Samsung, SK Hynix restrain from selling old chipmaking equipment to avoid US repercussions،
Even if you don't follow politics closely, you can't miss the ongoing conflict between the United States and China. The fight is taking place on many economic fronts, including the chip manufacturing industry.
The release of the Mate 60 series last year was a global shock, particularly upsetting U.S. officials, because the Mate 60 was the first 5G phone since the Mate 40 series. Before that, Huawei was sanctioned by the United States and was allowed to use only modified versions of Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipsets for its P50, Mate 50 and P60 flagships (these chips were modified to exclude 5G connectivity).
Less than a month ago, a report claimed that the Biden administration was turning up the pressure on China's most sanctioned major chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC). US authorities are set to block SMIC's most advanced factory from receiving more US imports. Indeed, SMIC has produced a sophisticated chip for Huawei's Mate 60 range.
Now, another report claims that Samsung and SK Hynix, “the world's leading memory chip makers,” have stopped selling their used chipmaking equipment “for fear of falling foul of U.S. export controls on China and Western sanctions against Russia. THE Financial Times The report claims that South Korean companies “store used machines in warehouses instead of putting them on the secondary market.”
Indeed, even decade-old machines could, in theory, be repaired and tuned to produce advanced chips, if they “fall into the wrong hands” and Korean chipmakers are apparently looking for ways to avoid US repercussions .
According to the report, “SK Hynix recently began selling some machines again after running out of storage space.” But the company still “refrained from selling U.S.-made equipment, ranging from wafer mills to engraving machines.”
Shortly after the Mate 60 Pro was released last year, someone quickly took it apart and discovered that two memory chips from SK Hynix were inside: a 12GB SK Hynix LPDDR5 RAM chip and a 512 GB NAND memory chip.
