Update: Intel issued an apology statement briefly after this article was published.  The tech giant said that its commitment to avoid supply chains from Xinjiang was an expression of compliance with US law, rather than a statement of its position on the issue.

The United States has long criticized China over the alleged widespread torture and repression of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

At the same time, Beijing has repeatedly dismissed all those allegations and claimed it to be borne of “political motivation” and “disinformation.”

Allegations and retaliation from both parties have resulted in continued tit-for-tat sanctions with Washington banning imports from the region and China taking “necessary measures” to prove its steadfastness.

To recall, the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the region is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years, has reached unprecedented levels.

By July this year, the White House opted to issue a tough warning to US companies doing business in the Xinjiang province.

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Calling US investments a potential threat, the government has warned American firms that they may wind up breaking the law if they don’t leave the region, a move that has prompted accusations of hypocrisy from Beijing.

In a Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory published jointly by the State Department, Treasury, Commerce, Homeland Security, Labor, and the Office of the US Trade Representative, it was stated that “Businesses and individuals that do not exit supply chains, ventures, and/or investments connected to Xinjiang could run a high risk of violating US law.”

Between a rock and a hard place, there is Intel

In 1985, when Intel entered the Chinese market, it was one of the first American companies to do so following China’s reform and opening-up.

Inevitably, the company has reaped huge benefits from China over those decades — by 2020, 26% of Intel’s revenue came from mainland China and nearby Hong Kong.

Nearly 10% of the company’s properties, factories, and equipment are located in China. 

Yet, to the surprise of many, especially Chinese netizens, the US chipmaker told its suppliers in a public letter to not source products or labor from the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

According to a report by Reuters, Intel said it had been “required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region”, following restrictions imposed by “multiple governments”.

Intel just joined sanction on suppliers frm #Xinjiang, China pic.twitter.com/2T7TSJEd1Q

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) December 21, 2021

The letter has caused a stir and led to severe criticism from Chinese users on Chinese social media, especially Twitter-like service Weibo.

In fact, Bloomberg said a hashtag on the topic has generated more than 250 million views on Weibo.

As the nationalist tabloid run by the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily, Global Times puts it, the move by Intel is “an attempt to prove the company’s own innocence under the pressure of the extreme political environment in the US, as well as pleasing US society with some fine words.”

To date, not many American companies have done what Intel did.

Global Times, in a separate report, added: “Most US enterprises, which Chinese people are familiar with, hesitantly and negatively support Washington’s demands to boycott Xinjiang’s products made by the so-called forced labor,”

Experts reckon that Intel “could afford this move simply because there are very few Xinjiang products in its current supply chain, and its CPU is rigidly demanded in China.”

It seems that Intel isn’t worried about retaliation from China and sees this as a move that favors the US and Western world, never mind that China is Intel’s largest international source of business revenue for six consecutive years. 

Even in Europe earlier this year, French authorities opened a “crimes against humanity” probe into four fashion brands namely Uniqlo, Zara-owner Inditex, and French textile firm SMCP (not to be confused with news outlet South China Morning Post).

The move came after complaints from the European Uyghur Institute and other pressure groups that those retailers were profiting from the use of forced labor from Xinjiang.

For context, the Xinjiang region produces 85% of China’s cotton and accounts for about a fifth of global cotton supplies.

A quick apology

Briefly after this article was published, Intel issued an apology statement over its open letter to suppliers. “We apologise for the trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners and the public. Intel is committed to becoming a trusted technology partner and accelerating joint development with China,” Intel said as per Reuters‘ report.

The post Intel under fire in China after shunning Xinjiang appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Over the past week, the Southeast Asian nation faced arguably the worst flooding in history in various parts of the country. 

Heavy monsoon rainfall besieged peninsular Malaysia’s inadequate drainage systems last weekend, which was especially devastating for people in the state of Selangor.

The floods have displaced over 60,000 people nationwide and have killed 27 people so far — the highest since the 2014 major floods. 

Inaccessible roads have also disrupted multiple supply chains across the nation.

Port Klang, in the state of Selangor, is Southeast Asia’s second-largest port, located in Klang. Klang also happened to be one of the worst-hit flood areas, together with neighboring township Shah Alam. 

The situation on the ground in certain parts of Shah Alam was so bad, that it had driven some victims to source food and water from closed convenience stores in the area, while others desperately cried for food and essentials atop the roofs of vehicles and houses.

Shah Alam also happens to be where a number of global semiconductor names have situated factories at. 

