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Easing into the new year with some light reading on U.S. tech export controls to China |
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Jan 03, 2008 at 04:23 PM |
After taking off some time absence during the Christmas and New Year's holiday break, Chip Shots plans to ease back into things---which shouldn't be too difficult considering the paucity of chip/solar/MEMS/FPOE/etc.
news that broke over the past few weeks. Several bloggable goodies left over from the waning days of 2007 will find their way into this space in the month ahead (I'm not quite done with IEDM yet!), as well as upcoming coverage inspired by and emanating from both SEMI's annual Industry Strategy Symposium forecastorama and shmoozefest in Half Moon Bay, CA, week after next, and the beguiling Flexible Electronics and Displays Conference, to be held in the Phoenix area the following week.
In the meantime, a New York Times article about whether U.S. high-tech sales to China might actually help bolster the Chinese military caught my attention when it appeared yesterday. A report from the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control evidently questions the rigor of the Bush administration's policies on exporting high-tech gear to China.
Five Chinese companies, designated as "valid end-users" in October, have been given the green light to import critical technologies without licenses, with about a dozen others in line hoping to get such a designation. Turns out that four of the five companies are inhabitants of the semiconductor ecosystem: Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics, Applied Material's Chinese unit, National Semiconductor's Chinese facilities, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (better known as SMIC).
The article states that "...the Wisconsin Project report... asserts that two nonmilitary Chinese companies designated as trustworthy are in fact high risk because of links to the Chinese government, the People's Liberation Army and other Chinese entities accused in the past of ties to Syria and Iran."
No, Applied and National Semi are not tied somehow to the Chinese military-industrial complex, and SMIC appears to be free of such dubious connections as well (although I wonder if SMIC's recently announced licensing deal with IBM for 45-nm bulk CMOS process tech would have happened without the Shanghai company's landing of the US government's "validated end-user" status).
However, according to the Times' piece, the report does single out Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics, which it states "is majority owned 'through a corporate chain' by the China Electronics Corporation, which the report says is a government conglomerate that produces military equipment along with consumer electronics. It has a unit, the report says, that procures arms for the military."
Of course, any number of high-end and not-so-high-end ICs can and will end up in various defense-related gizmos and systems and potentially cause bodily harm at some point in their lifecycle, but that's not what's at issue here. Whether HHNEC is playing a more direct role as some sort of semiconductor arms merchant remains to be seen, and the article sheds no additional light on the company's level of involvement---or lack thereof.
But the feature does contain one factual error that gets repeated periodically when nonspecialist reporters (and editors) , even at a newspaper as presitigious as the Grey Lady, get involved in stories involving the chip manufacturing realm and don't differentiate the chipmakers from the tool companies: for the umpteenth time since I've been working this beat, Applied Materials was referred to as "a maker of semiconductors based in California."
At least the "paper of record" got the California part right.
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