Just to be factual, China outside of Taiwan still lacks the ability/technology to fab a modern microprocessor using a competitive process. Fab technology is incredibly restricted, not just by governments but the companies themselves.
China doesn't export CPU processors, they import from Intel like everyone else. I believe there is a fab in Singapore, but I'm not sure what generation they are at. There is a testing facility in chengdu, at least.
You still got the top 2 in Taiwan and Korea, so they won't be able to produce iPhones or Macbooks. But the rest is there already. Even Samsung has a few fabs in China.
Why China? Most of the major chip fabs aren't made in China. They're mostly made in Taiwan, South Korea and the US. Unless we're strictly talking about TSMC, which does have 2/18 fabs in China.
Fabs aren't really a realm of competition with China. Leading fabs are in Germany (GlobalFoundaries in Dresden), Taiwan (TSMC's primary fabs), South Korea (Samsung) and even the US (GlobalFoundaries) and Singapore (GlobalFoundaries).
Samsung (South Korea), TSMC (Taiwan) and Intel (US, Israel) locate their fabs in small countries that are heavily dependent on the US for ensuring their neighbors do not attack.
Two of those three (TSMC & Intel) are building fabs in Arizona due to political pressure, hefty subsidies and geological stability of the area (reducing the number of defects in chips).
GF has foundries in Germany and in the US, TSMC is Taiwan.
Beyond that the only other fab for hire company with an advanced node is SSC and all their advanced fabs are in Korea.
The only thing that China can currently fab on a matching node are display panels.
Their IC nodes are still stuck on 28nm and even that is pushing it.
AMD has global foundries manufacture their IO chip. They are an American company, but I don’t know where they actually fab the silicon. (I would assume Singapore since that’s where their 200nm fabs are)
I'm sure everyone of those parts is built in the US. I do not know the location of every FAB, nor battery manufacturer, nor display manufacturer, and neither does anyone else.
What we do know is that Intel has a fab in Arizona for example and Corning's headquarters (gorilla glass) are in NY etc.
I also don't know for sure what is in each city in China. While it is public information (for the most part), finding a source to back my claim would be as possible as backing the authors claim.
GlobalFoundries is more global, but there's only one fab in China.
A previous employer was a semiconductor company, and it was pretty clear that the high-tech fabs had to run in the US, and that only the older generations could be moved offshore.
Fabricators of chips you are familiar with: Taiwan. Most of the Chinese fabless SoC companies (Allwinner, Rockchip etc.) aren't getting their chips fabbed by Chinese owned fabs. Most of those cheap chinese phones have Mediatek SoCs, from Taiwan.
China is only about 10% of overall semiconductor production. Mostly the older technologies. A large amount of wafer production is in Taiwan and South Korea.
Globalfoundries: Dresden, Singapore, U.S...
The only company I see with a lot of fabs in China is SMIC, and they're at 40nm, so they sure aren't making the Xiamo's CPU. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricati...
reply