It's not just about profitability but rather about how many players are out there.
Fewer players, fewer customers and much lower barrier to entry means more mobility which means employees have the ability to demand more.
Hardware also requires more experience and if we are honest more education to get into, there is some weird state of fields which on one hand require so much to enter but on the other pay quite below what one would expect and hardware design is just one of them.
No one has the balls to report that it's more than just a common occurrence that many Chinese employees engage in IP theft casually. And this plays a huge role in gaining competitive advantage for the Chinese companies benefiting off IP theft, needless to say.
There are ample real world reports of such occurrences, even.
You can at least see a difference from casually downloading pirated Cadence soft from Chinese FTPs =D.
But saying this, you think would anybody there decide to pay $1M just to order few hundred Cadence licenses (and this is on the low end,) when they can not to with zero consequences?
This is more than the total capital of most semiconductor companies there.
I'd say people doing that have different aims. They "grew out" of pirated Cadence, and now want more serious tools like ones custom made Cadence makes for top tier clients like Intel, Apple, NVidia, and AMD.
It comes down to the old managerial quandary of "Do we buy-built? It'll be cheaper and faster, but keeps us dependent on others" or "Do we build our own? It'll be slower and more expensive, but we won't be dependent on others, and we may be able to compete and recoup our expenses."
Most managers prefer to buy-built wherever they can. It's more efficient. But they are happy to 'Build our own" whenever forced to, as they will get the advantages further down the track.
The US complains that China doesn't buy enough US exports from them, but bans the Chinese from buying the stuff that they actually want. That's short-term thinking.
China would be quite happy to keep buying cheap US semiconductors, US semiconductor companies would be very happy selling billions of dollars worth of chips to China. WIN-WIN.
China is now forced to 'Build Their Own'. They will do that. Their fabs will be newer. They will cover their own requirements first, then compete with the US chip manufacturers who previously held a monopoly.
And the net result? US semiconductor chip manufacturing will go the way of US auto manufacturing, US textile manufacturing, US paper manufacturing, US steel manufacturing, etc.
I would expect there would be better ROI in funding the development of open source EDA tools. This is already ongoing and the current trade conflict will likely accelerate it.
>Veteran engineers and high-level executives are leaving top U.S. chip design toolmakers for Chinese rivals as Beijing looks to break America's near monopoly on this key segment of the semiconductor industry.
Are they of Chinese descent? It sounds dubious that a lot of engineers leave to work in Chinese startups.
> Are they of Chinese descent? It sounds dubious that a lot of engineers leave to work in Chinese startups.
Out of EDA companies that are in US, only Synopsys, and MG comes to mind.
MG is now Siemens, and they are now full tiers behind Synopsys, and Cadence, after their sale.
So no wonder of the exodus.
I heard a saying "EDA industry is much like CAD software, but worse." People working on top tier EDAs need to be heads above their peers academically, know both tons of rarely going together disciplines like computer science, and process engineering, but they are also very poorly remunerated for their outstanding level of knowledge because the industry is so tiny.
And yes, I never saw a shortage of Western engineers working in China, with them often calling themselves "labour market refugees."
It feels the West is set on to effectively exterminating whatever serious industries it has left, with loss of semiconductor manufacturing being the most glaring, and extreme example.
Some chips these days simply don't have datasheets in English.
When the last civilian industry of a nation fails, it will suddenly become evident why so much money has been spent on maintaining a powerful military. If you can’t make something yourself you make an excuse to invade someone who can make it.
I would be interested in hearing more about this. Living in Japan or South Korea can be a very rough transition for some (I've witnessed my fair share of colleagues exiting Japan after only a few months). Mainland China would present many of the same challenges with the addition of living under an autocratic regime.
I would be interested in living in a version of the U.S. where citizens recognize autocracy by the behavior, instead of depending on their television to inform them.
Lots of people on HN say, whenever the topic comes up, that they don't care about politics and don't want to hear about it. In China, you can have that!
> Mainland China would present many of the same challenges with the addition of living under an autocratic regime.
And with China now sliding back into madness of seventies again, I see lots, and lots of people leaving,... but they do not go back to the US, or West in general.
Out of all places, some went to Vietnam, some, to Taiwan, some try their luck in places which were never before associated with electronics industry. One rather serious company of a person I know quite well, whose success was entirely on it being in China, is now relocating to Singapore.
Having lived in China and visited Japan on a number of occasion, my feeling is that it would be more difficult to live in Japan than in China as a Westerner.
I think that many people overestimate the impact of living under China's "autocratic regime" has on daily life. Especially if you're a Westerner there is no difference.
I have always felt that Japanese culture and society were more difficult to adapt to. China is much less rigid.
Obviously it's still a big cultural and linguistic change.
Be dismissive all you want but you give an example that is quite irrelevant in daily life, which is my point.
If you're into political activism, sure China is not the place for you to move to. But look at the daily life of a typical American and the daily life of a typical Chinese and they will be boringly similar.
As an Indian, it's one thing to curse a political leader in the comfort of your home. Totally a different thing to take to political activism on the streets.
In any country, barring dire situations, most people just want to wake up every morning and go do their jobs to put food on the table.
In India, most tech people don't even vote, let alone indulge in active political causes. Most of those people will do fine anywhere.
Are people working in American startups from american descent? Im sure there are thousands of Indian, Pakistani or other country people employed right now, so do you think they would be loyal to US startups?
