When I was at embedded world in Nuremberg recently, I ran into Dick Selwood because we arrived together at the press room. He told me it was his last embedded world, since he's retiring, so I wish him well. I just read his piece on the conference , which he opened with a quote from the marvelous Douglas Adams from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a way to convey how big embedded world seems: Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams was at Cambridge University at the same time as me. He and a couple of colleagues formed a comedy trio that went under the name Adams-Smith-Adams that put various shows, including pretty much single-handedly (well, tripled-handedly) writing and performing that year's Footlights Revue. Totally off-topic, but my favorite Douglas Adams story is also set in a place I knew well as a non-car-owning student, the Cambridge train station: This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge. I was a bit early for the train. I went to get myself a newspaper, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I want you to picture the scene. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. In the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. I stared at the newspaper, and took a sip of coffee. In the end I thought nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened, and I took out a cookie for myself. But a moment or two later, he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A moment or two later the train came in, so I stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there's a perfectly ordinary guy who has the same exact story...only he doesn’t have the punch line. Anyway, Dick went on to say big is how embedded world feels, with several halls, and 32,000 visitors. It certainly did feel big and busy to me, too, especially when I had to leave and get through all the halls with my suitcase to get to the Metro station. Embedded is not only automotive and IoT, but it seemed a bit that way this year. To read about what Cadence was showing (yes, automotive mostly) see my post embedded world: Dreaming of Electric Cars . I came home from Germany, and a week later went to SEMICON China. It has several halls and 70,000 visitors. So roughly twice as big. At the press briefing, Ajit Manocha, the CEO of SEMI, said only CES is bigger. Well, Mobile World Congress is bigger too, but it is certainly up there among the biggest conferences in the world. Perhaps more amazing, the Shanghai New International Exhibition Center (which is conveniently right next to the Cadence office) is built as a big triangle with a huge open space in the middle large enough to hold a football game. SEMICON China fills just one side of the exhibition center (plus one hall). So while CES overflows the Las Vegas Convention Center into several hotels, and MWC fills the Barcelona Convention Center, SNIEC has room to hold SEMICON China almost three times over. So if embedded world is really big, SEMICON China is...well, bigger. Like China itself. The US seems big, as the third largest country in the world, but China is over three times the population (but within a couple of percent in area). The semiconductor manufacturing supply chain is very complicated. There are the big names you've heard of, like Applied Materials, ASML, Nikon. There are companies supplying materials like silicon wafers and gases. Eventually, there are companies that supply just something very specialized, ingots of one particular metal for sputtering, or diamond saw blades for splitting up the wafer into die. It is a little like the recent DesignCon, which has everything from million-dollar oscilloscopes to people selling ribbon cables. At SEMICON China, you can talk to ASML about EUV steppers, or several companies who will sell you the abrasive used for CMP, or silane, or any of hundreds of other things used in semiconductor manufacturing. 200mm One trend that is noticeable in China is the importance of non-leading-edge processes and 200mm equipment. It is well known by now that there are 26 fabs under construction in China. There are a few fabs that are on or close to the leading edge, such as the biggest memory fabs (for memory, "go big or go home" is the only way to be financially viable). The joint GLOBALFOUNDRIES/Chengdu fab is 22FDX and presumably will eventually go down to 12FDX. But most of the others are 200mm fabs for non-leading-edge processes. For the Chinese domestic market, and for the Chinese design capabilities outside companies like Huawei and Spreadtrum, that's what's needed. SEMI's graph above shows the trend. 200mm fabs were being decommissioned, but now they are growing again in number (and capacity, some of which comes from expanding existing 200mm fabs). The result is that there is a shortage of 200mm equipment. Until a few years ago, there was no second-hand-market for 200mm equipment, because nobody wanted it. Now there is no market because there is no equipment available. At a presentation during the conference, David Haynes of Lam Research (who mostly do deposition and etch) talked about processing 200mm wafers using 300mm tools, since that is one way to address the shortage of 200mm tools. Memory One of the big things in China is memory. As I wrote in SEMICON China: Is This China's Decade? first Japan, and then Korea built up their semiconductor industry on the back of internationally competitive memory companies. Memory has some big advantages as a way of getting started, since it requires just a handful of designs, and a very limited service aspect to the business. Furthermore, since there may be essentially just one design running at any time in the fab, the process learning is very fast compared to foundry, which is the other extreme. When I was at VLSI Technology, our corporate counsel came from Micron. He said he couldn't believe the difference: Micron put one or two designs into production per year, we put one or two designs into production most days. There was a session on the Chinese memory market, but unfortunately, it was one of the few sessions that wasn't simultaneously translated. In Semiconductor Rankings: Thanks for the Memory I talked about the four big memory projects: YMTC is building a 3D NAND flash fab at Wuhan Donghu New Technology Development Zone XMC was planning on capitalizing on the disruption caused by 3D NAND flash but now it is switching to NOR Innotron is building a fab for DRAM focused on mobile with LPDDR4 (low power). JHICC is building a fab for DRAM for consumer electronics in Fujian I think that the most significant of these is the Innotron mobile DRAM fab. Vivo, Oppo, and OnePlus are mobile brands that are unknown in the West. But they are all owned by one company BBK. Grouped together, they are the second biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world behind Samsung, and ahead of Apple (in unit shipments, nobody can touch Apple for profits). Historically, they've not been grouped together for some reason, so they came out of nowhere not that long ago to take up residence in the lower rungs of the top 10. But even though they don't (I think) sell outside China, certainly not outside Asia, they sell more phones worldwide than anyone except Samsung. The reason that is significant is that they presumably contain a lot of low-power mobile DRAM. With pressure from the Chinese government for local semiconductor content, if Innotron can get their fab to be competitive in terms of product performance, power, and so on, it will disrupt this part of the market. That's not a trivial "if" though. The costs might still be out of line if yield is not competitive with the big DRAM guys, but they will price competitively and assume they will get yield up with volume. Also big and Chinese are Huawei and Xiaomi, who would also be able to use domestic DRAM if it is competitive. Of course, there is a lot of NAND flash in most smartphones, too. So YMTC's 3D NAND fab could be another important entrant into the market, but I think that is on a longer time frame. I am by no means a memory manufacturing expert, but I think that 3D NAND takes a level of precision above DRAM simple because there are so many layers to be processed, and everything has to go perfectly. DRAM has a lot fewer process steps since it is 2D (and finding a 3D replacement for DRAM is a topic for another day, an issue everyone faces, not just China). There is also a major technical hurdle with 3D NAND, the high-aspect-ratio etch. When all the layers are formed, eventually long narrow holes need to be etched down through the whole stack. This seems to be the most limiting factor to how many layers can be stacked vertically. Aspect ratios of 40:1 are used, but 70:1 or 80:1 might be required for 96- or 128-layer designs, which is beyond the current equipment capabilities. It's hard to get the ions down to the bottom of that hole with enough energy to do any more etching. To give you an idea of how extreme this is, the Burg Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai is 2,700' high. If it had an 80:1 aspect ration, that would mean that the base would be just 34' on each side. It would be roughly the size of a 1,000 square foot house...but with a lot of stories! Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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