Beijing's Made in China drive fueled by Washington's export crackdowns:
Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.
Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others.
EDA is an umbrella term for software, hardware, and services essential to the planning, design, and production of chips. While integrated circuits were largely designed by hand decades ago, chips became so complex that computer-aided design and automation was unavoidable, generally speaking.
Huawei's EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirmed by media in China. The Register reached out to Huawei's PR team for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back.
Today, the EDA market is largely controlled by three companies: California-based Synopsys and Cadence, as well as Germany's Siemens. According to the industry watchers at TrendForce, these three companies account for roughly 75 percent of the EDA market. And this poses a problem for Chinese chipmakers and foundries, which have steadily found themselves cut off from these tools.
Synopsys and Cadence's EDA tech is already subject to several of these export controls, which were stiffened by the US Commerce Department last summer to include state-of-the-art gate-all-around (GAA) transistors.
Huawei's focus on EDA software for 14nm and larger chips reflects the current state of China's semiconductor industry. State-backed foundry operator SMIC currently possesses the ability to produce 14nm chips at scale, although there have been some reports the company has had success developing a 7nm process node.
To put that in perspective, TSMC and Samsung are currently ramping up production of 3nm process tech, while Intel has said it will have a 2nm chip in production by late next year. This puts China's semiconductor industry two to three generations behind that of Taiwan, South Korea, and the US.
So, 14nm isn't cutting edge, though it's also not useless.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday March 27 2023, @02:28PM (1 child)
I understand TSMC is using Siemens EDA mostly.
Siemens EDA is originally Mentor Graphics, interesting history of absorbing technologies, some of them originally free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_EDA [wikipedia.org]
Some fresh eco numbers: https://min.news/en/economy/2df9267931dab562f10ba8df9ca2d056.html [min.news]
Obviously, those sanctions do not work properly. The Chinese systematically do their own too fast. More sanctions are necessary.
Most critical situation harming global dominance will happen when EDA tools suddenly become FOSS again, that's totally unacceptable for Bureau of Industry and Security of U.S. Department of Commerce!
Wanna tea?
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Monday March 27 2023, @10:18PM
Yeah we use Electra at work for electrical design, it was made by Radica who seemed a small passionate outfit in Malaysia. They were bought out by Siemens.
https://radicasoftware.com/blog/siemens-acquires-radica-software [radicasoftware.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crahman on Monday March 27 2023, @05:21PM (1 child)
Now we're safe from their industrial development.
Competition was tough, and it's nice if we can just relax and enjoy being the best.
It's not like they'll just replace the missing steps in their industrial base and our manufacturers will become extinct. Sure, we'll need to outcompete them but we're the best.
All we have to do is isolate ourselves with sanctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2023, @09:48AM
With all the technical documentation written in Chinese, with only machine translations to English available.
Maybe a funny read if one wasn't concerned with accuracy and just reading for the amusement from incidental humor in translation misinterpretations.
____________________
The water served in this restaurant has been personally passed by the chef.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2023, @07:30PM
They made it from scratch for sure.