I would assume more loyal than to Chinese startups. As far as I understand China is not a very immigrant friendly country.
"Successful applicants are required to renounce any foreign nationalities they have.[46] Naturalization is exceptionally rare in mainland China; there were only 1,448 naturalized persons reported in the 2010 census[47] out of the country's total population of 1.34 billion.[48] "
That programme offers one-off subsidies, ranging from 800,000 yuan (US$113,488) to 1.5 million yuan, in addition to welfare packages covering family members, rental allowances and medical care. More than 96 per cent of the talents recruited under the Peacock Plan holds a doctorate, and 94 per cent are Chinese returnees.
Shenzhen has also pledged to extend tax breaks to top overseas and local talent, which could be as low as 15 per cent of a person’s annual income compared with as high as 45 per cent previously, under China’s progressive taxation system.
To date, the city has been helping develop at least 10 laboratories in collaboration with Nobel laureates involved in natural sciences. Nine of these have been completed as of June this year.
Shenzhen’s hi-tech companies are also sparing no efforts in wooing talent with high pay. Last month, Huawei announced plans to lure gifted new recruits with “top-notch” salaries.
Some western countries are approaching thresholds like 45% for specialist income. For example in the UK after recent changes to IR35, an engineer will likely have to pay about 54% of tax assuming he or she gets paid market rates and the client will declare them to be deemed employees to be safe.
If China could match western rates, but added tax exemptions on top, plus located the sites somewhere warm with good amenities, they could attract good people without even trying much.
I have been thinking of maybe moving from western Europe to Singapore or a Shenzhen. Just to be a bit closer to the Asian side of my family.
A developer job in either Singapore and China tier 1 cities seems to allow for a middle class to high middle class life style,
about the same life style I have here in Europe.
The problem is being paid in a currency that's worthless outside of China and can't be converted back to anything serious. It's fine for Chinese expatriates who went abroad for better money, but I can't see the rest being too interested.
Duh, of course CNY is easily traded to other currencies on the Forex markets, China's starving for reserves.
But they're actively preventing money from getting _out_ of China, in particular said reserves. If you're making money in China, it's going to stay in China until you jump through a lot of hoops.
I work in China. I wire money out of China on a regular basis to my home account in Canada. Have to give copies of tax forms and a copy of my contract to the bank, but that's about it. Other than that, it's the same as wiring money from Canada to any other country. There is a limit each year, but I've never been able to hit it. And a bunch of my foreign colleagues have half of their salary automatically deposited in USD accounts in their home country. Not me, but the point is that there are options.
Gulf has way more harsher visa conditions, with no citizenship path and yet Indians flock to the Gulf.
It is crazy to think that people won't sell their services for money, because of loyalty or whatever. For the common man, their own career is what they care about. And for a good reason, especially in a country where every wants to hoard money at any cost- No one's going to miss out on an opportunity of this kind.
> As far as I understand China is not a very immigrant friendly country.
China is very flexible.
There may be difficulties in getting citizenship (which is another issue, really), but for work visas to foreign talents, which are sponsored by local companies, this is simply a matter of applying in order to get one.
A lot of misconceptions and FUD here. And I write that as someone who spent 3 years living in China and working for a JV.
If you want to emigrate there permanently this may be different but realistically this is not the topic of this discussion, which is more about highly educated people finding opportunities in China.
Extremely weird question. We live in a competitive global market, people can and will move countries for better opportunities.
USA used to just receive talent as it was way richer that any other country. That times are over now. I understand that it will take some time for Americans and many people in other for countries to accept this new reality, thou.
It was also (and arguably still is) way freer that any other country. In terms of freedom of religion, political, and economic freedoms. Its individualist culture is way more conducive to accepting differences, and being an immigrant nation from the start, making it your new home is much more natural.
One country is liberal and democratic, the other one currently keeps an ethnic minority in reeducation camps, due to cultural non-conformance. In one country the current leader's power to change things has been significantly limited, while 90% of the mass media has been downright scornful about him, and the judiciary refusing to do everything he wants, in the other the leader can cancel IPOs, put CEOs in prison for decades for disrespect.
I.e. your level of legal protection is not comparable between these two countries.
So we are indeed in a global competitive job market, but not all presumed competitors are actually competitive.
It is shocking that people still talk about America as this place with amazing freedom. That has simply not been true in a long time. Especially looking at the disaster that is American democracy today, it is hard to grasp how people can still cling to this idea.
Among all developed countries I have visited and lived in America has always felt most like a police state to me. Cops are aggressive, overzealous and tend to show zero tolerance. In general anybody with some authority are kind of scary in the US. Just look at immigration in the US. You will be hard pressed to find immigration in other developed countries behaving in this manner.
What I notice most interacting with American at authorities are all the threats. Pretty much any document you sign elaborate quite a lot on the dire consequences of filling it out wrong.
And as one can see online and I have experience myself, the Us is a country in perpetual paranoia. Cops get called all the time for nothing. And they abide. There is not any issue small enough for them to not show up. And they are not nice. They act like police state police. You can look at videos online of police arrests and dealing with different situations. American police tend to escalate and be very brutal. Slamming people to the ground. Beating them up. Pointing guns and yelling. Handcuffing even small kids. A ridiculous practice seen from the perspective of other actually free countries.
