSI image sensor for their space based telescope :D

PeLXFIf.png


SKGQJZn.png


Code:
http://iaaweb.org/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/conf/pdc2017/IAA-PDC-17-02-P02.pdf

HHuwec8.jpg
 
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But how many Chinese companies relies on US products like ZTE? More than China care to admit.

What ZTE did was the fastest way to grow and all Chinese technically oriented companies knew it. It make sound business and tactical sense. The components are R/D-ed and built. All you have to do is buy and assemble them to suit your business model. All these yrs people have been gloating that Chinese companies bought US companies. What do you think for?

So if you cannot buy the company, then buy its products and make your own devices.

Never think that engineering company who doesn't produce chip is simply an assembling company. You know LG and Samsung were also not making their own chip for their smartphone.

In fact, ZTE is one of one of the companies with biggest patent applications, beating intel, apple, microsoft and ibm.
 
zte is not the whole china. stupid zte deserve to go broke. they even buy simple components like power management and bluetooth chips from the US. they thought buying americans will get them american market access freely with no restrictions like huawei. fools..




you're not one of them. technical people know even supa powah USA rely on critical components made by non americans. technical people also know two chinese companies already added to list of apple's suppliers to supply depth sensing chips for their face id, and is in talk to buy 3d nand from yangtze memory. they also know apple is currently shopping around in china for flexible oled for their future foldable phones.

technicol peepo no:enjoy:
Seem to have hurt your failings(sic).
Added to , in talk , thinking of ...... the crux of the matter is usa said jump and ZTE said how high. People wont touch a iphone if they find chinese components being used in them. Most are MNCs mfd components and thats the reason the much vaunted( in pdf atleast) chinese supply chain turned out to be useless when confronted with reality.
I think the chinese learned that propaganda has its limitations.
 
Seem to have hurt your failings(sic).
Added to , in talk , thinking of ...... the crux of the matter is usa said jump and ZTE said how high. People wont touch a iphone if they find chinese components being used in them. Most are MNCs mfd components and thats the reason the much vaunted( in pdf atleast) chinese supply chain turned out to be useless when confronted with reality.
I think the chinese learned that propaganda has its limitations.

apple is already using components made in china like: microphone, battery, display, touch-control, camera module. they will add more components to the list like memory chip, 3d sensing, etc...

you know jacksh1t. stop commenting on stuff you don't know. lol

BOE is one of display screen suppliers for macbooks, ipads and apple is currently testing their flexible oled for future foldable phone.

o-film is supplying touch screen technology for ipads and iPhone 8 front-facing camera modules. now apple is adding o-film and another chinese startup to supply 3d sensing tech too.

apple is ready to buy 3d NAND chips from yangtze memory when available to kiss china's @ss.

apple is not chinese company. this thread is about china chipping away american sh1t. get your apple sh1t outta here. we don't care..

stay salty forever. it's good for health :D
.
 
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apple is already using components made in china like: microphone, battery, display, touch-control, camera module. they will add more components to the list like memory chip, 3d sensing, etc...

you know jacksh1t. stop commenting on stuff you don't know. lol

BOE is one of display screen suppliers for macbooks, ipads and apple is currently testing their flexible oled for future foldable phone.

o-film is supplying touch screen technology for ipads and iPhone 8 front-facing camera modules. now apple is adding o-film and another chinese startup to supply 3d sensing tech too.

apple is ready to buy 3d NAND chips from yangtze memory when available to kiss china's @ss.

apple is not chinese company. this thread is about china chipping away american sh1t. get your apple sh1t outta here. we don't care..

stay salty forever. it's good for health :D
.

Difficult to talk to "not technical people" such as this Indian false flagger.

Unerducatable, yet they think they somehow strike a nerve with 82 comments like "technical people know."

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