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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

#171

Post by BrannonB »

krupan wrote: post #146
BrannonB wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-) My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering. In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer t…

Sorry, but that comment makes it sound like you've either never used pencils, or you have never used verilog.

25 years of high performance chip design.

Perhaps you’re an FPGA guy? The tradeoffs are different in that world.

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

#172

Post by deepnotderp »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #75
deepnotderp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^^ 100x. If it wasn't for integrated circuits, the u.s. likely would not have won the race. And it's not just because I'm a chip guy.

Wow “chip guy” is understatement of the year. I just looked up vathys.ai from your profile. Very excited to see what comes from that! My personal focus is in embedded computing (Arduino/Pi), and seeing all of these amazing AI-focused chip startups makes me really excited for the days once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning - THEN we’ll get to see the future we were promised in the 90’s!

Heh, thanks!

> Very excited to see what comes from that!

I am too :)

>once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning

I think that day will come sooner than you think.

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

#174

Post by neuromantik8086 »

forapurpose wrote: post #154
neuromantik8086 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic immigrants these days are also potentially undercutting/warping expectations about labor in academic labs. 36k (for grad students) or 50k (for postdocs) are hardly acceptable salaries from an American perspective, but to folks from India and China those salaries are fortunes relatively speaking. To Indians/Chinese a 70 hour work week for that money might be worth it. Contrast this to past academic immigratio…

> immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities People in the U.S. have been complaining about the 'values' and 'sensibilities' of the new immigrants since Benjamin Franklin would go off about Germans. Then of course it was Irish, the Italians, etc. etc. Older generations of Central European Jewish people even complained about the Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Of cour…

> The sensibilities of 1930s Germany?

Or maybe the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe, which was friendlier towards socialist, pro-labor policies than both modern India and China (people tend to forget that the SPD existed before Hitler).

I know it's a hot-button issue, but I'm not anti-immigration and you're preaching at the wrong person. I will strongly disagree with your somewhat extreme belief that sensibilities are purely individual; having lived two separate countries, with two separate languages and cultures, it's a bit quixotic to claim that cultural and other environmental factors are irrelevant, and cultural universals are notoriously difficult to pin down.

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

#175

Post by seanmcdirmid »

intrasight wrote: post #165
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business school and liberal arts kids will mostly go back to China, STEM is very different.

My Chinese STEP colleagues have or plan to go back. Too many cultural and political impediments to progress here now.

Is that new? Because the trend has been very stabke for the past 10 years: fuerdai kids (with rich parents) who come to america to study major in liberal arts and business but will almost always go back because that is where their connections are. These are relatively new foreign students in the USA and constitute much of the recent boom.

The more tradition Chinese students who have been coming here since the 1980s (and don’t have very rich parents) mostly pick STEM majors. On graduating, they would rather work for Google in Mountain View than Tencent in Shenzhen.

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

#176

Post by ksk »

fermienrico wrote: post #136
ksk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it. Could you explain your reasoning?

I can give you an example of semiconductor manufacturing and its supply chain. Say, I am a company with X billions to throw at building a Fab. You could probably build one, but finding lithography suppliers, automation, building long term relationships with them and being able to do it in a cost effective manner is a monumental challenge. Intel, Global Foundries, TSMC runs on decades of internal knowledge to be able…

>I can give you an example of semiconductor manufacturing and its supply chain. Say, I am a company with X billions to throw at building a Fab. You could probably build one, but finding lithography suppliers, automation, building long term relationships with them and being able to do it in a cost effective manner is a monumental challenge.

Okay, all that sounds logical, but they're not building a fab from scratch here. They already have (IIRC) 30 operational fabs in China. If you said this in 1999 or 2000 when China had no fabs you could have had a point - but they would have proven you wrong because they did precisely what you said they couldn't do by throwing money at the problem.

>Another example is Tesla. They will and in the past have throw billions of dollars to build a solid manufacturing lines, suppliers and personnel; but you can see the challenge today when theyre trying to ramp up.

Tesla had never built a single car before they got started, I do not think its a comparable example.

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

#177

Post by oldandtired »

It has been interesting reading the various opinions being expressed here in this discussion. As a couple of writers have noted, the appropriation of knowledge (without attribution to the source) has been the mainstay of technological advancement by the major powers over many decades, if not centuries.