No, the US is an embarrassment to liberal democracy. It makes the rest of us living in democracies look bad.
>It is shocking that people still talk about America as this place with amazing freedom.
Find me a country with anything comparable to the First Amendment's current absolutist interpretation. In any other country you would find speech regulations and exceptions to constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech rights.
Cops are indeed more nervous in the US, but that is because the US is unique in the world with citizenry having a right to bear arms (and pretty serious arms at that, like easily concealable handguns or the .50 cal, automatic assault rifles if you are rich). Nowadays it's fashionable to underestimate the importance of that right, but armed citizenry is a very important factor, a deterrent in the minds of those who would dare to attempt to take the rights away. What is happening right now in Belarus likely wouldn't have happened if the citizenry had been armed, because using armed forces against your own people, starting a civil war, will look like a risky proposition even to a strongmen.
You are focusing on the behavior of the police, and there are indeed issues. Whatever cops do right now happens because American public lacks sufficient understanding of the issues, not because the country is an authoritarian police state. But the police behavior isn't the whole picture. There is also a legal system, the free press, and an uncensored internet access. While police may be rough, your chances of getting unfairly convicted are actually pretty low, provided you have money of course.
>other actually free countries.
I assume you are talking about western European countries with all kinds of limitations on speech and expression, and disarmed populace. To each their own, but I would not consider them freer than the US. And I'm saying that as someone who grew up in an authoritarian unfree country.
> In any other country you would find speech regulations and exceptions to constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech rights.
Copyright is draconian in the USA and has imposed its model worldwide. It has been used to silence even critics to religion organizations like Scientology.
USA has more freedom to express racist sentimens than other Western countries. And companies are allowed to use 'freedom of expression' with money to buy political favors, known as corruption in many other countries.
The USA has many positive things to offer, but also many flaws that did not fix while it was the dominant power.
> What is happening right now in Belarus likely wouldn't have happened if the citizenry had been armed
As you can see from nearby Poland, this just means that you have to get the armed rightwing section of the populace on board first.
I think the thing to learn from is Amartya Sen's "capability" model: how well does the theoretical freedom to do X and Y match up to the practical ability to achieve it? For many people, the lack of an economic safety net is a far more immediate and pressing problem than a theoretical government coup.
Wake up. With a president actively trying to overturn election outcome? Attacking the very system that puts him in power 4 years ago? No, the world is watching, and they are not stupid.
He's closer than you'd think. The US constitution gives state legislatures virtually unchecked authority to choose their own electors regardless of what state laws or courts say, without needing any other justification (eg. no evidence or even claims of fraud required).
Some, if not all, of the legislatures of PA, MI, GA, and WI will be sending their own GOP electors.
Those electors arguably take precedence over electors chosen by other legal processes, like democratic votes, according to the US Constitution. Because this issue does not concern state laws (or fraud allegations) whatsoever, the matter will go directly to federal courts.
Looking past the smoke screen of poorly supported fraud allegations and popular reporting's misdirected focus on the obvious lack of merit of said allegations, last night's impromptu PA legislative hearing was a major turning point in this situation.
I don’t know about USA, but many many Germans went there to work in rising automotive sector. The growth opportunities are insane while building future without internal combustion engines.
"many many"... I doubt that, but if so, that would be interesting reading. Do you have any numbers and examples? I know some of BMW's early electric car team went to China, after BMW stopped the development. But anyone else?
Dictatorship aside, the problem with Chinese companies is the glass ceiling. It is pretty much impossible to make a career there as foreigner. Very much unlike the US and EU.
No press source. Students from the same study year gladly stayed on China after some graduate programs. They weren’t Chinese. I don’t think they were the single ones. Who wants to sit in dying Europe? No innovation, no money for innovation. No will for it either.
I am pretty sure, you have zero chance as foreigner to make great career in EU. Though EU is big and diverse. About USA I don’t know. First thing I see is a big problem with visa.
China does not need random US engineers. It needs a comparatively small pool of people who have the specific know how that China currently lacks and it can probably afford to pay them some large multiple over the US market rate. Why would a massive career and financial boost not be enough to sway a significant fraction of people driven enough to become A-players in their field in the first place, especially if China is clever about how it rolls out the red carpet for them and their families?
The article mentions "China based employees [of existing EDA companies]", so by the sounds of it they found the limited set of people who've already relocated and made them a better (or non-refusable?) offer.
Expatriates represent less than 1% of people, and market analysts categorize movement between countries into “inbound countries” and “outbound countries”.
The USA offers higher quality of life and has a cosmopolitan, multicultural society. I live in the Netherlands, where I enjoy an extremely high quality of life, get access to diverse cultural programs, and get to meet interesting individuals from every corner of the earth who have come to pursue art, technology, and science here. Dutch tech salaries aren't the highest, but I'm living a great life. Dutch and American societies are open-minded and immigrant-oriented: both readily and easily assimilate millions of immigrants.
During uni, I did an exchange study in Beijing and Shanghai. I'm open to working a short gig in China, but I would never settle down there. Chinese cities have thin veneers of modernity and glitz, but they are polluted, offer poor quality of life, and—aside from small expat circles—are monocultural from a global viewpoint. I am thoroughly convinced that China lacks the West's ability to draw, retain, and assimilate foreign talent en masse.
I completely agree, that's why I emigrated to Sweden (not so different that the Netherlands) instead of the USA. But many people gives high value to money and high status.
