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

Posted by BeauHD on from the Chinese-venture dept.

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."

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:custom chips == government backdoors by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.