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Two More Chinese DRAM Fabs Ready
- vardump 8y agoDRAM prices have increased by over 200% since 2016 (more than tripled). Hopefully these new fabs will bring prices to more reasonable levels.
- l33tbro 8y agoSure, as long as they bring current industry-standard QC processes to the party. I'm skeptical.
- geezerjay 8y agoIf the price is right, there are plenty of applications where dodgy RAM is good enough. Once that starts to eat the incumbent's lunch the prices will follow.
- derefr 8y agoAre there CPU architectures/OSes/software frameworks built to deal with extremely flaky memory? Something like the Mars rovers' "six CPUs take a vote on what to do" architecture, but where those are just six NUMA nodes in the same workstation?
- jotm 8y agoSomewhat related, I used several sets of unmarked DDR2 RAM (so I'm assuming either Chinese or factory rejects) back in the day, and it worked without problems for years. That was after a 24 hour run of Memtest, which I do for all new modules.
- monocasa 8y agoI've heard on the grapevine that essentially all modern DRAM is dodgy and ECCs internally (sort of like flash). When you're buying ECC RAM, it's just exposing that on the bus for end to end ECC.
- mehrdada 8y agoThis sounds suspect (perhaps depending on what do you mean by modern?) I am curious if there's a reference?
- monocasa 8y agoGrapevine being drinking with DRAM engineers. I don't know if there's a reference.
- PhantomGremlin 8y agoIf true, it's the "wheel of reincarnation" all over again. Back about 35 years ago, perhaps for the 256 kbit DRAM generation, IIRC it was Micron that did something like this. I tried some quick Googling and didn't find anything. But it's really hit and miss how much stuff that precedes the WWW can be turned up by a quick search. The Micron idea was that they would use a (12,8) Hamming type code. A total of 12 bits including 8 data bits. Which, if you recall the theory behind these codes, meant that you could do Single Error Correction, but not Double Error Detection (that would take a 13th bit). Not doing DED was a "feature", since these chips were pin compatible with standard memory. So you had no easy way to signal an error anyway. I don't think the product was very successful (if it ever made it into volume production) because of the incredible overhead it would take. Instead of 262144 total memory bits on the die, you needed 50% more, i.e. 393216. On the plus side, you could make each cell a little bit smaller, and you wouldn't really care about a few individual bad bits (those would be hidden by the ECC). So your yield probably went up. But of course the die was so much bigger, so your yield went way down because of that. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs! Overall, if you were Micron I suppose you were just happy if the finished chip met some appropriate AQL standard. What it did on die was just an implementation detail. :)
- bsder 8y agoDRAM has always been feast (shortage when new apps cause demand to outstrip supply) and famine (new fabs lead to oversupply). This cycle was why Grove and Moore got Intel out of the memory business in 1985.
- stefan_ 8y agoExcept I have a feeling that the moment chinese DRAM is reaching viability prices will magically drop to smother the new competitor.
- drfuchs 8y agoConsidering how it worked out in the solar cell manufacturing business, you might expect the exact opposite: eventually all the older manufacturers get driven out of business.
- cptskippy 8y agoThat ended sometime in the late 90s or early 00s when the DRAM Lords began the annual ceremonial sacrifices to Sherman. I'm referring to the DRAM fixing scandal. All of the DRAM makers colluded to fix prices. We had one DRAM maker a year for like 6 or 7 years plead guilty to collusion and price fixing under the Sherman Anti Trust Act. Since then prices haven't been very volatile, they just sort of steadily rise year on.
- baybal2 8y agoI have a dissenting opinion. Rather than getting two more fabs, Chinese state funds have just launched two more barely working ones that add to a long long list of their failed attempts to achieve self sufficiency in memory supply. There were numerous attempts by Xinhua University Group in the past to launch memory businesses. Judging by that those fabs stand dark for years, none of them succeeded, and a lot of taxpayers money just got wasted again.
- dis-sys 8y ago> There were numerous attempts by Xinhua University Group in the past to launch memory businesses. Judging by that those fabs stand dark for years, none of them succeeded, and a lot of taxpayers money just got wasted again. That is the exact non-sense talked by many people 10-15 years ago regarding BOE and its state backed investment. Look at what BOE achieved in mid/long term.
- ksec 8y ago1. They weren't as serious as this time around. 2. The money involved before were tiny compared to this round. 3. They now have a market to absorb some lower quality components. 4. The market is now making so much money from NAND and DRAM that is unseen in past time. There is not better time to enter the market. Even at half the yield then other major competitor they would still be able to make money. 5. I don't think they will catch up in 3D NAND any time soon. But DDR4 seems to be a easier target.