> China lacks the West's ability to draw, retain, and assimilate foreign talent en masse
That is probably true for now. I have seen the USA loosing that appeal, China may gain it. Hong Kong is going to be a test bed on China capacity to keep foreigners in the country as the region is already diverse.
China lacked the money to be multicultural, people was not willing to move to a poor country. That may change and Western democracies need to stop thinking that are the best in the world and work more to improve education, health care, inequality reduction and quality of life if we do not want to be surpassed in the future.
People move to many countries but China is not one of them. Those of Chinese descent are the one exception in Chinese immigration.
If non-Chinese started moving to China in large numbers this would be a notable change, and the OP’s question makes sense.
“ In 2016, China issued 1,576 permanent residency cards. This was more than double what it had issued the previous year, but still roughly 750 times lower than the United States’ 1.2 million.[1]”
“ The only significant immigration to China has been by the Overseas Chinese, who in the years since 1949 have been offered various enticements to return to their homeland. Several million may have done so since 1949. The largest influx came in 1978–79, when about 160,000 to 250,000 ethnic Chinese refugees fled Vietnam for southern China, as relations between the two countries worsened. Many of these refugees were settled in state farms on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.”
PR is for immigration and China isn’t an immigrant country.
I agree however not a lot westerner immigrated China in masses. I don’t think you would live a normal life there without knowing Chinese, it will be painful. The immigration policy is mostly nonexisten, which by itself says a lot about the government's attitude towards foreigners in general.
On the other hand, China could be attractive place to gain experience with, it is vast complex and completely different from the West.
Well, just to lay out the facts. The soon to be past administration makes the rhetoric so hostile that immigration to US becomes substantially harder and less attractive.
It is hard to not feel that aliens, especially those who work in tech, are unwanted and targeted according to the administration's agenda.
If engineers are underpaid then why would anyone wonder they go to someone offering better terms? You won't feed your family and fulfil your dreams with patriotism.
Depends how hard the US will enforce the restrictions.
A group breaking out of ASML would still need a company, is that company going to be in the EU, Japan, US?, if so, restrictions still apply.
I'm not sure people will like moving to China to work on chip tech and possibly end up on US lists.
Then there's the problem of the whole manufacturing and software tech that is likely closely guarded by ASML, and the massive capital investments to actually get anything done.
A company in Europe is still subject to US pressure on their own government, even if the company itself doesn't do business in the US.
The US prevented ASML from selling their EUV machines in China by pressuring the Dutch government not to renew ASML's export license, presumably by threatening more than just ASML's access to American suppliers and customers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-usa-china-in...
Several things make this potentially interesting. The lasers that hit the droplets of tin in ASML's EUV machines come from the US. On the other hand, just who is going to be buying EUV machines in the future? Global Foundries has dropped out of the game of cutting edge logic, and Intel shows every sign of never being able to move past their 14 nm node. Their 10 nm node is all 193 nm UV, they're only adopting EUV for their 7 nm node, which is now also failing to deliver the goods.
Samsung and TSMC can expand only so fast. Are their other types of chips which are using EUV, or are anticipated to use it in the future, like memory?
In the end who pays more wins. If China will offer better terms to key workers, then why they wouldn't go for it? I remember that Soviets built entire cities just for engineers all stocked with top food, entertainment and so on. China has resources to meet engineers' wildest dreams. What the West could do about it, confiscate passports?
in Crimea, organizing counter BML protests, funding parler, paying off high elected US officials, sending people to space station, building second Nord Stream line to Germany, the list goes on and on. Russia didnt go away just because USSR fell.
I meant for all their 'investments' in smart people, where is their technology, also where are those people now that they can actually leave the country?
I am aware Russia is still around and needs to be dealt with...
I grew up in a communist country and have a deep dislike for Russia to put it mildly
Keep in mind that the Chinese benefited from a US policy designed to help due to US interest in sidelining the USSR.
That help is gradually being replaced with the hostility reserved before for the USSR.
So, while China may have power to attract people* the US can do a lot more to limit/sideline China.
*doubtful though as people will need to live under a dictatorship.
This is ignoring what damage a bad/incompetent leader can do to China, one like Stalin since Xi is essentially removing all checks and limits of power.
Not a hardware engineer, but I've dabbled a bit with very basic CPU design using an open source Verilog compiler and simulator (specifically, Icarus Verilog). Just out of curiosity, what do proprietary tools in this space offer that open source ones don't?
Support is a non-trivial benefit when mistakes or delays cost money. The feature set of proprietary EDA is huge, and the place & route optimisers have been tuned for years.
Sure, it costs $250k for a Synopsys license with the full suite of tools; it also costs far more than that to have to redo a mask set, lose your slot in the fab's calendar, etc.
I work in the industry but don't have a perfect understanding of everything, hopefully someone will correct any mistakes in my explanation.
So Icarus Verilog can only be used for simulation, you will never produce a physical chip using (only) this tool.
I guess I'll quickly start with the end goal. Assuming you don't have your own fab and want to get something manufactured by one of the fabs, you'll most likely send them a GDS file[0]. It's basically a file that contains coordinates for a bunch of rectangles and their layer which define how the mask [1] should look like.
How do you go from verilog to a GDS file? Well it's a pretty long process, none of the steps can be done with Icarus Verilog:
1. Synthesis, this will synthesize (coming from the software world, I guess you could call this "compile") your verilog into standard cells(imagine AND/NOT/OR gates) and how they are connected.
