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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

> In return, the company — once a symbol of China’s progress and engineering know-how — will be allowed to buy the American-made microchips, software and other tools it needs to survive.

Aren't most mobile device SoC/ASICs made by non-US companies like TSMC and Samsung?

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The fabrication of SoCs for mobile is mostly at TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in Korea, but the ownership of the chips is American. TSMC manufactures the die, but it's fair to say that Qualcomm is the one "making" it since they own the IP and do the front and back end design-work. Similarly, you can say Apple makes the iPhone, even though final assembly is done at Foxconn or Wistron.

Complete tangent, but in case someone else gets a chuckle out of it: the word "fabrication" means "creation"... but also serves as a synonym for "falsehood", almost an antonym in some contexts. I'm not aware of many words in English that can mean both a thing and its opposite. "Cleave" means to bind together, or to completely separate... Any language geeks out there know of others? Or what such words are called?

auto-antonyms.

bingo! thanks :)

My feeling is that "lie" and "creation" go together. Similar to "he made that up". Something is a fabrication (in the lie sense) when it's created by the person saying it and not drawn from evidence or observation.

> The fabrication of SoCs for mobile is mostly at TSMC in Taiwan

Given China's attitude towards Taiwan, it might be tempted to acquire TSMC's technology by military force at some point in the future.

Yes, Qualcomm is US, but then there's Samsung at the high end and Allwinner & Mediatek at the mid/low end. ARM is also non-US, and some modem IP is also non-US. So it's not a controlling stake.

Your premise is very narrow. Six or seven of the ten largest semiconductor companies are American. The US has a lot of big companies working in or around the semiconductor market.

Eg - Texas Instruments, Qualcomm + NXP, Apple, Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, Cisco, Xilinx, Analog Devices, GlobalFoundries, Maxim, Microchip Tech + Microsemi, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, Marvell, Broadcom, Micron, nVidia, Teradyne, Cypress, On Semi, Praxair, Skyworks, Ambarella, Cirrus Logic, Diodes Inc, Integrated Device Tech, IPG Photonics, Semtech, Qorvo, Cavium, Mellanox (US-Israeli), Inphi, Monolithic Power, Lumentum

Now you've even got Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon looking into/working on their own chips.

Unless I’m mistaken, your list contains both semiconductor companies with and without fabs.

I think for this discussion semiconductor companies with fabrication facilities are more interesting.

How much fab is still done in the US?

You can start answering that question with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

If fab manufacturing is what mattered, ZTE would have never had a problem in the first place.

Those companies I referenced control a large part of the global technology industry. If you can't access their products or sell to them, you're often going to have a very hard time operating.

I believe almost no Fab manufacturing happens in the US anymore. This is why the article seems a little hyperbolic to me. I understand US companies lead in chip design, but if Asian companies are manufacturing the chips, how long will it take to reverse engineer? To add to this, many engineers working for these American Giants are Asians and can be poached back. Look how it little it took for Chinese manufacturers to produce state of the art smartphones that are "almost" Apple level.

> I believe almost no Fab manufacturing happens in the US anymore.

That's incorrect. The US has four or five dozen fabs. It's one of the largest fab manufacturers globally, along with Taiwan, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. The US is likely to grow its domestic fab manufacturing over the next decade, thanks to the new lower corporate income tax rate and tighter restrictions on IP exportation (those two things lured Broadcom home).

> how long will it take to reverse engineer?

That's where China faces a problem: that only works if you have no plans to integrate further into the global economy.

For the most part, the EU, North America, South America, Australia/NZ, Japan, South Korea, etc. isn't going to buy your stolen semiconductor tech.

If you're going to steal semi tech and use it as your own, at best you can only sell it domestically.

If you mean stolen chip designs, no we're likely not to want to use them ... but there are lots of smart Chinese chip designers doing great stuff - some using on licensed US IP (the ESP chips), others based on licensed Arm IP (I've lost track of who owns that), some home built.

Remember China is not just 1/4 of the world's population, it also has 1/4 of the world's smart people

China is actually slightly less than 1/6 of the world's population.

Almost all of Intel's fabs are in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

> I believe almost no Fab manufacturing happens in the US anymore.

I kinds lost count at least half way though, but this list has about 60-70 US fabs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

how long will it take to reverse engineer?

Long enough that by the time they do, the chips they've ripped are behind the times.

Chips march on a pretty fast cadence, and with billions of transistors they are no small feat to reverse engineer.

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