1. US semiconductor chip makers are most vulnerable to trade wars;
From micro-network news, from aircraft to semiconductors, the share price of all manufacturers of U.S. goods fell on Wednesday. Prior to the Trump administration's plan to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, China retaliated, causing many U.S. large companies to face trade. The risks arising from the escalation of the dispute.
Just 11 hours after the Trump administration proposed to impose a 25% tariff on some 1300 Chinese industries, science and technology, transportation and medical products, it was easy to counterattack and listed a similar list of levied tariffs, covering US soybeans. , Airplanes, Automobiles, Beef and Chemicals, and other important imported products.
China's revenue accounts for 24%
Although Trump has shown his indifference on Twitter, the U.S. government has hinted that there will be room for manoeuvre. The industries most affected by the trade war will include the U.S. technology industry, especially chip makers, and the share prices of many such companies this month. Interrupted by Trump's targeting of China.
According to the "Thomson Reuters" data, about 24% of the semiconductor companies under the S&P 500 Index have revenue from China. According to Qualcomm's documents, the revenue generated by China's customers and authorized businesses last year accounted for the company's total revenue. Nearly 60% of the time.
According to CCTV, on the 3rd, local time, the United States announced its taxation checklist for China's 301 investigation. As it relates to aerospace, semiconductor and other industries, it also triggered concerns of some Japanese companies. China is Japan's leading intermediate trade country. In particular, a large number of high-end semiconductor components were imported from Japan, processed and manufactured in China, and finally exported to the United States and the European market. The data shows that, driven by factors such as strong demand for semiconductor products in the Chinese market, Japan’s export market is continuously 15 in size. Monthly expansion. It is reported that the practice of the United States, for the Japanese industry, will bear the brunt of the semiconductor industry, and may even affect the industrial robot industry. For the Japanese companies in the Sino-U.S. trade industry chain, the U.S. practice Will have a very direct impact on them.
2. Broadcom announced that it has relocated the headquarters to the United States;
Sina US stocks on the 5th morning Reuters said on the morning, Broadcom announced on Wednesday local time, has completed plans to relocate headquarters from Singapore to the United States, and in the previous weeks US President Trump has just banned on the grounds of national security The company acquired Qualcomm’s deal for US$117 billion.
Prior to being acquired by Singapore's Avago Technologies in 2016, Broadcom was a US company. On November 2 last year, just a few days before its first offer to Qualcomm, the company announced plans to relocate its headquarters. United States.
After the acquisition of Qualcomm was blocked last month, Broadcom announced that it will continue to implement plans to relocate its headquarters to the United States. Although the higher tax rate in the United States will increase the company’s annual revenue by approximately US$500 million, the advantage of this is that Broadcom will Can avoid US CFIUS review when acquiring US companies in the future.
Broadcom said on Wednesday that the existing joint headquarters in San Jose, California will become its sole headquarters.
3. Lin Benjian: Communicate with Zhang Zhongtao to reverse the semiconductor rules!
This article comes from Business Weekly, Wu Zhongjie's article.
He changed the technological path of the global semiconductor industry, leaving big brothers such as Intel and equipment maker ASML, Nikon, and other industry giants to abandon the research efforts that cost more than $1 billion and several years. TSMC has turned around. Not only has global semiconductor manufacturing advanced six to seven generations, but also about 14 years. TSMC has therefore become one of the largest manufacturers in the industry, leading the industry in specifications.
He is the academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lin Benjian, the former deputy general manager of TSMC R&D. TSMC chairman Zhang Zhongmou once said that without Lin Benjian and his team, "Taiwan Semiconductor's lithography (one of the semiconductor key processes) will not have this scale today."
After retiring, Lin Benjian, a distinguished professor of lectures at Tsinghua University, recently published his first semi-autobiographical book and relived with us how he reversed the situation.
Born in Vietnam, Lin Bianjian came to Taiwan to study at adolescence. The subordinates nicknamed him "Burn (in English) Grandpa." He treats people kindly, but he does not give up on what he believes.