* These standard cells come from a PDK[2](process design kit) which will be supplied to you by your semiconductor fab. I think if you wanted to break into the industry, supporting PDKs will be a pain. Allegedly there is OpenAccess[3] which is meant to allow for a "standard" way of developing these PDK's, but I'm not convinced.
2. Placement, your chip is a rectangle of a certain size (you decide the size, the bigger, the more expensive it'll be since wafters are fixed size) and it needs to fit all those standard cells. A tool will figure out how to optimally place them. There are certain rules it needs to follow defined by your PDK.
3. Routing, you've placed the cells on your chip, but they aren't connected. A tool will find an optimal?(maybe?) solution on how to connect the standard cells so that it matches the netlist generated in step 1. This pretty much gets you the GDS.
3.a. After everything has been routed, you can extract the physical properties from the layout and resimulate everything with the "real" design. When you were simulating with icarus verilog, it was just checking that the logic is sound. It didn't have any of the real world delays, with the extractd netlist, you can simulate it with the delays. I'm pretty sure Icarus Verilog would support this, I think the delays are just implemented with "`delay X" statements, but I might be wrong.
Now this primarily deals with the "digital" part of the chip. Now I'm a bit unsure about this part, but I'm pretty sure you can't just make a "digital" (i.e verilog) only chip. I'm assuming at a bare minimum any product now days will have some ESD protection which will require at least a bit of custom.
For the analogue part of the chip, it's completely separate form Icarus Verilog. Analog designers will be manually placing transistors to create circuits for the chip. The PDK will define how the transistors behave under different voltages/temperatures/process corners[4]. They will then simulate their circuit to see if it works. To go from the circuit they designed to the GDS, someone (a person) will go through the circuit and manually layout their circuit. There are tools that check that the manual layout process matches the schematic/circuit (LVS – layout vs schematic). There are a bunch of design rules that the fab will specify (DRC, design rule checks) that the layout needs to meet, there are tools which will check those for you. Basically, a bunch of tools and licenses you need to pay these vendors for.
Normally someone will pull in the synthesized digital into the analogue layout to create the final GDS before it’s sent to the fab.
I hope that gives you a peek into what’s involved in making these chips from a tools perspective. These EDA tool licenses are almost all token based and use FlexLm[5]. You're paying per instance of the tool running. Most of the simulations run in parallel and take multiple tokens. The licensing costs for these things go into multi-millions for any decently sized semi-conductor company.
Apologizes in advance for any inaccuracies or any omissions. There's definitely a lot more stuff involved in the process, but the comment was getting really long already.
notes: I've used verilog everywhere, but it might as well be VHDL or any other HDL.
They offer productivity. Commercial tools have simulation speed and a half decent visual debugger for example. The bar is not that high, but Icarus is behind in these two areas
It makes sense in that software is more profitable, but a lot of employers who do this (big techs) are not really cash strapped or sensitive for cost.
It is so much much harder to find great HW compiler engineers with deep toolchain knowledge than another leetcode SWE. Seems a serious blindspot.
Fewer players, fewer customers and much lower barrier to entry means more mobility which means employees have the ability to demand more.
Hardware also requires more experience and if we are honest more education to get into, there is some weird state of fields which on one hand require so much to enter but on the other pay quite below what one would expect and hardware design is just one of them.
There are ample real world reports of such occurrences, even.
But saying this, you think would anybody there decide to pay $1M just to order few hundred Cadence licenses (and this is on the low end,) when they can not to with zero consequences?
This is more than the total capital of most semiconductor companies there.
I'd say people doing that have different aims. They "grew out" of pirated Cadence, and now want more serious tools like ones custom made Cadence makes for top tier clients like Intel, Apple, NVidia, and AMD.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-az/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-...
Just take a look at the horrible state of the Design Automation Conference over the past 10 years.
Most managers prefer to buy-built wherever they can. It's more efficient. But they are happy to 'Build our own" whenever forced to, as they will get the advantages further down the track.
The US complains that China doesn't buy enough US exports from them, but bans the Chinese from buying the stuff that they actually want. That's short-term thinking.
China would be quite happy to keep buying cheap US semiconductors, US semiconductor companies would be very happy selling billions of dollars worth of chips to China. WIN-WIN.
China is now forced to 'Build Their Own'. They will do that. Their fabs will be newer. They will cover their own requirements first, then compete with the US chip manufacturers who previously held a monopoly.
And the net result? US semiconductor chip manufacturing will go the way of US auto manufacturing, US textile manufacturing, US paper manufacturing, US steel manufacturing, etc.
Are they of Chinese descent? It sounds dubious that a lot of engineers leave to work in Chinese startups.
Out of EDA companies that are in US, only Synopsys, and MG comes to mind.
MG is now Siemens, and they are now full tiers behind Synopsys, and Cadence, after their sale.
So no wonder of the exodus.
I heard a saying "EDA industry is much like CAD software, but worse." People working on top tier EDAs need to be heads above their peers academically, know both tons of rarely going together disciplines like computer science, and process engineering, but they are also very poorly remunerated for their outstanding level of knowledge because the industry is so tiny.
And yes, I never saw a shortage of Western engineers working in China, with them often calling themselves "labour market refugees."