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As workers in these factories tend to live around the area, they have been struggling to either leave or enter their residences and workplaces.

BE Semiconductor, a Dutch supplier of chipmaking equipment had lowered its fourth-quarter revenue outlook on Monday as its main factory in Shah Alam was affected by the floods.

It had halted operations for product assemblies, with losses to the tune of US$28 million. 

“First estimates of one-time costs associated with materials and labor necessary to repair or reproduce any systems affected are in the range of 4 — 6 million euros and will be taken as a charge to fourth-quarter earnings,” said the group in a statement.  

The company did not disclose which of its clients would be affected by its closure, but a report by Reuters showed that Foxconn, STMicroelectronics, ASE, Forehope, Micron, and LG Innotek are among its list of existing customers.

This semiconductor supply chain disruption comes at an inopportune time, and just days after Intel unveiled its US$7 billion Malaysia chip factory plan. 

Malaysia is a major player in the global electronics supply chain and is a hub for semiconductor packaging — making up a tenth of the sector’s global trade.

However, the global Covid-19 pandemic had led to multiple strict lockdowns by the government over the past two years, preventing chip factories from being able to operate normally.

Additionally, the government’s lockdowns had severely restrained the manufacture and supply of aluminum capacitors this year. These capacitors are essential chip-related components in consumer and industry electronics such as EVs and computers, which further strained the global semiconductor shortage.

However, things may look up for both affected people and industries — the cargo congestion in Port Klang appears to be easing up, and lockdowns had ceased since September this year.

Nevertheless, industry experts and watchers are still nervous about the impact of the Omicron variant, which might cause yet another dent in the global semiconductor supply chain.

The post Malaysian floods disrupts semiconductor supply chain; devastates workers appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

For years, there has been a state-led drive to achieve semiconductor independence in China. Then came the pandemic and almost every other month there is news on Chinese tech giants venturing into their own chip side-gig.

The most recent, though, is Chinese phone maker Oppo, who launched its first self-developed chip last week, known as the MariSilicon X.

As more companies in China strive to achieve semiconductor supply autonomy amid a global chip shortage, Oppo aims to continue increasing investment in developing chips in-house.

At the two-day Oppo Inno Day 2021 last week, founder and CEO Chen Mingyong said the name of Oppo’s chip is inspired by the Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the sea in the world, reflecting the difficulties of developing a chip.

“The birth of MariSilicon X signals that Oppo has entered the ‘deep waters’ of R&D. Technology companies must solve key problems with breakthroughs in key technologies. Without core technology there can be no future,” Chen said.

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The chip is being manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) using its 6-nanometer process technology. 

It is the first NPU (neural processing unit) chip designed for imaging at the mobile terminal. It will be featured on the latest series of Oppo’s high-end flagship Find X devices in the first quarter of 2022.

The chip is almost 20 times faster and halves energy consumption for some tasks relative to Oppo’s previous top-of-the-line smartphone, the company said in a statement.

To top it off, Oppo said the MariSilicon X can produce AI-assisted 4K night videos with a high dynamic range, applying image enhancements typically seen on still images to moving pictures.

The MariSilicon project in China is being headed by Qualcomm veteran Jiang Bo.

However, he told reporters that the ongoing global semiconductor chip shortage, even in China, will not affect the production of MariSilicon X. The Chinese phone maker isn’t the first one to have plans on developing in-house chips. 

In fact, other domestic phone makers like Xiaomi and VIVO have also released their self-developed imaging chips, the Xiaomi Surge C1 and VIVO V1 respectively.

Analysts reckon that in-house development of critical chips could also strengthen supply chain controls and potentially ease widespread shortages and disruptions.

Overall, the pandemic, if anything, has fueled a huge need for self-sufficiency, especially among technology giants that are often stuck in between the supply and demand conundrum. 

The post Oppo joins China semiconductor race with self-built chipset appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

About two months ago, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a new server chip that’s based on advanced 5-nanometer technology. It was dubbed as China’s most advanced chip, a milestone in the country’s pursuit of semiconductor self-sufficiency. The tech giant did not stop there. Adding on to its in-house chip collection, Alibaba apparently has just developed the world’s first, DRAM-based 3D chip that merges logic and memory.

According to Chinese news outlet Pandaily, through a now-deleted post on Chinese social networking site Weibo, Alibaba through its DAMO (Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook) Academy has successfully developed a 3D stacked in-memory computing (IMC) chip that can help overcome the von Neumann bottleneck, a limitation in chip speed resulting from the CPU needing to wait for data to be delivered from memory.