His proposal, co-ordination with the owners
"Although millions of people, I'm going!" Lin Bianjian described his rewrite of history from 2002 to 2004.
At that time, the situation was as follows: As the semiconductor process evolved, the lithography, one of the key processes, had to continue to shorten the beam wavelength. The industry has long been accustomed to using air as the medium, and it is a “dry” lithography, but this However, the technology has “crashed the wall” at the 157 nm wavelength. However, Lin Bingjian, who was at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., was able to escape the framework and returned to the previous generation of 157 nanometer wavelengths to use water as a medium to develop “infiltrating lithography”. Technology, to shorten the beam wavelength to 134 nm, breaking the bottleneck.
This kind of broken-box thinking was initially lonely and even hostile.
Because other companies have invested more than one billion U.S. dollars in R&D expenditures on dry development, they are close to TSMC’s capital spending for the entire year. If Lin Benjian's theory is adopted, it is equal to declaring that other people are doing their best. The previous chief operating officer of TSMC, Jiang Shangyi, wrote for Lin Benjian. Preface: "(Current year) There are indeed high-level executives of big companies who express serious concerns. I hope I can manage him (Lin Benjian) and not stir the game."
Before he does his work, he will deduct to exhaustion
Internally, Lin Benjian asked Jiang Shangyi and Zhang Zhongmou to pay the bills, and foreigners would have to persuade the industry to abandon the original input.
His secret is to "completely" two words, to think thoroughly, and to carry it out thoroughly. "Like chess, we must first think of several steps behind it," Lin Benjian said. Before doing anything, deducing it to exhaustion, it was always his Habits, "Take all possible thoughts, (until) think impossible."
A TSMC executive who had been with Lin Bingjian recalled that at the beginning, the opposition often opposed TSMC in an international seminar, questioning that water as a medium was prone to pollution, and that bubbles in the water would affect exposure. Lin Bingjian, who was prepared, decided to solve the problem more thoroughly. He took the team to complete three papers in half a year, submitted it to an international journal, and even conceived doubts that had not yet been submitted. Response: “Originally an American manufacturer The representative said that they would never use this technology. As a result, after a (semiconductor process) generation, they also used it."
In addition to reasoning, Lin Bianjian’s communication has also been thorough. At that time he traveled to the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany to meet the industry one by one, prompting Asmael and Nikon to turn to other manufacturers. He said that communication was his job from Zhang Zhongmou. Learn an important lesson.
Since he joined TSMC in 2000, Zhang Zhongmou had fixed lunch with the third-tier executives two times a week for lunch, and the deputy general managers had monthly meetings. During the meeting, Zhang Zhongmou and the directors can talk about the development of the company to the international political economy. The situation, including the core values of TSMC’s “integrity and honesty” and “commitment,” also condenses. “The chairman of the board will encourage everyone to ask him questions. Sometimes people will ask questions well. He will be happy to answer. have eaten. "
"Think thoroughly, thoroughly, it's his habit." For example, Huang Xiuhui, who had been with Lin Bianjian's 50-year-old wife, served as the commander of the church choir. Many members were not good at reading the staves. They encountered repeated paragraph symbols and often forgot to recount. The general commander constantly corrects and reminds, but Lin Ben-jian completely solves the problem and replays the score. The spectrum after the repetition is directly written out so that everyone can sing smoothly.
He is thorough, but he knows more about detours in case of problems.
However, Lin Ben-keung’s “completeness” is with cleverness. He thinks that in the face of difficulties, sometimes it may be better to stop, rest, even bypass, and move forward. It would be better to simply follow the path of his predecessors and blindly say “Foolishly moved by the mountains.” When he proposed infiltration 2. The lithography is a way out of the usual path of the industry.
"He often said that imagination can be endless, but when it is actually used, be cautious. He never suppresses any thoughts of engineers." The aforementioned director of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. said that Lin Benjian encouraged subordinates to imagine that it would be possible to innovate.
