8 ms·
Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with
by wishart_washy 8y ago
Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology.
China's short term goal is clearly to reach parity so these students can enter a mature semiconductor industry. Give these students ~5-15 years to gain expertise from the American academic system and industrial research base and I think we'll start seeing China innovate.
American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE. To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more.
- vkou 8y agoThroughout the 20th century, the United States benefited greatly from this sort of knowledge drain, from war-torn Europe, and from the Soviet sphere of influence. The trend is just reverting to the mean.
- frozenport 8y agoNonsense, many of these countries didn't exist long enough to establish "mean" trends. How old is China? Confucius Institute progpoganda not withstanding, maybe 30 years? There is only what is now, and how we stop China from fucking us over.
- andygrovetheman 8y agoMany scientists and academics immigrated to the US because of its values: it was a free country and a multicultural country where immigrants are welcomed. The knowledge drain moved smart people to a free country to build a knowledge economy. (Economists too: the Bretton Woods system was built in part by smart people who fled the autocratic or fascist countries). That system of free exchange between stable democracies with social safety nets kept peace in the world for 50 years. Not sure this brain drain has equal intentions for rule of law and democratic societies.
- worldengineer 8y ago> The trend is just reverting to the mean. That's a lie. United States get 1M immigrants a year since 2000. There's over 37,000,000 legal immigrants in US. United States gets the creme of the crop from countries around the world. On the other hand, there were approximately 594,000 immigrants living in China in 2010, most from Asia. If you can live in US and make 300k-400k, you would do that in a heartbeat, vs living in China where the pollution could shorten you and your family's life, a brush with someone in CCP could destroy your life, no way to get the money you make in China out, no ownership of properties, censorship prevents you from doing research in the real internet, etc. Oh yeah, what do you think will happen to China after additional $400 billion tariffs, when XiJingPing dies, when the massive shadow debt ($12Trillion and counting) causes widespread defaults and 30% devaluation of yuan?
- epc 8y agoThe current US government approach to immigrants, legal or otherwise, would seem designed to convince immigrants to go elsewhere. I think China will be fine given that it can simply shut down exports to the US if Trump's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?
- worldengineer 8y agolol right, China is going to stop exporting $100B a year of electronics to US. Even though Xi Jing Ping begged Trump not to kill ZTE. China is not fine. China is trying to balance its shadow debts (12T, 170% corporate debt to gdp), prop up stock market (lost 15% this year), prop up real estate (decline in 1st tiered cities, 25.96x House price to income ratio), and prop up yuan (4% loss this year).
- jonhendry18 8y agoXi Jing Ping bribed Trump not to kill ZTE.
- dang 8y agoWe've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and nationalistic battle. That's not ok here, as the site guidelines make clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- tzahola 8y agoWell, if you EE guys would finally got off your high horses and dropped Verilog in favor of JavaScript, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem!!!
- StavrosK 8y agoSure, the circuits might catch fire once in a while, but imagine the ease of development when you can get a bunch of underqualified people to develop stuff!
- wishart_washy 8y agoI left EE and became a full-stack developer! No complaints about JavaScript here. Verilog should just switch to lambdas and get it over with.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoSame here. Switched to CS from EE and never looked back, although my respect for EE majors increased a lot. (I had trouble with the continuous math once we reached steady-state analysis. Besides, I wanted to just get through all that to the fun stuff: discrete math, logic design, and programming.)
- ultrasounder 8y agoOn that path after 12 years of blood and sweat as a HW engineer in various FAANG companies. Self teaching myself Algos so that I can eventually leetcode the day light out of my life and take a crack at the same FAANG this time as a SW engineer. The problem with the whole EE landscape is much beyond the Mandarin syndrome. It’s systemic. In fact the canary in the coal mine is Berkeley where the enrollment in graduate level EE courses in analog circuit design and RFIC have been falling rapidly as more and more grads prefer the “deep learning” bandwagon much more than the traditional popcorn chip design and manufacturing which was the mainstay of the local Silicon Valley economy until I was in grad school. Back to my BFS study from clrs :-)
- deepnotderp 8y ago
- crb002 8y agoThe $$ is in ASICs. Most code is sorting, hashing, encoding/decoding, matrix-matrix multiply. Bitmain is hitting it out of the park.
- addicted 8y agoWell the vast majority of these kids would prefer to stay in the US. Clearly the solution to prevent them from taking their knowledge back to their home countries is to denigrate them politically and make it harder and more inconvenient for them to live and work here.
- exelius 8y agoI would not agree with this. I went to an elite business school and my Chinese classmates all felt there was far more opportunity for them in China with an American education. They’re not stupid, they look at China and see an economy growing at 6-9% a year while the US is stuck at 1-2% and they know where the growth is for the medium-term. They also see a mature American economy that can be tough to crack even for native white citizens, so its not hard to see how their chances of long-term success are much higher in China than in the US.
