The US may place a series of limits on Korean semiconductor chips made in China
President Joe Biden's administration is planning to limit the number of advanced chips made by Korean companies but made in China in order to 'isolate' some part of the economy's semiconductor manufacturing industry. second largest economy in the world. The move is expected to hit South Korean tech giants like Samsung and SK Hynix. These are all companies that have made significant investments in China.
As reported by Reuters, US Undersecretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Alan Estevez said that Washington is likely to put some more stringent limits on the number of chips that Korean companies can use. China can produce at production lines located in China. However, details about the new restrictions have yet to be disclosed.
South Korea is the world leader in memory chip production with a total market value estimated at more than 70 billion USD. South Korea's semiconductor industry is mainly driven by two of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Both companies have invested billions of dollars in their main manufacturing facilities in China over the years.
Specifically, Samsung Electronics currently operates two main manufacturing facilities in China, one for NAND (flash memory) located in Xi'an and the other for DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) based in Suzhou. In addition, Samsung has also established three cutting-edge R&D centers in China, even more in its home country of Korea. Samsung Xi'an factory currently accounts for 42.5% of Samsung's total NAND production and 15.3% of global capacity. This is also the largest overseas investment of the Kim Chi technology giant, with an initial cost of up to 7 billion USD for production infrastructure alone.
Although SK Hynix does not have an R&D center in China, it has a series of large-scale DRAM and NAND memory chip production facilities in Wuxi, Chongqing and Dalian. The Wuxi plant is now responsible for producing more than 40% of the company's DRAM chips. In addition to these two technology giants, there are many other Korean semiconductor businesses and startups that have, are and will plan to set up production bases in China.
On the opposite side, China is also the largest market for Korean semiconductor companies. Mainland China and Hong Kong account for about 60% of the country's semiconductor exports, according to data from the Korea International Trade Association. However, the ongoing US-China trade war has pushed South Korea into a dilemma.
If the US is determined with the above plan, it is clear that a series of Korean companies will face serious losses, leading to the prospect of the national economy falling into recession as an inevitable consequence. South Korea's Minister of Industry said that so far, there have been no formal discussions between South Korea and the United States about setting limits on semiconductor manufacturing technology and output in China. .
However, both countries have reached an agreement not to let sanctions and common policies affect the current and future investments of Korean companies in China. Last October, both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix received a one-year exemption from US export restrictions. The country is currently planning to enter a discussion with the Joe Biden administration to extend the waiver.
You should read it
- Huawei surpassed Qualcomm, becoming China's number one chip supplier
- Samsung is ready to pump an additional $ 116 billion for the battle in the mobile chip market
- Samsung invested $ 6 billion in the new 7nm EUV factory
- Intel unveiled a powerful 9th generation H series CPU for gaming laptops
- Nvidia's 7nm process GPU will probably launch in 2020?
- Toshiba applies PS3 processor chip to laptop
- China secretly turned Huawei into the most powerful weapon in the chip war
- Not everyone knows the top 10 interesting facts about America
May be interested
- UK pours £1 billion in semiconductor industry fundingthe uk government has recently officially announced the national semiconductor strategy.
- Intel introduces a new series of H-series chips for laptops, clocking beyond 5.0GHza commendable effort for intel when its new series of chips still use the 14nm process but have a very high clock speed.
- Samsung upgraded hardware for Chrome-based computersaccording to notebookcheck, the korean manufacturer has just made hardware upgrades for two models of the chromebook series 5 and chromebox series 3.
- China produces x86 chips close to AMD server processorscopyrighted x86 ip processors show that they are stepping into the commercial war and dealing with national security.
- Macbook will probably use AMD chipsthe delay in offering intel core i5 / i7 processors to upgrade to the recent macbook pro series has made the apple 'quite annoying'.
- Apple is in talks with Chinese companies to supply memory chips for the iPhonea company called yangtze memory is expected to start producing nand flash chips this year and apple is in talks with the company to supply chips for apple's iphone.
- Samsung announced 2nm SF2Z chip manufacturing technology, a new solution for high-quality AI productsgrasping the hot development trend of the global ai field, korean technology giant samsung has just announced a series of new chip manufacturing technologies as well as many other initiatives related to artificial intelligence.
- Opponents of MacBook Air from Samsung cost 1,650 USDsamsung series 9, 13.3-inch screen size like apple's laptop but slimmer and lighter, started selling today. in addition, the korean electronics company also introduced an 11.1-inch laptop version.
- Compare the size of high-end chips from Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei and Applequalcomm snapdragon, samsung exynos, huawei kirin and apple a-series are the four leading flagship chip makers for mobile devices in the smartphone market. of these 4, there are 3 firms integrated for android flagship smartphones, and a-series chips, apple only put them on their own devices.
- What happens if some of the billions of chip transistors fail?semiconductor companies are the ones who can give you the correct answer. they have a concept called efficiency management (yield management) or classification (binning).