After starting teaching at the university two years ago, Lin Bianjian also hoped that students would not become "slaves of slavery" in the duck education. He encouraged students to cooperate and required that some assignments must be completed in teams, just as he used to reverse the semiconductor rules. He proposed the idea one by one. Afterwards, he needed the support of Zhang Zhongmou and Jiang Shangyi and others, and found allies in order to practice epoch-making technology.
"I hope we can pass on some valuable things to the next generation as much as we can." Like the original intention of writing books, Lin Benjian, 76 years old, should continue to use the school as a platform to teach thinking and practice.
4. High-speed computing, especially bitcoin mining band Wang Semiconductor;
According to the micro-network news, a number of securities institutions issued reports that the semiconductor industry will gradually bottom out in the first quarter of the first quarter, and the strongest development with high-performance computing (HPC) is expected to become the key to the growth of the semiconductor industry.
Including Fubon Securities, Uni-Presidents, Yushan Investment Advisors and Hongyuan Investment Advisors recently released the semiconductor industry outlook report, and optimistically looking forward to the performance in 2018, Fubon Securities was again the most optimistic about reunification, considering that the semiconductor industry has gradually emerged from the first quarter. At the bottom of the operation, the start-up performance in the second quarter was stronger. Among them, the largest driving force for boosting the industry's growth came from high-performance computing applications, especially the AI artificial intelligence and virtual currency mining boom, which led to the strongest semiconductor demand.
Yushan Gu’s analysis showed that Bitland’s global share accounted for more than 70%. Its flagship ant miner, the S9, was equipped with 189 ASIC chips. Currently, it is difficult to dig ore, and major mining pools need to use hundreds of miners. , Also boosted ASIC chip demand, ASIC chip using TSMC 16nm process.
Uniform investment analysis, Bitcoin mining in China costs about 3,500 US dollars, the current Bitcoin price is about 8,000-9,000 US dollars, is still profitable, mining demand is expected to continue.
Another major driving force for the development of high-efficiency computing comes from AI applications. Yushan’s investment analysis is a wide range of AI applications. It covers everyday life, safety, shopping, medical care, finance, education, etc. The most widely accepted application is self driving.
Hong Yuan’s investment analysis shows that by 2021, the semiconductor industry will have 30% of new revenues related to AI technology, including processors, network architecture, supercomputer personal terminal devices, robots, drones, and autopilot, etc. l Sensing, networking and communication devices, ASIC chips, network chips, etc.
5. Intel: Specific Earlier Processor Will Not Patch Spectre Vulnerability
After months of hard work, Intel announced on Wednesday that a specific legacy product line will not receive a patch.
In early January, Google Project Zero researchers discovered three speculative execution flaws. Spectre variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753) and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) can be resolved by installing operating system updates, but Spectre variant 2 (CVE- 2017-5715) The CPU layer needs to be patched. Intel released chip microcode (microcode) to repair products including Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake in early February and late February respectively.
The microcode revision guidance released on Wednesday added "stop" to the product status in the file table, meaning that Intel will not issue patches to it, including Bloomfield, Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, and Harpertown Xeon CO/E0. , Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale C0/M0/E0/R0, Wolfdale Xeon C0/E0, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon, belong to earlier CPUs such as Intel Core, Celeron, Pentium and Xeon, and some may even be traceable By 2008, there were few users.
Intel pointed out that after extensive investigations into the microarchitecture and microprogramming code capabilities of these products, the company decided that if the product meets one of the following three conditions, it will not release the microprogram code. The three conditions are that the actual product mitigation plan is not practical. There are few supporters of market system software, and products are less likely to be attacked for closed systems.
At the beginning of the incident, Intel stated that it would prioritize the repair of its products for five years. ZDNet cited Intel as saying that after several waves of repairs, Intel had already repaired products within nine years.
Intel announced in March that future new 8th generation Core processor products will have built-in Spectre vulnerability 2 and Meltdown's mitigation technology.