quadibloc
Posts: 423 +275
Well, they were trying to guard against that by keeping the netlists for themselves, and by having an additional layer with two joint ventures, one of which AMD had majority ownership of.It actually seems to reek of desperation. The monetary gain is extremely modest ( something Su noted in the CC), but giving the Chinese access to core IP carries significant risk. If/when the PRC abuse the scope of the IP agreement, good luck trying to prosecute a case against the Chinese in China and trying to put the genie back into the bottle regarding the black and grey markets.At first I was not that confident about Lisa as CEO, but looks like she's doing good job aligning AMD IP with potential deals. Hopefully now they will have some money to spend on marketing.
Now that push has come to shove with all this being placed on the Entity List, though, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously, neither TSMC nor GlobalFoundries can sell chips containing U.S. origin technology to bodies on the Entity List, license or no, so theoretically China would have to build its own 14nm fabs to use the masks they have.
But a joint venture majority-owned by AMD, but phisically in China and subject to Chinese authorities can hardly expect to keep secrets from the Chinese government for long.
So AMD will get burned by having its netlists stolen, and a 28mm version or whatever will be made for China's military by the fabs China does have.