The new chip apparently also meets the needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and other scenarios for large bandwidth, high capacity memory, and extreme computing power. In one specific AI test,  the chip improved regular performance by over 10 times.

Clarifying on the chip since the post was deleted shortly after it was posted on Weibo, Alibaba told The Register that the breakthrough chip exists but they declined to provide additional details.

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For context, computers have been designed according to the von Neumann architecture for the past 70 years. Through this architecture, programs and data are held in a memory unit, while the CPU works as a separate unit. Because the memory and processor are separated, data needs to be moved back and forth between the two, making latency unavoidable.

Now,  given the development of advanced processors that can operate much faster than data can be fed to them, the von Neumann model can get quite challenging. At this point, the computing power of processors is increasing at a rate of about 3.1 times every two years. Memory performance however is only rising at a rate of about 1.4 times during the same period.

Reports indicated Alibaba Cloud believes that IMC is the best way to solve these problems. In fact, Alibaba believes this new architecture could be used in virtual/augmented reality, astronomical data calculation, unmanned driving, remote sensing data analysis, and other scenarios in the future.

Alibaba has been part of a growing cohort of technology companies in China venturing further into semiconductors, partly spurred by President Xi Jinping’s goal of achieving self-sufficiency in high-tech sectors. 

To recall, search-engine operator Baidu in August announced it has begun mass production of its artificial intelligence chips, while handset maker Xiaomi is pushing into similar ventures. In the West, tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla are all shunning established chip firms and bringing certain aspects of chip development in-house, based on company announcements and media reports.

The post The newest chip by Alibaba is the world’s first – here’s why appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

For years, Apple has been using Qualcomm modems in its iPhones before shifting to Intel’s when its relationship with the former started to sour. Following that, news began to surface that the iPhone maker may just create its own modems to cut reliance on Qualcomm.

However, things might take a different turn now as Apple is said to have selected Taiwanese chip giant TSMC to make its 5G iPhone modems instead.

According to Nikkei Asia, quoting people familiar with the matter,  Apple plans to adopt Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s 4-nanometer chip production technology to mass-produce its first in-house 5G modem chip from 2023 onwards.

Additionally, Apple is also apparently working on its own radio frequency (RF) and millimeter wave components to pair with the modem.

That is on top of an in-house power management chip that Apple is producing specifically for the modem. For context, all of the components in the latest iPhone series are provided by Qualcomm.

This isn’t an isolated move by Apple, however. The company has been attempting to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm for several years and the latter has also recently confirmed that its share of iPhone modem orders will drop to about 20% in 2023.

Both companies finally settled a lengthy legal battle over patent royalties in 2019. To be fair, the modem chips segment has long been dominated by Qualcomm, which has built a large patent wall around the technology, as well as Taiwan’s MediaTek and China’s Huawei Technologies.

Intel, which supplied modem chips to Apple alongside Qualcomm since 2016, dropped out of smartphone modem chip development and sold the business to Apple in 2019.

“In addition to saving money on fees it currently pays to Qualcomm, developing its own modem would pave the way for Apple to integrate TSMC’s chip with its in-house mobile processor, multiple sources said,” according to the report by Nikkei.

Apple’s relationship with TSMC isn’t a new one. In fact, the Taiwanese chip titan has been a vital partner for Apple in its strategy of designing more of its own components, and is the sole producer of iPhone processors and M1 Mac processors. 

The move would eventually give the US tech giant more control over its hardware integration capability as well as boost the chips’ efficiency.

“Currently, most mobile chip developers integrate 5G modem systems onto the processor chip,” added the Nikkei report.

Here’s what TSMC is providing Apple with

Modems in smartphones such as Apple’s connect to cellular networks and let devices browse the web, download apps, and make phone calls.

It requires more layers of engineering than some other types of processors. Apple began in-house work on modems about three years ago, and the part typically takes at least two years to build and another year and a half to test.

Basically, for the new 5G iPhone modem, sources told Nikkei that Apple is using TSMC’s 5-nm chip production to design and test-produce the chip.

It will then use the even more-advanced 4-nm technology for mass production. For a phone to go on sale globally, it must be qualified to work on many local networks, a process that requires rigorous field testing by expert engineers.

So with these in mind, it seems that it will take some time after 2023 for the commercialization of Apple’s own 5G modem.

The post Apple: Bye Qualcomm, hello TSMC? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.