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AMD and Nvidia Silicon Manufacturing Secrets Allegedly Stolen, Sold To China (pcgamesn.com)
According to a report on DigiTimes, a former TSMC engineer has been accused of stealing the secrets of their 28nm
manufacturing process and taking them across the Taiwan Straits to Chinese rival, HLMC. "The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) produce the chips for the great and the good of the PC hardware market, specifically Nvidia and latterly AMD," reports PCGamesN. From the report: The report claims the former engineer, known only as Hsu, has been accused of taking details and materials relating to TSMC's 28nm manufacturing process and handing them over to Shanghai Huali Microelectronics (HLMC) after being offered a job there. The engineer was arrested before he even had a chance to start his new job on mainland China. This isn't the first reported instance of potentially shady dealings involving HLMC. DigiTimes previously reported that the Chinese foundry had headhunted a team of up to 50 research and development engineers from Taiwan's first semiconductor company, United Microelectronics (UMC), to help them get their 28nm production process up to speed. DigiTimes also alleges that some Chinese memory manufacturers have been doing the same thing, headhunting Taiwanese talent to get their own fabs off the ground, and that Micron are taking legal action against some of their Taiwan partners for allegedly nicking their tech and handing it over to China-based RAM companies.
Saves a lot of money and time.
No need to bother with R&D when you can just wait for someone else to do it, then just steal it and improve upon it.
This has nothing to do with AMD, NVidia, or any other American companies. This was, supposedly, a Taiwanese engineer selling information on manufacturing processes used by the Taiwanese TSMC, to a company on mainland China.
I lived in China for a while. They are improving FAST, but while it's true that Western buyers will strip costs to the bone... many Chinese will strip it past the bone. This is changing, but it's where they're at. A lot of people have just started manufacturing stuff and are new to Capitalism, and some percentage of those think that if it looks passable enough to get paid for it before it falls apart, good enough. It takes more experience than a lot of them have to figure out that screwing people is not a good long term strategy.
Chinese people are WAY more tolerant of broken crap than Westerners are. They just return it, and hope the next one works. My assistant didn't want me to toss the box my fridge came in... he said I should wait a month to make sure it would work first. The entire reason I had a new fridge was because the one we took from work broke in transit. The new clothes dryer's main heater coil was broken from day one. The maintenance guy had to come repair my hot water maybe 4 times in 6 months. A relative came to take a shower one day because their hot water was out. It's just way more normal to work around equipment failures there.
The government is VERY keen to make China the best in the world at, well... everything... so there's a big push to improve. The way things work there, though, many things can get delayed through deals or favors... so it will take a while. There will be many large, signature, highly government monitored success stories.. the way forward will be shown... and the culture will change.
There's a lot of pride in China in what everyone's accomplishing. When producing quality products become a matter of national pride as well, the products will get WAY better. I expect this is simply a matter of time... very possibly not all that much time.
They're not there yet. My native partner there didn't want to buy Chinese... he wanted import equipment whenever possible. Strangely enough, I was the one pushing for domestic machines usually.
This is why I virtually never buy anything direct from China. The shipping agreements and China customs mean it's nearly impossible to return anything, so many Chinese sellers will sell complete crap, sometimes 100% fraudulent garbage, because they know you can't return it. There's a lot of good ones that will just refund you and say "keep/throw away the broken one", but there are enough bad seeds I just don't want my money going to perpetuating that. Really, even a lot of the "good" ones are just betting that you won't bother to even contact them about it.
Culturally, manufacturers there seem to hate throwing away product, hate waste, so much that they'll ship you crap knowing they screwed up just because they don't want to throw it away and start over. We had real trouble with machine shops shipping stuff that blew the specs with the hope that nobody noticed. I think this extreme aversion to throwing bad stuff away is some of why there's so much crap "knockoff" product out there. Sometimes it's real product that failed specs, so they sold it to someone who didn't care. I would also expect them to sell bad product to competitors looking to reverse engineer stuff.
My Chinese mother in law is staying with us for now, helping with the young ones. She loves gardening. Instead of asking for proper tools, containers, pots, etc... she'll cut up plastic juice containers for pots, old 2 liters are lying around all over filled with seedlings. She'll take string and rope from packages we receive to hold up the garden sticks she's got everything growing over. Oh, garden sticks? I meant to say leftover fence boards she asked me to cut lengthwise for the purpose as paying for $1 garden sticks would be a waste when you had perfectly good fence boards lying around. Waste is absolutely abhorrent.
Make no mistake. China is going to blow completely past everyone else and just keep going. All that "let the market decide" BS that's all the rage in the US is all China needs. The government in the
I used to be involved in building nuclear power plants in the U.S. One of my key suppliers kept sourcing steel (bar stock) from China - not from third party suppliers, but from their Chinese foundries.
Then came the day when coupon testing of the steel showed some irregularities, and when we sent inspectors to China to see what was going on, discovered that instead of delivering LCC (impact tested, low temperature performing) steel, they were taking WCC (different steel), removing the "W" from the imprint, forging on an "L" and faking the CMTR (material chemistry) data sheets.
This isn't unique, it wasn't a one-off, and there's a reason that giant companies have sourcing restrictions in their RFQs and POs like "No Chinese-sourced parts allowed."