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Comment by magicsmoke | Hacker News Reader

Actually, what's to stop Huawei from just copying and incorporating whatever they need into their IC designs regardless of patents? I can imagine foreign foundaries refusing orders from Huawei to avoid manufacturing IP infringing designs, but are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents?

As an aside to that, how do foundaries know whether their client designs infringe on patents? Is there some sort of automated system that goes through the design files they are sent looking for areas of silicon that may contain infringing IP blocks?

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>are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents?

Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.

SMIC are now rolling out 14nm - that's apparently competitive enough for people to still use Intel CPUs.

There's a very, very big difference between "rolling out 14nm" with unknown yields, performance, etc. Vs Intel's venerable 14nm process.

Intel is Intel, as unhelpful as that statement is. So these guys are starting on 14nm, while others are pushing ahead to 5 and below. Sure it'll work, but I don't find that competitive in an already crowded smartphone market in the next 2 years.

They've been rolling it out since 2016, better wait until their product actually appears.

> Is there some sort of automated system that goes through the design files they are sent looking for areas of silicon that may contain infringing IP blocks?

I'm going to venture a solid guess that no such system exists in America simply because possessing the IP to match potentially infringing IP against would be problematic for the companies it's designed to protect.

Intel: "Hey GlobalFoundries, you're not one of our suppliers but here's the schematic for our latest chip. Please make sure nobody takes it!"

And I can all but GUARANTEE that doesn't exist in China. Unless of course it's to pick up any IP they might have missed when they stole it the first time.

Infringement is detected by display of patented features or potentially reverse engineering relevant portions of an IC. There is no practical way to police infringement using the disparate array of design inputs mapped onto proprietary gate libraries.

Infringement would most likely be detected by reading data sheets and looking for similarities. Armed with that, an IP holder would go through the very expensive reverse engineering process. They're unlikely to do that unless a win in court is likely.

There is no easy way to check for IP infringement here. When the key idea of a design may be 100% lifted illicitly, the schematics may be somehow different, and the mask layout, incomprehensibly different.

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