Qualcomm To Manufacture Custom Chips For Chinese Market (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Qualcomm president Derek Aberle has suggested that the semiconductor giant is preparing to produce its own custom chips for the Chinese market. [A Wall Street Journal interview with] Aberle revealed that the American company had entered into a joint venture with the local government in Guizhou province to manufacture custom chips starting in the second half of 2016. According to Aberle, the Guizhou government owns 55% of the venture, while Qualcomm owns the remaining 45%. Aberle told the Wall Street Journal that he expects China's server demand to dwarf that of the U.S.. He said of the government-backed venture: "This is really going to be the primary vehicle from which we build our data center business in China. We are actually trying to create the company that is going to be able to win the market here as opposed to just licensing old technology."

Comments

Re:story makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

China has several fabs, and their current to fab can fab 28nm chips

China also has an army of fabless companies, some high end fabless joints such as hilink (from Huawei) are qualifying 10nm tape-outs with TSMC in Taiwan

In other words, China's fab ecosystem is very robust and healthy

Qualcomm has agreements with both Chinese fabless operation and the Chinese fabs because they want to establish and strengthen their beach front in China

Intel also wanted to get into China but they came into China too little too late - they only offer the Chinese their useless Atom chip (for mobile) - and their effort flopped

Right now the China market is being supplied, in low end, 30% by their home grown talents, 40% by the Taiwanese, and 30% by USA / Europe; in middle, 20% by home talents, 60% by the Taiwanese, and 20% by USA / Europe, and in the high end, less than 5% from home talents, 70% by the Taiwanese and the rest, USA / Europe

Qualcomm is determined to change that ratio

Re:custom chips == government backdoors

[tlhIngan]

China already gets powerful multi-core ARM chips at dirt cheap prices, so this isn't a matter of saving money. The only logical reason they would be making custom chips (and so soon) is they are modifying an existing chip and adding a hardware backdoor. With hardware backdoors in every server in china, they can control information much easier and identify dissidents.

Exactly. You might not know it, but the Chinese regulations specify a lot of standards that you must support, only in China. For example, WiFi encryption - WEP and WPA are banned in China - if you want to have WiFI encryptoin, you must use WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure).

WAPI is only used in China and very limited entities have access to the entire standard. And no, WAPI is not part of any standard we recognize - IEEE, ISO, etc.

There are probably dozens of other things that are Chinese only, so if you want to sell your chip in China, you need to support it.

And yes.you can bet there are backdoors.