It feels the West is set on to effectively exterminating whatever serious industries it has left, with loss of semiconductor manufacturing being the most glaring, and extreme example.
Some chips these days simply don't have datasheets in English.
> The West is set on to effectively exterminating whatever serious industries they have left
.. this is hardly deliberate. "The West" is not a single actor with a single intent.
Is there a Chinese website/repository similar to wikichip?
And with China now sliding back into madness of seventies again, I see lots, and lots of people leaving,... but they do not go back to the US, or West in general.
Out of all places, some went to Vietnam, some, to Taiwan, some try their luck in places which were never before associated with electronics industry. One rather serious company of a person I know quite well, whose success was entirely on it being in China, is now relocating to Singapore.
I think that many people overestimate the impact of living under China's "autocratic regime" has on daily life. Especially if you're a Westerner there is no difference.
I have always felt that Japanese culture and society were more difficult to adapt to. China is much less rigid.
Obviously it's still a big cultural and linguistic change.
You can stand in front of the White House and yell "Down with Donald Trump!", and you will not be punished.
Equally, you can also stand in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and yell "Down with Donald Trump!", and you will not be punished.
Obviously it's still a big cultural and linguistic change.
If you're into political activism, sure China is not the place for you to move to. But look at the daily life of a typical American and the daily life of a typical Chinese and they will be boringly similar.
In any country, barring dire situations, most people just want to wake up every morning and go do their jobs to put food on the table.
In India, most tech people don't even vote, let alone indulge in active political causes. Most of those people will do fine anywhere.
"Successful applicants are required to renounce any foreign nationalities they have.[46] Naturalization is exceptionally rare in mainland China; there were only 1,448 naturalized persons reported in the 2010 census[47] out of the country's total population of 1.34 billion.[48] "
That programme offers one-off subsidies, ranging from 800,000 yuan (US$113,488) to 1.5 million yuan, in addition to welfare packages covering family members, rental allowances and medical care. More than 96 per cent of the talents recruited under the Peacock Plan holds a doctorate, and 94 per cent are Chinese returnees.
Shenzhen has also pledged to extend tax breaks to top overseas and local talent, which could be as low as 15 per cent of a person’s annual income compared with as high as 45 per cent previously, under China’s progressive taxation system.
To date, the city has been helping develop at least 10 laboratories in collaboration with Nobel laureates involved in natural sciences. Nine of these have been completed as of June this year.
Shenzhen’s hi-tech companies are also sparing no efforts in wooing talent with high pay. Last month, Huawei announced plans to lure gifted new recruits with “top-notch” salaries.
But they're actively preventing money from getting _out_ of China, in particular said reserves. If you're making money in China, it's going to stay in China until you jump through a lot of hoops.
Out of 500k green cards every year, only 15k are for eb1,2,3 employment based immigration, with country of birth based limitations on top!
Gulf has way more harsher visa conditions, with no citizenship path and yet Indians flock to the Gulf.
It is crazy to think that people won't sell their services for money, because of loyalty or whatever. For the common man, their own career is what they care about. And for a good reason, especially in a country where every wants to hoard money at any cost- No one's going to miss out on an opportunity of this kind.
China is very flexible.
There may be difficulties in getting citizenship (which is another issue, really), but for work visas to foreign talents, which are sponsored by local companies, this is simply a matter of applying in order to get one.
A lot of misconceptions and FUD here. And I write that as someone who spent 3 years living in China and working for a JV.
If you want to emigrate there permanently this may be different but realistically this is not the topic of this discussion, which is more about highly educated people finding opportunities in China.
Extremely weird question. We live in a competitive global market, people can and will move countries for better opportunities.
USA used to just receive talent as it was way richer that any other country. That times are over now. I understand that it will take some time for Americans and many people in other for countries to accept this new reality, thou.
It was also (and arguably still is) way freer that any other country. In terms of freedom of religion, political, and economic freedoms. Its individualist culture is way more conducive to accepting differences, and being an immigrant nation from the start, making it your new home is much more natural.
One country is liberal and democratic, the other one currently keeps an ethnic minority in reeducation camps, due to cultural non-conformance. In one country the current leader's power to change things has been significantly limited, while 90% of the mass media has been downright scornful about him, and the judiciary refusing to do everything he wants, in the other the leader can cancel IPOs, put CEOs in prison for decades for disrespect.
I.e. your level of legal protection is not comparable between these two countries.
So we are indeed in a global competitive job market, but not all presumed competitors are actually competitive.
Among all developed countries I have visited and lived in America has always felt most like a police state to me. Cops are aggressive, overzealous and tend to show zero tolerance. In general anybody with some authority are kind of scary in the US. Just look at immigration in the US. You will be hard pressed to find immigration in other developed countries behaving in this manner.
What I notice most interacting with American at authorities are all the threats. Pretty much any document you sign elaborate quite a lot on the dire consequences of filling it out wrong.
And as one can see online and I have experience myself, the Us is a country in perpetual paranoia. Cops get called all the time for nothing. And they abide. There is not any issue small enough for them to not show up. And they are not nice. They act like police state police. You can look at videos online of police arrests and dealing with different situations. American police tend to escalate and be very brutal. Slamming people to the ground. Beating them up. Pointing guns and yelling. Handcuffing even small kids. A ridiculous practice seen from the perspective of other actually free countries.