- worldengineer 8y agoThey are stupid, if they didn't know about China's fake gdp for the past several years. "U.S. GDP could top 4% in 2nd quarter, economists say" https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-gdp-could-top-4-in-2nd-quarter-economists-say-2018-05-31 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-gdp-could-top-4-in-2nd-... "Baotou in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region revised its estimated fiscal revenue in 2017 lower by nearly 50% in an annual work report" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-data/another-chinese-city-admits-fake-economic-data-idUSKBN1F60I1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-data/anothe... "China fake data mask economic rebound" https://www.ft.com/content/a9889330-f51c-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1a00 https://www.ft.com/content/a9889330-f51c-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1...
- exelius 8y agoNobody can predict anything today, with president temper tantrum throwing weekly wrenches into the global economy. But over the last decade they would have been right; and keep in mind that even in China, most economic gains have been captured by the elite — which anyone educated in a top American university would be a part of almost by definition. Also weighing heavily on people are family and cultural conflict issues. But anecdotally I can say that the majority of Chinese students don’t want to stay in the US for a variety of reasons; and that many feel their prospects are at least as good in China as the US.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoToo late. China dominates in the 'jelly bean[1]' chip business. This was the bread an butter for the dozen semiconductor shops in the Bay Area during the 70's through the early naughts. As fabs shut down they became 'fabless' and had their work shipped out to TSMC. Now they exist as a genre in China in much greater numbers than they do here. Companies that will make a couple of wafers of USB + ADC + random logic kinds of things. And the innovation never comes from the chip companies, it comes from companies that are building the products. They go to the chip companies and say "Can you make a chip that does this?" and then a new jelly bean chip is born and if that product gets traction everyone decides to make one with their own bit of spin. What is unique to the Chinese scene is that there are thousands of minute variations rather than any sort of ordered discipline. Transistors are free at the jelly bean chip level so there is no incentive to re-use or save on chips. ARM has become the defacto microprocessor architecture because, in part, ARM will license it to anyone. In the US all of these folks have coalesced into a few mega companies (TI, NXP, Microchip, Maxim) which don't have much in the way of competition locally. So innovation stops because conservative business practices rule. This really became clear to me when I started perusing datasheet sites for the Chinese market and realizing there are hundreds if not thousands of chips for which there is no English data sheet. This is a complete reverse from the last century when nearly every data sheet was in English and getting a Chinese version was a challenge. [1] Jelly Bean chips are those that are made in batches of 1 - 10 million with a set of functions that are fairly specific to their application.
- fspeech 8y agoAs chip manufacturing goes DRAM used to be at the bottom of the ladder. Many logic fabs did DRAM first to learn the rope because the fab technology is simpler for DRAM (less layers than logic). DRAM fabs bought used equipment from logic fabs, so there were always swing capacity available. DRAM business was tough and the main challenge was yield (therefore cost and margin). I don't know if any of this has changed more recently as it certainly seems people are not bringing DRAM capacity online as expected -- maybe they are scared by the prospect that China may bring in a large amount of capacity. The Chinese company mentioned in the article is only incidental to the story so the article title is kind of a click bait. Sure they decided to buy technology from the Taiwanese fab UMC, which is perfectly legal. UMC as a very large fab itself, could also be expected to provide the technology. For whatever reason, UMC seemed unable to deliver and had allegedly resorted to underhanded tactics instead.
- rasz 8y agoReminded me of comment under recent Cornell dormrooms clip uploaded by Bruce Land (ece.cornell.edu) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qthb6taW_9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qthb6taW_9U "Just dropped in by accident. I see 80% of them are asian girls, is this recording from Shenzhen?"
- netheril96 8y ago> To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more. The gap is even greater in China, since China has a booming Internet industry, second only to the US, while its semiconductor industry is still in infancy and cannot survive without subsidies. My friend, who graduated with a degree in EE from Tsinghua University, lamented that almost none of her classmates stayed in EE fields. Note that Tsinghua University is the undisputed best Chinese university in engineering schools.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoMany semiconductor advances were made by Chinese for the last 60-70 years. They just weren’t residents of mainland china.
- paidleaf 8y ago> American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE. We won't decline in absolute numbers but comparatively. We will never produce as many engineers as china because they outnumber us by more than a billion people.
- madengr 8y agoThat near 100% foreign is the norm everywhere, not just “elite” schools. It has been that way for at least 30 years.
- segmondy 8y agoThis happened with Japan too, anyone that wants to know how they dominated the electronics industry in the 70's/80's should checkout the book "We were burning"