Global shortage sparks run on vintage chipmaking machines
Massive demand for semiconductors drives resellers in the United States to hunt for and buy old tools
San Francisco — Minnesotabased Polar Semiconductor makes chips for automakers but is booked beyond capacity. Expanding production lines to help solve a chip shortage that is shutting down car factories around the world is not feasible — in part due to the scarcity of older-style chipmaking machinery.
Chip factories like Polar use these tools to make chips on 200millimeter silicon wafers, which were state-of-the-art two decades ago. Now, advanced chips are made using much larger wafers, but there is still much demand for simpler, older chips.
The demand has been supercharged by a combination of the COVID-19-driven boom in computer gear and unexpected strength in auto sales.
General Motors on Wednesday extended production cuts at three North American plants and added a fourth to the list of factories hit. Fiat Chrysler owner Stellantis warned the pain could linger far into the year. Shortages forced Ford Motor to slash shifts for production of its F-150 pickup truck, a longtime profit driver.
Automakers use a range of chips in cars. Some, such as those in infotainment systems, are made in the same cutting-edge chip factories that make smartphone chips. But chips in braking and engine systems are made using older, proven technologies that meet automakers’ durability and reliability requirements.
The machines to make those older chips can take six to nine months to find, said Surya Iyer, vice-president of operations and quality at Polar.
“There’s no way I can expand capacity beyond just stretching my limits,” Iyer said. “A real capacity increase would take nine to 12 months, minimum.”
Resellers of chipmaking gear say they cannot find used equipment, leading some buyers to stalk old factories in the United States, Japan and Europe, waiting for them to close in hopes of snapping up the gear inside.
“Demand is hot for used equipment, but we don’t have enough of them to cope with demand,” said Bruce Kim, chief executive of South Korea’s SurplusGLOBAL, one of the largest dealers of used chipmaking gear.
He said used equipment prices have gone up by as much as 20 percent over the past six months. Meanwhile, the number of refurbished 200 mm tools fell to 1,000, down from between 7,000-8,000 a decade ago.
Ohio-based Rite Track, in normal times, would buy up old chipmaking equipment, upgrade it and sell it to chip factories.
But Chief Executive Tim Hayden said the recent squeeze has spurred the company to spend more time sending technicians out to upgrade tools that are installed on factory floors in order to squeeze more chips out of them.
“You just can’t go out on the open market and buy a used 200 mm tool. They’re just not readily available,” Hayden said. “So people are getting a little bit more creative.”
Demand for old tools is so robust that buyers are looking at every kind of factory. One example is Spin Memory in Fremont, California, which is designing a new kind of memory chip.
It maintains a small “pilot production line”, mostly to provide samples to potential customers, said Chief Executive Tom Sparkman. Even though Spin Memory’s tools use 20-year-old technology, Sparkman gets offers to buy them almost every day.
“We haven’t taken the plunge to get rid of it yet, but some days it’s tempting,” he said.
Toolmakers such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, meanwhile, are enjoying a boom in business by refurbishing or recreating some of their greatest hits from the 1990s and earlier.
“It’s really exploding,” said Mike Rosa, head of strategic and technical marketing for a group at Applied Materials, the world’s biggest chip-equipment vendor.
David Haynes, a managing director at Lam Research, said demand for 200 mm tools was once mostly from China as it worked to build up its domestic chipmaking industry.
Now, he said, customers from around the world are looking to buy or upgrade older tools.
Still, investment in older technology lags relative to the spending on more advanced production lines, or “nodes” as they are known in the industry.
“Most of the capital expenditure has been going into advanced nodes,” said Tyson Tuttle, chief executive of Silicon Laboratories, which designs automotive chips to be made on older technology.
Chipmakers “have always relied on the fact that the digital guys move out of the older nodes and that frees up capacity for all the support chips. The problem is, the digital guys aren’t moving out as fast. The mainstream nodes are all just jammed”, Tuttle said.
Demand is hot for used equipment, but we don’t have enough of them to cope with demand.”
Bruce Kim, chief executive of South Korea’s SurplusGLOBAL, one of the largest dealers of used chipmaking gear
Updated regulations on the protection of Beijing’s historical and cultural areas came into effect last week, highlighting the capital’s determination to preserve its areas of historical interest.
As a world-famous city and an embodiment of Chinese civilization, Beijing was approved as one of the first national historical and cultural cities in 1982, said Zhang Qing, deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Beijing People’s Congress.
To continually update the local regulations, which have been in force for 16 years, will help to transform the ideas and requirements for the protection of historical and cultural cities into institutional rules, in a bid to further improve the protection of Beijing’s character, Zhang added.
The new regulations make it clear that the scope of protection for Beijing’s historical and cultural areas covers all the administrative districts.
By strictly ensuring no more time-honored areas are demolished, the new regulations aim to preserve the overall pattern of these areas, which highlight gentle, open and magnificent spaces, according to local officials.
At the beginning of 2021, two streets, both with more than 700 years of history in downtown Beijing, opened with a revitalized character after renovations.
One of them is Gulou Xidajie, or Drum Tower West Street, in Beijing’s Xicheng district.
He Xiangdong, a 75-year-old local resident, said: “Three years ago, it wasn’t like this. There were cars everywhere. What a mess!”
Having lived in the area for most of his life, He witnessed the process of the street’s transformation from chaos to order.
Gulou Xidajie has kept the breadth it had more than 700 years ago. But as illegal buildings and car parking grew, the street became congested and noisy.
To improve the situation, Xicheng district launched a threeyear action plan to tidy up and revive the street in June 2017.