- baybal2 8y agoKsec, there may be merit to your thought here, but just for point 4. Even though memory market was always the ultimate cash cow, and price collusion was always the second name to it, what we see today is something completely "beyond good and evil." I regularly meet Unigroup people just below the C-suite level during industry events in China. The do not give off any sense of brilliance to me, nor I can say anything high of their ability from what they did before. Sure, they are probably the top fund by concentration of Oxford and Ivy league grads in China, and have few returnee cadres with past stellar career in Western top tier investment funds. I can even go as far as to say that if judged individually, some can be said to be genuine talents. With all that star crew, why don't they fly? Because they are dominated people with stellar credentials, but all of whom are just meh and so so... Just look what their "genius stratagem" of joining RDA and Spreadtrum did: they took a leader in one market, a leader on another market, joined them and got one without lead in any. When Qualcomm was still greatly greatly handicapped in Chinese market by the fact that they were limited to high-end as low-to-mid-end market was a shark tank with likes of Spreadtrum and RDA in their prime. But when Unigroup decided to forcefully uproot both of them from their power base - domestic mass market, and mandate them to "abandon it all, focus on high-end, and make a chip to nail Qualcomm in under a year" they both lost their grip on their market niches, which Qualcomm and Mediatek were happy to devour, and of course they never came even close to scoring anything in high end market that Unigroup wanted. Now they have neither low-end lead, nor high-end lead. As the saying goes: you don't get iron by joining brass and bronze.
- dis-sys 8y agoWhen the $ spent on importing chips is more than the amount spent on importing oil, you know full well that that there is no real alternative but to invest heavily into the semiconductor industry. In 2016, $227 billion worth of chips were imported by China [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-chips/chips-down-china-aims-to-boost-semiconductors-as-trade-war-looms-idUSKBN1HR1DF https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-chips/chi...
- baybal2 8y agoSilicon is the new oil! No, it is by a big extend more important. Nothing today can throw any country back to a stone age than loss of access to microelectronics: 1. Loss of powerplants and the grid infrastructure - possible to rebuild, and immediate impact is not catastrophic 2. Loss of food supply stocks - unless, you are blockaded, you can just buy abroad 3. Loss of fertilizer stocks - just as survivable as loss of food supply. 4. Loss of hydrocarbon supply - an even more laughable national emergency. 5. Heavy industry - just rebuild, you can wholly rebuild it with pre-industrial tech level. 6. Loss of microelectronics - you fc*ked - to make microchips, you need more microchips, and to build those microchips, you need a ton of other microchips. You achieve nothing if you manage to replicate the technology of the era of first ICs.
- yitosda 8y agoI can't see how #6 would be a larger problem than the others unless all existing microelectronics disappeared overnight, which doesn't seem like a real concern.
- pradn 8y agoAre those chips imported specifically for domestic use? Or does that figure count chips imported to be put into export electronics?
- dis-sys 8y agothose eventually end up in exports are usually not counted as imports, because such chips stay in those so called tariff-free zone to be used in production and then shipped overseas without clearing custom twice. domestic consumption is also at a crazy level, e.g. in Q1 2018, smartphone sales in China had a "hard landing" down 21% YoY, still 91 million phones were sold in Q1 2018 [1]. [1] https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/chinese-smartphone-market-suffers-hard-landing-shipments-decline-21-q1-2018 https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/chinese-smartphone-market-s...
- sevensor 8y ago> According to a media report, the equipment move-in will be completed by early July and the first phase of the fab will be able to start volume production of DRAM in the third quarter. Ouch, that's an aggressive schedule. Two months to qualify the equipment and the process, train technicians, establish PM schedules, ramp up testing and QA departments, and run pilot lots? If anything at all goes wrong -- one bad mask, one misaligned robot that scratches all the wafers, one misconfigured test program -- you lose three weeks and have to start over. More if you have to revise a mask. Even more if you don't discover the problem until after burn-in. If they hit volume production in the third quarter, it's going to be at the very end of September, and it's going to be a very generous definition of "volume."
- donald123 8y agoThe move-in started late in 2017. It's almost a year to do all the preparations.
- sevensor 8y agoCould be. The article wasn't totally clear on the status of the fab. Most equipment has a few weeks of work (more for a scanner, less for a wet hood) to be done between when you bolt it to the floor and when you're ready to try it in production, but it might make more sense to wait until the dust (literally) has settled if you're moving in a whole row of tools at once.
- donald123 8y agoDo you really think they will start making things ready after all the equipments are moved in?