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Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

nytimes.com

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Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#121

Post by jonhendry18 »

scruple wrote: post #115
epc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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 T​r​u​m​p's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?

> The current US government approach to immigrants, legal or otherwise, would seem designed to convince immigrants to go elsewhere. I'm curious where you live and wether or not you can actually, personally, witness the effects of legal immigration there. In SoCal, where I've spent the last decade+, what you're saying rings completely hollow, to me. I have seen literal tour buses of mainland Chinese folks touring new…

Are they touring those developments in order to find a place to live?

Or are they investors who will stay in China?

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#122

Post by jonhendry18 »

worldengineer wrote: post #106
epc wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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 T​r​u​m​p's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?

[flagged]

Xi Jing Ping bribed Trump not to kill ZTE.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#123

Post by jonhendry18 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #117
worldengineer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

OTOH, China doesn't seem to want immigrants either. It's close to impossible to get Chinese citizenship if one would want to, for example.

I would assume there are lots of expats living and working in China.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#124

Post by allegedganon »

tzahola wrote: post #50
wishart_washy wrote: post #44

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 pa…

Well, 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!!!

Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space.

There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages.

Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: people in the hardware business still haven't understood and digested the lessons of open source and sharing. The whole industry still operates on notions of "industrial secrets" and spends tremendous amounts of energy trying to hide how what they build works.

I mean if you need a example of how bad it still is, the dominant word still used to describe a chunk of functionality in that world is "IP".

Who in their right mind in the software industry would call a piece of code they wrote "intellectual property", as in "just download my IP and use it in your project" ?

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#125

Post by jonhendry18 »

394549 wrote: post #118
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation. The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists.

> The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists. I would say that's debatable. The USSR did beat the US to orbit (and in space station technology), but it fell short getting to the Moon, launching scientific space probes, and building a space plane.

"The USSR did beat the US to orbit (and in space station technology), but it fell short getting to the Moon, launching scientific space probes, and building a space plane."

Those are arguably issues of running out of resources, to some extent, not inability to innovate. At some point you need money to turn innovative ideas into reality.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#126

Post by orbital-decay »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #123
orbital-decay wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, China doesn't seem to want immigrants either. It's close to impossible to get Chinese citizenship if one would want to, for example.

I would assume there are lots of expats living and working in China.

Yeah, certainly, especially in places like Shekou. It just doesn't seem possible to fully assimilate, you will always be a laowai.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#127

Post by nerpderp83 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #99
wishart_washy wrote: post #44

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 pa…

Too 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 kind…

> And the innovation never comes from the chip companies, it comes from companies that are building the products.

I agree with you.

Eng has really got to stop thinking they are the source of ideas, most good ideas come from customers that have needs that can't be currently met. Eng balances design constraints, as companies grow, hierarchies get stronger and creativity drops. Maximum innovation comes from small companies solving customer (the ones building the products) problems.

The Jelly Bean chip business could get disrupted by the proper mix of analog and digital. The PSoC [1] was almost but not quite there

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSoC

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#128

Post by chmod775 »

worldengineer wrote: post #82
nimish wrote: post #67

History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry. Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.

[flagged]

> China broke all the rules TODAY. and is still breaking them.

Speaking about whataboutism...

Let's not forget the cases of state-level industrial espionage performed by the NSA against targets such as France (with Germany's help) as well as against Germany itself, which both occurred and came to light within the last 20 years. There's probably more but those are the ones I remember.

There's also no indication the NSA has stopped these activities. Unless the the former being revealed by Snowden finally changed anything.

Everyone is spying on everyone right now. And why shouldn't they? The internet age has made it much easier than it used to be.

You can't demand change and be outraged at other countries' behavior unless you first change your own. At least the Chinese refrain from virtue signaling at the same time.

So. In conclusion I don't think this is a case of "whataboutism", but rather a case of "Look who is complaining".

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#129

Post by jonhendry18 »

tormeh wrote: post #100
tryptophan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any examples? As far as I am aware, the USSR only beat USA at getting into space first.

The NK-33 engines from 1960s and 70s Soviet Union were used by American space companies as late as 2014. These were just stuck and forgotten in a Russian warehouse. Doubtlessly other Soviet technology has also been lost and awaits rediscovery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

Not sure if that's a testament to innovation, or to the American tendency to throw things away.

American engines of the same vintage probably would have been used if they were available for a similar price.

Re: Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

#130

Post by deehouie »

worldengineer wrote: post #87
vkou wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout 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.

> 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…

Just curious, have you been to China?
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