The plan covered multiple aspects that ranged from demolishing illegal buildings, blocking off hole-in-the-wall shops and stopping vehicles from parking illegally.
In the past three years, 308 illegal buildings in the street, covering about 13,900 square meters, have been demolished. Also, 214 illegal advertising boards and 212 unapproved hole-in-the-wall shops were dealt with.
“More than a decade ago, Gulou Xidajie was a street where vehicles were not allowed to stop, but the rule could not be enforced at all. Illegal parking became more and more serious (in the past few years),” said Liu Weiyan, a senior officer involved in the three-year action plan.
There are a large number of residents living in hutong, or alleyways, who bought cars but had no place to park. So they had to park vehicles on the sidewalk of Gulou Xidajie.
More than 600 vehicles were illegally parked along the 1.7-kilometer-long street at peak time, forcing pedestrians to risk walking on the road.
After investigations and studies, Xicheng district mobilized neighboring enterprises and public institutions to share some of their parking places with residents in immediate need. This has helped to solve the congestion in the street.
“Promoting people-centered new-type urbanization and implementing urban renewal action are important national strategies during the 14th Five-Year Plan (202125),” said Yang Jun, deputy director of the Beijing Commission of Planning and Natural Resources.
Urban renewal is not only a matter of physical and spatial demolition and repair. It is also a systematic project to promote sustainable and high-quality development, and high-level governance of a city, Yang added.
“We need to base ourselves on Beijing’s realities, continue to explore, enrich and improve our policies and measures, which requires the concerted efforts of the government, market, society and the public.”
Promoting peoplecentered new-type urbanization and implementing urban renewal action are important national strategies during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25).”
Yang Jun, deputy director of the Beijing Commission of Planning and Natural Resources
About six months ago, clarinetist Wang Tao had good reason to celebrate and, to use a musical metaphor, blow his own trumpet — or in this case the clarinet. His daughter was born. The arrival of a baby is a joyous event for any family and for Wang, having a daughter makes his life complete, he proudly proclaims.
This is not his first child. He and his wife, the former Olympic gymnastics champion Liu Xuan, welcomed their son five years ago.
Wang has the perfect present for his new bundle of joy. As a gift to his newborn daughter, a new album, titled Talk to Her, performed by Wang, is released on Monday, on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
“It feels quite different having a son and having a daughter. There are different ways of communicating with them,” says Wang, 43, adding that, in his roles as a husband, a son, and a father, he also wants to dedicate the new album to the women of his family. “I want my daughter to listen to these music pieces as a form of early communication as she cannot speak yet.”
The album features classical music pieces, which portray different female characters. It opens with the well-known piece, La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), composed by French composer Claude Debussy, followed by Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fuer Elise (For Elise), and Ave Maria (Hail Mary) by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Wang also adapted Pavane pour une infante defunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), a piano masterwork by French composer Maurice Ravel, which chronicles the life and death of a young, beloved princess; Garota de Ipanema (The Girl From Ipanema), a well-known, 1965 Grammy Award-winning Brazilian bossa nova song, and Solveig’s Song, by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, which was originally from Henrik Ibsen’s five-act play, Peer Gynt, and is an ode to a beautiful and sweet young woman.
Wang tries to give these classic works a fresh feel by adding electronic elements, bossa nova beats and stringed instruments to the various arrangements.
“I’ve performed those pieces throughout my career. For example, I played Solveig’s Song not long after I learned to play the clarinet,” says Wang. “With my life experiences, I can now interpret them with different color and meaning.
“The female characters depicted have various personalities, since music allows us to imagine,” says Wang, adding that, as well as showing the listeners different female images, he also wants them to “reflect and think about the women around them, especially their mothers, wives and daughters”.
He also adapted a popular Mandarin song, titled Woman Flower, first sung by Hong Kong pop diva Anita Mui in 1997, and he has released two versions: an instrumental piece and a vocal performance in collaboration with Chinese actress Ning Jing.
A best-selling female singer, Mui died of cancer in 2003 at 40.
Throughout the song, a woman’s whole life is recounted, from her time as a little girl to the day she passes away. Wang says he wants to “perform the music with a pure heart”.
“I had many ideas about adapting the song with my musical instrument. The version I chose is very clean and straightforward, without much embellishment,” he adds.
For the vocal version, he invited Ning to sing. The 48-year-old award-winning actress made headlines after she appeared in Hunan TV’s reality show, Sisters Riding the Winds and Breaking the Waves. “She is very confident and versatile. She is not defined by age,” says Wang.
Wang, who was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, studied the cello and erhu (a two-stringed bowed instrument) in childhood before picking up the clarinet when he was 9. At the age of 11, he was admitted to the middle school affiliated with the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.
Wang was the first musician in China to receive a master’s degree in the clarinet from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and has been teaching there since 2002.
With more than 10 albums under his belt, Wang also won the Best Instrumental Album award at the Golden Melody Awards in Taiwan. He released his first crossover album, Night & Day, in 2014 after signing a contract with Universal Music China. The album, which merges the clarinet with pop, rock and jazz, received warm feedback.
“I’ve known my wife for more than 20 years and I’m lucky to have her. I cannot achieve musically without her support,” says Wang. “She is a very independent woman. Besides her career success, she also takes good care of the whole family. Whenever I return to my home after touring, I feel warm and relaxed.”
I cannot achieve musically without her support . ... Besides her career success, she also takes good care of the whole family.”
Wang Tao, 43, a clarinetist speaking about his wife, Liu Xuan, a former Olympic gymnastics champion