Even though it is popular to classify such appropriation as "theft", it isn't theft. The term is used often in a cynical way by those who have appropriated such knowledge from others before them to provide a justification to maintain an advantage over those who follow them. Theft requires that the original party no longer have access to the items in question. For theft of knowledge, one would have to ensure that the deaths of those who know it have occurred and that there are no extent records available for that knowledge.

There have been many in the USA, including government organisations (civil and military), who have appropriated knowledge from others for their own benefit. One only needs to look at the history since the late 1800's to see many of these appropriations.

Many countries, organisations and individuals have done this. It has happened in the past, it happens today and it will happen in the future. In one sense, the only solution is for the free dissemination of knowledge in every area, but in many areas that will not happen.

I have a friend who will be prosecuted if he releases any information about a certain subject matter that he developed and was going to use commercially because a certain government pushed another government to appropriate that knowledge. These things happen and happen regularly.

So China appropriating technological know-how to various areas is nothing new and is just following in the footsteps of those who have gone before. So getting in a tizzy about it is not helping. If one wants to make a difference then be better at that area than anyone else. Produce what the consumers want at a price they are willing to pay and you will get a market share.

If someone copies you, then use that as a marketing strategy. Make sure that you can do it better than them. There are enough examples of companies and individuals that produce quality and still make enough to keep going. Look at your game plan and stop worrying inappropriately about the competition. If you are being copied then you must be doing something right and you can use that to your advantage, even if you are a one-man shop.

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

#178

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

I worked for Nokia when we outsourced part of our R&D to Huang Shu. 2 years later many of the sites employees moved on to work for Chinese gov backed tech firm, and the source code of what I wrote for Nokia and that of several colleagues popping up on github. It wasn't critical in terms of copyright or deep secrets about the product. But it contained info that allows an outsider get a very accurate picture of the software supply-chain and a potential gold-mine for further social engineering and/or attacks against the firms supply chain security.

So if you have the habit of adding your name in the /* comment stanza */ in all your source code, I urge you to "vanity search" your name in github/gitlab repos.

Also if you are serious about supply-chain security, and go to great lengths of buying in China but assembling your IP in Malaysia, Vietnam, etc, ... remember to compartmentalize. If you're a person of interest (any engineer in a larger tech-company is), then use a dedicated phone for communicating with China where you install WeChat and be careful how you move information across the 2 domains.

edit: WeChat Security concerns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat#Security_concerns

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

#179

Post by PakG1 »

selectodude wrote: post #161
allegedganon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well the vast majority of these kids would prefer to stay in the US. I'm afraid you're making assumptions here. America is not where opportunity is these days, especially in the hardware manufacturing sector.

>America is not where opportunity is these days Yes, but the living standards in the United States are far higher. Sure you may never become a billionaire here like you can in China, but you can breathe the air and the traffic isn't that bad. The schools are better, the houses are bigger. China may get there, but I know where I'd rather be over the next 20-30 years. And they can always move back.

I'd be wary of thinking that it'll take that long. Live in Shenzhen and it is crazy the amount of progress here every year. Public transportation is way better than most American cities and housing is more expensive than most American cities. Apartments here regularly go for a couple million USD, the ads are plastered on the windows of every real estate agency on every street corner. The air here is quite breathable too, and from what I hear, other cities are getting better as well.

Yeah, I think US living standards are higher for now. But I can totally see China seeing parity in less than 20 years. For one thing, they have made large strides in infrastructure investment, and for another thing, they've been realizing and acting on their need to clean up their environmental act over the last few years.

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

#180

Post by janeroe »

adventured wrote: post #148
hospes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century. China is already #1 by GDP (PPP) with ~$23 trillions [1]. US is #2 with ~$19 trillions (numbers are from 2017). So here China already overtook US. If you look at nominal GDP, then US is #1 with ~20 trillions and China is #2 with ~14 trillions [2]. With…

> With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well. That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship and the world's most indebted nation (before they even get well-off at the median, which bodes very badly for their future). Not to mention that the people of China have few rights at all at…

> The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20

Right, and North Korea is the second best country in the world according to the research of North Korean scientists.

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