No, the US is an embarrassment to liberal democracy. It makes the rest of us living in democracies look bad.
Find me a country with anything comparable to the First Amendment's current absolutist interpretation. In any other country you would find speech regulations and exceptions to constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech rights.
Cops are indeed more nervous in the US, but that is because the US is unique in the world with citizenry having a right to bear arms (and pretty serious arms at that, like easily concealable handguns or the .50 cal, automatic assault rifles if you are rich). Nowadays it's fashionable to underestimate the importance of that right, but armed citizenry is a very important factor, a deterrent in the minds of those who would dare to attempt to take the rights away. What is happening right now in Belarus likely wouldn't have happened if the citizenry had been armed, because using armed forces against your own people, starting a civil war, will look like a risky proposition even to a strongmen.
You are focusing on the behavior of the police, and there are indeed issues. Whatever cops do right now happens because American public lacks sufficient understanding of the issues, not because the country is an authoritarian police state. But the police behavior isn't the whole picture. There is also a legal system, the free press, and an uncensored internet access. While police may be rough, your chances of getting unfairly convicted are actually pretty low, provided you have money of course.
>other actually free countries.
I assume you are talking about western European countries with all kinds of limitations on speech and expression, and disarmed populace. To each their own, but I would not consider them freer than the US. And I'm saying that as someone who grew up in an authoritarian unfree country.
Copyright is draconian in the USA and has imposed its model worldwide. It has been used to silence even critics to religion organizations like Scientology.
USA has more freedom to express racist sentimens than other Western countries. And companies are allowed to use 'freedom of expression' with money to buy political favors, known as corruption in many other countries.
The USA has many positive things to offer, but also many flaws that did not fix while it was the dominant power.
As you can see from nearby Poland, this just means that you have to get the armed rightwing section of the populace on board first.
I think the thing to learn from is Amartya Sen's "capability" model: how well does the theoretical freedom to do X and Y match up to the practical ability to achieve it? For many people, the lack of an economic safety net is a far more immediate and pressing problem than a theoretical government coup.
Wake up. With a president actively trying to overturn election outcome? Attacking the very system that puts him in power 4 years ago? No, the world is watching, and they are not stupid.
He can try, but he won't succeed.
Some, if not all, of the legislatures of PA, MI, GA, and WI will be sending their own GOP electors.
Those electors arguably take precedence over electors chosen by other legal processes, like democratic votes, according to the US Constitution. Because this issue does not concern state laws (or fraud allegations) whatsoever, the matter will go directly to federal courts.
Looking past the smoke screen of poorly supported fraud allegations and popular reporting's misdirected focus on the obvious lack of merit of said allegations, last night's impromptu PA legislative hearing was a major turning point in this situation.
Dictatorship aside, the problem with Chinese companies is the glass ceiling. It is pretty much impossible to make a career there as foreigner. Very much unlike the US and EU.
I am pretty sure, you have zero chance as foreigner to make great career in EU. Though EU is big and diverse. About USA I don’t know. First thing I see is a big problem with visa.
Its the same everywhere minority will always have a ceiling or a stop on their ambitions. And off course there will always be exceptions everywhere.
But now with the growth of Chinese companies, this becomes an 'adventure' not so different than accepting a job abroad, wherever that might be.
https://www.finaccord.com/Home/About-Us/Press-Releases/Globa...
The USA offers higher quality of life and has a cosmopolitan, multicultural society. I live in the Netherlands, where I enjoy an extremely high quality of life, get access to diverse cultural programs, and get to meet interesting individuals from every corner of the earth who have come to pursue art, technology, and science here. Dutch tech salaries aren't the highest, but I'm living a great life. Dutch and American societies are open-minded and immigrant-oriented: both readily and easily assimilate millions of immigrants.
During uni, I did an exchange study in Beijing and Shanghai. I'm open to working a short gig in China, but I would never settle down there. Chinese cities have thin veneers of modernity and glitz, but they are polluted, offer poor quality of life, and—aside from small expat circles—are monocultural from a global viewpoint. I am thoroughly convinced that China lacks the West's ability to draw, retain, and assimilate foreign talent en masse.
I completely agree, that's why I emigrated to Sweden (not so different that the Netherlands) instead of the USA. But many people gives high value to money and high status.
> China lacks the West's ability to draw, retain, and assimilate foreign talent en masse
That is probably true for now. I have seen the USA loosing that appeal, China may gain it. Hong Kong is going to be a test bed on China capacity to keep foreigners in the country as the region is already diverse.
China lacked the money to be multicultural, people was not willing to move to a poor country. That may change and Western democracies need to stop thinking that are the best in the world and work more to improve education, health care, inequality reduction and quality of life if we do not want to be surpassed in the future.
If non-Chinese started moving to China in large numbers this would be a notable change, and the OP’s question makes sense.
“ In 2016, China issued 1,576 permanent residency cards. This was more than double what it had issued the previous year, but still roughly 750 times lower than the United States’ 1.2 million.[1]”
“ The only significant immigration to China has been by the Overseas Chinese, who in the years since 1949 have been offered various enticements to return to their homeland. Several million may have done so since 1949. The largest influx came in 1978–79, when about 160,000 to 250,000 ethnic Chinese refugees fled Vietnam for southern China, as relations between the two countries worsened. Many of these refugees were settled in state farms on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China
PR is for immigration and China isn’t an immigrant country.
