Seconded - not seen that one exactly.

Maybe not in this  case (as I have just tried and drawn a blank) but maybe useful info for you anyway, I have had luck in the past with websites like https://www.lcsc.com/ for getting data-sheets(usually  in Chinese of course) - there are a number of Chinese chip makers that have no chip sales outside China, although products containing their devices keep turning up commonly here. The data-sheets usually have enough schematic and google translate can be pressed into service to create some understanding.

The volume pricing is an eye-opener to western eyes. There are a great many 'low value' things. like LED torches, Li-ion cell charge balancers and so on where there are no western equivalents, as the business model does not work at those prices.

It is likely that makers like Shenzen Fumen and similar are in effect subsidised by State education programmes and so on to encourage the development of an indigenous chip manufacturing capability.

Mike

I reckon the silicon is a close relative, maybe made under licence  by another fab.
Mike.

Thanks Mike, that's a really interesting website - I find it crazy, I've only ever been involved with sourcing components from the EU until recently and the price drops from China are astonishing, makes it hard to justify not outsourcing everything to China!

If you judge everything on economics alone, yes.

Or perhaps it makes you wonder what our govt education and long term business programmes are lacking, and if the exchange rates are correct,  - because if you can outsource the making of the parts to China at a profit,  you can outsource the design, assembly and use of them as well. Then it unravels, because you have effectively outsourced jobs a large part of the population depend on, and have to employ them somewhere else.

Of course if you ever go there for work, you soon see how that disparity arises, and worry about the morality of it when you come back.   The likes of JLPCB, PCBway, PCBgogo and so on have effectively removed many small engineering works from the UK - but they are attractively cheap for any one job, and all the health and safety, chemical handling etc worries have been exported to a place UK law does not apply.

It is very cheap to buy things in China, it may not always be wise at scale or  in the long term..

Mike.

If you judge everything on economics alone, yes.

Or perhaps it makes you wonder what our govt education and long term business programmes are lacking, and if the exchange rates are correct,  - because if you can outsource the making of the parts to China at a profit,  you can outsource the design, assembly and use of them as well. Then it unravels, because you have effectively outsourced jobs a large part of the population depend on, and have to employ them somewhere else.

Of course if you ever go there for work, you soon see how that disparity arises, and worry about the morality of it when you come back.   The likes of JLPCB, PCBway, PCBgogo and so on have effectively removed many small engineering works from the UK - but they are attractively cheap for any one job, and all the health and safety, chemical handling etc worries have been exported to a place UK law does not apply.

It is very cheap to buy things in China, it may not always be wise at scale or  in the long term..

Mike.

I fully agree with that, unfortunately the management overlords don't always see it that way though. It seems in the industry we're starting to move back towards China slowly now after a large push out a few years ago. Everything becomes much more economically viable when you remove health and safety and regulation out of the equation.

Even then, it is possible to manufacture electronic systems in the far east (or even eastern Europe) much more cheaply than in the UK and, with enough diligence, retain the health and safety and regulation requirements. I spent several years in the early 2010s working to save a UK manufacturing site, that was part of a multinational, from closure; we couldn't argue with our HQ on H&S or quality grounds as they very thoroughly policed their "low cost country" manufacture (had to - our end customers heavily audited us on this stuff, plus we were making safety critical systems). The only way we could keep the manufacture of standard electronic products on the UK site was to heavily automate it, so again theoretically those jobs were lost anyway. What we did was to ramp up engineering and production of custom and semi-custom systems because those we could show real value in UK manufacture (for UK applications). So we managed not lose any jobs, but there was some serious re-skilling needed. 

What was interesting was that we did show that with enough automation it was economically viable to manufacture electronics in the UK, simplistically the site and energy etc overhead costs in the UK about balanced the transport and general handling costs from overseas. But the actual number of people employed in that area became pretty minute.

It's the conundrum - if you manufacture in the UK either you have to drive wages down, or drive prices up to cover the wages which drives the earning power of wages down, or automate so only a few people are actually making any money out of it, or...? Nobel Prize in Economics for anyone who comes up with a better answer to that one. I'm just very very glad that my career in electronics design and manufacturing (which is what most of it was until recently) was in industries where customisation was the norm so we could show added value which people were able to justify paying for.

Andy