General statistics
List of Youtube channels
Youtube commenter search
Distinguished comments
About
shazmosushi
Asianometry
comments
Comments by "shazmosushi" (@shazmosushi) on "Hongxin: China’s Billion Dollar Semiconductor Failure" video.
Sounds like you're back to your proper microphone setup. The recording quality is much improved over your recent videos!
38
It's worth noting the China-based semiconductor foundries like SMIC and HSMC were trying to build cutting edge 7 nanometer semiconductor node leveraging extreme ultraviolet techniques. For those who don't follow the chip making industry at all, it's worth noting the former world leading chip maker from Silicon Valley called Intel has been struggling for the better part of a decade and is no longer on the cutting edge. Now, Intel has $25 billion US dollars in cash on hand. If getting to a cutting edge process node was as simple as poaching a few hundred TSMC engineers for 2.5 times the salary for 5 years then surely Intel could do it? They could pay 750 TSMC engineers each $250,000/year to move to the US for 5 years to try and leapfrog TSMC, and that would still be $1 billion in salary (4% of their cash on hand). Admittedly building a new fab would cost another $10 billion by itself, but it would still be a bargain if it got Intel back into the lead (which they held for most of their existence).
18
Your video refers to SMIC and HSMC, who are working on cutting edge semiconductor fabs used to make CPUs and GPUs. I'm not an electrical engineer. Aren't these not the only type of semiconductor fabrication plants that exist? But there are other classes of silicon chips such as NAND flash memory (used in USB sticks and SD cards etc) and RAM memory modules (DRAMs). I believe these electronic components tend to be more of a fungible commodity, and are generally of lower value (but still advanced manufacturing). I may be wrong on this, but aren't China's semiconductor fab facilities for flash memory and RAM already internationally competitive (from a value for money perspective)? A quick Google search found Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC) and ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc (CXMT). A lot of the coverage is from Chinese state-backed propaganda sources like Caixin Global and South China Morning Post, and I haven't looked into these companies further yet, but they may be producing internationally competitive chips rather than merely being state-subsidized zombie companies for the government of China's never ending corruption tinged attempts to move up the electronics manufacturing value chain.
10
If you're looking for future topics, you should consider making a video about The Great Firewall of China. I consider it one of the most dangerous technologies ever invented.
4
@Asianometry If the topic doesn't pique your interest then don't worry about it. Life is too short to spend your free time on things you aren't interested in. Also unlike perhaps semiconductor fabrication, I have enough background to deeply research and understand the technology aspects of the Great Firewall / "Golden Shield Project" myself (though less so about the Chinese government political / historical aspects, which are also important). (Side note: sorry about recent spam in this comment section -- hopefully it might helps with the YouTube algorithm though!)
2
@Asianometry Oh, if that's the issue I would suggest almost approaching it like a university lecture: whenever talking about complex concepts eg, the TCP/IP stack, VPNs etc you can just show the textbook diagram (but presumably without the textual dot points, because that's not your style). I wouldn't worry too much if the diagram is too complex for the audience. If showing the diagrams is not covered by fair use copyright, places like Wikimedia Commons should have freely licensed diagrams.
1