I agree however not a lot westerner immigrated China in masses. I don’t think you would live a normal life there without knowing Chinese, it will be painful. The immigration policy is mostly nonexisten, which by itself says a lot about the government's attitude towards foreigners in general.
On the other hand, China could be attractive place to gain experience with, it is vast complex and completely different from the West.
San Francisco is 34% foreign born, compared to 0.7% in Shanghai.
China is not really in the conversation when it comes to foreign talent yet. But that could change over time.
It is hard to not feel that aliens, especially those who work in tech, are unwanted and targeted according to the administration's agenda.
A group breaking out of ASML would still need a company, is that company going to be in the EU, Japan, US?, if so, restrictions still apply.
I'm not sure people will like moving to China to work on chip tech and possibly end up on US lists.
Then there's the problem of the whole manufacturing and software tech that is likely closely guarded by ASML, and the massive capital investments to actually get anything done.
The US prevents eg. ASML in doing business with eg. Huawei by threatening to cut off ASML's access to American suppliers and customers.
The US prevented ASML from selling their EUV machines in China by pressuring the Dutch government not to renew ASML's export license, presumably by threatening more than just ASML's access to American suppliers and customers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asml-holding-usa-china-in...
Samsung and TSMC can expand only so fast. Are their other types of chips which are using EUV, or are anticipated to use it in the future, like memory?
I am aware Russia is still around and needs to be dealt with...
I grew up in a communist country and have a deep dislike for Russia to put it mildly
Keep in mind that the Chinese benefited from a US policy designed to help due to US interest in sidelining the USSR.
That help is gradually being replaced with the hostility reserved before for the USSR.
So, while China may have power to attract people* the US can do a lot more to limit/sideline China.
*doubtful though as people will need to live under a dictatorship.
This is ignoring what damage a bad/incompetent leader can do to China, one like Stalin since Xi is essentially removing all checks and limits of power.
Sure, it costs $250k for a Synopsys license with the full suite of tools; it also costs far more than that to have to redo a mask set, lose your slot in the fab's calendar, etc.
So Icarus Verilog can only be used for simulation, you will never produce a physical chip using (only) this tool.
I guess I'll quickly start with the end goal. Assuming you don't have your own fab and want to get something manufactured by one of the fabs, you'll most likely send them a GDS file[0]. It's basically a file that contains coordinates for a bunch of rectangles and their layer which define how the mask [1] should look like.
How do you go from verilog to a GDS file? Well it's a pretty long process, none of the steps can be done with Icarus Verilog:
1. Synthesis, this will synthesize (coming from the software world, I guess you could call this "compile") your verilog into standard cells(imagine AND/NOT/OR gates) and how they are connected.
* These standard cells come from a PDK[2](process design kit) which will be supplied to you by your semiconductor fab. I think if you wanted to break into the industry, supporting PDKs will be a pain. Allegedly there is OpenAccess[3] which is meant to allow for a "standard" way of developing these PDK's, but I'm not convinced.
2. Placement, your chip is a rectangle of a certain size (you decide the size, the bigger, the more expensive it'll be since wafters are fixed size) and it needs to fit all those standard cells. A tool will figure out how to optimally place them. There are certain rules it needs to follow defined by your PDK.
3. Routing, you've placed the cells on your chip, but they aren't connected. A tool will find an optimal?(maybe?) solution on how to connect the standard cells so that it matches the netlist generated in step 1. This pretty much gets you the GDS.
3.a. After everything has been routed, you can extract the physical properties from the layout and resimulate everything with the "real" design. When you were simulating with icarus verilog, it was just checking that the logic is sound. It didn't have any of the real world delays, with the extractd netlist, you can simulate it with the delays. I'm pretty sure Icarus Verilog would support this, I think the delays are just implemented with "`delay X" statements, but I might be wrong.
Now this primarily deals with the "digital" part of the chip. Now I'm a bit unsure about this part, but I'm pretty sure you can't just make a "digital" (i.e verilog) only chip. I'm assuming at a bare minimum any product now days will have some ESD protection which will require at least a bit of custom.
For the analogue part of the chip, it's completely separate form Icarus Verilog. Analog designers will be manually placing transistors to create circuits for the chip. The PDK will define how the transistors behave under different voltages/temperatures/process corners[4]. They will then simulate their circuit to see if it works. To go from the circuit they designed to the GDS, someone (a person) will go through the circuit and manually layout their circuit. There are tools that check that the manual layout process matches the schematic/circuit (LVS – layout vs schematic). There are a bunch of design rules that the fab will specify (DRC, design rule checks) that the layout needs to meet, there are tools which will check those for you. Basically, a bunch of tools and licenses you need to pay these vendors for.
Normally someone will pull in the synthesized digital into the analogue layout to create the final GDS before it’s sent to the fab.
I hope that gives you a peek into what’s involved in making these chips from a tools perspective. These EDA tool licenses are almost all token based and use FlexLm[5]. You're paying per instance of the tool running. Most of the simulations run in parallel and take multiple tokens. The licensing costs for these things go into multi-millions for any decently sized semi-conductor company.
Apologizes in advance for any inaccuracies or any omissions. There's definitely a lot more stuff involved in the process, but the comment was getting really long already.
notes: I've used verilog everywhere, but it might as well be VHDL or any other HDL.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomask [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_design_kit [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAccess [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_corners [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher