Now, the entire assets of HIDM will be auctioned. The starting price is 1.66 billion yuan. According to the auction list, the overall assets of HIDM in this auction include 19 buildings such as production and office buildings, as well as 171,265.90 sq.m of industrial land, as well as machinery and equipment, electronic equipment, vehicles, raw materials, and other items.
China is seeing a lot of bankruptcies of start-up semiconductor foundries. The government started shoveling huge amounts of money in to the segment in response to chip embargoes, and a lack of due diligence has led to massive errors and widespread fraud.
ReplyDeleteThis video (and the sequel on the collapse of QXIC) is very enlightening: https://youtu.be/uQ-4Iw8OsCg
It is irresponsible on your part to reject years of planning, investment and hard work that the Chinese govt and people have put in bringing up the foundries. You give a couple of examples of failures, but then you should also give umpteen examples of successes. In no other country, the ecosystem has developed at a pace that it has done in China. There are, and will be, always some misses, when a country does something like this from scratch.
ReplyDeleteThis might be misunderstanding. There are many successful projects in China, but this blog scope is limited by image sensors. There are not that many stories about image sensor fabs. For example, there is not much info about CIS business at SMIC, HHNEC, HLMC, XMC, Gigadevice, etc. If you have a nice story, please send it to me and I'll publish it.
DeleteGetting back to HIDM fiasco, as they say "Only those who do not try, do not fail." So, it's not a shame to talk about the failures.
The comment is in reference to Anon@July 9. Your blog presents balanced news/analysis as far as I am concerned.
DeleteYou are committing a logical fallacy and using an argumentum ad misericordiam. How can I point out the bad things when so much good has been done?
DeleteThis is a strange type of censorship you are proposing. One under which we cannot talk about errors and fraud because much hard work has been done. This is the equivalent of saying, "Most people are law-abiding citizens, so we must never talk about, or investigate theft".
When the US joined World War 2, it immediately set up the Truman Commission to investigate waste and fraud in war time production. If anyone cried, "But look at all the hard work people are doing!" they were either ignored or have been forgotten by history.
This post was about a foundry that had gone under. It was appropriate for me to post a comment about similar foundry failures. It was highly relevant.
Had this instead been an article about a successful start-up CMOS image sensor foundry which had achieved a significant milestone, then it might have been churlish for me to have made the comment I did. But it wasn't.
I had some direct discussions with both of HIDM management team and their hired Japanese design team in the past, and the conclusion for me in that time was that the whole project was flawed, their plan was basically a joke, and it was a well-designed scam, so I would definitely keep myself away from those people. I even tried to warn the local officials via my personal networks, but unfortunately my warning was disregarded in the end. With no surprises, it was exposed later by the government paper that there were corruption and bribe to the local officials happened during the project.
ReplyDeleteAnd now the whole core team of HIDM is gone or disappeared, billions of tax-payer's money were vanished that can't be got back anymore and left a big mess to the local government in behind....so to me, HIDM project is a big shame of failure.