The import cost is close to double that of crude oil. How long does the domestic integrated circuit industry achieve “turning overtaking”?

In 2017, China’s IC import volume reached 377 billion pieces, an increase of 10.1% year-on-year; import value was US$260.1 billion (approximately 17561 million yuan), a year-on-year increase of 14.6%. In 2017, China’s imports of goods amounted to 12.46 trillion yuan, which means that imports of integrated circuits accounted for 14.1% of China’s total imports. In the same period, China’s total imports of crude oil were only about US$150 billion. China's spending on semiconductor chip imports is already nearly double that of crude oil.

Recently, more and more people are concerned about the progress of chips developed independently by China. If you want to refine a Chinese "core", what steps are needed?

status quo

Import costs for semiconductor chips are close to twice that of crude oil

Perhaps not everyone understands integrated circuits, but many people have heard of Moore's Law. Moore's Law means that when the price is constant, the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double about every 18 months, and the performance will also double. Half a century ago, this speculation put forward by Moore, one of Intel's founders, has continued for more than 50 years.

Moore's Law reveals the speed of development in the field of integrated circuits. In such high-speed innovations, IC products continue to reduce costs, improve performance, and increase functionality. It is also in such a rapid development that the gap in integrated circuit technology in various countries has increased. According to industry insiders, if China wants to catch up with top companies in the main integrated circuit field, it will need more than time, but it will be an overall system upgrade.

According to information released by the General Administration of Customs, the import volume of integrated circuits has exceeded crude oil for three consecutive years since 2015, and the difference in import between the two countries is above 95 billion US dollars annually. Among them, China's IC import volume reached 377 billion pieces in 2017, an increase of 10.1% year-on-year; the import volume was US$260.1 billion (approximately 17561 million yuan), a year-on-year increase of 14.6%. In 2017, China’s imports of goods amounted to 12.46 trillion yuan, which means that imports of integrated circuits accounted for 14.1% of China’s total imports. In the same period, China’s total imports of crude oil were only about US$150 billion. China's spending on semiconductor chip imports is already nearly double that of crude oil.

survey

There are dozens of gates and thousands of small gates

A chip, which refers to a silicon chip that contains integrated circuits, is small in size and is often part of a computer or other electronic device. The chipset is a series of interconnected chipsets. They depend on each other, and they can be combined to play more roles. For example, the central processing unit (CPU) in a computer and the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in radio frequency (RF), baseband, and communication base stations in a mobile phone are multiple chips. Combined larger integrated circuits. The integrated circuit is a very sophisticated instrument whose unit is nanometer. One nanometer is one hundred thousandth of a millimeter. This requires very strict and high standards for design and manufacturing processes.

There are many types of chips, and Gu Wenjun, chief analyst of the core research, told the Beijing Youth Daily reporter: “Only from the product type, there are dozens of types of chips and thousands of sub-categories; if the equipment flow is involved, then More, the United States is in an overall and all-round leading position, and we have only made breakthroughs in certain fields, and these areas are not the core and high-end areas, such as China's simulation in memory, CPU, FPG and high-end. Chips, power chips, and other fields are almost absent. If China makes R&D efforts, it may make some breakthroughs in certain small categories."

Follow up

There are hundreds of chips in a communication base station

Taking the operator service as an example, the communication base station equipment is one of its most important products, and in a communication base station, there are hundreds of chips responsible for implementing different functions. "Simply put, the base station transmits and recovers the signal. After retrieving the signal, it must first have chip filtering and stabilize the signal; then there is the chip to amplify this very small signal; another chip will perform analysis and processing; then the chip will be responsible for transmission. Distribute. The base station core is similar to the computer, can realize various functions, but it can support multiple mobile phones, so the speed is faster, the chip is more complicated.” The above-mentioned person says.

Among them, the most typical is the ADC chip, China is currently unable to produce alternative products. The ADC chip is an analog-to-digital conversion chip and is responsible for converting the continuous analog signal received by the antenna into a digital signal for talking or surfing the Internet. At present, ADC mainly depends on supplies from companies such as Yaduo and Texas Instruments.

From a software perspective, EDA simulation software is another example. Using this software, an electronic designer can design a chip system on a computer, and a large amount of work can be done using a computer, and a combination of multiple products can be tested. If there is no EDA simulation software, manual design and testing are required, and the costs of manpower and time are numerous. At present, there are more than 10 kinds of EDA software that have entered the country and have extensive influence, and basically come from the United States.

attention

It takes 5,000 processes to make a chip

An expert in chip manufacturing told reporters that the manufacturing process of a chip is very complicated. A production line involves about 50 industries and 2000-5000 processes. Take the representative factory, it is necessary to first purify the "sand" into silicon, then cut into wafers, and then process the wafer. Wafer processing plant contains two processes before and after, the former process is divided into several major modules - photolithography, thin film, etching, cleaning, injection; the latter process is mainly encapsulation - interconnection, wire bonding, sealing. Among them, photolithography is a link between manufacturing and design.

Many of these processes are carried out in independent factories, and the equipment used also requires special equipment factories to manufacture; the materials used include several hundred special gases, liquids, and targets, all of which require specialized chemical industries. In addition, the production of integrated circuits is carried out in clean rooms, so systems such as exhaust air and air purification are also needed.

There is an argument that integrated circuits are higher than aerospace high-tech. According to industry insiders, this argument is not unreasonable. "The reliability of aerospace is estimated to be 4-9 or 5-9 (X 9 means that the system can be used normally during the use of the software system for one year.) The ratio of time to total time. Now the purity of the silicon wafer material will be more than 6-9."

focus

Global chip is almost monopolized by U.S., Japan and Europe

According to the report of the Foresight Research Institute, at present, the global chip is still dominated by American, Japanese, and European corporate products, and the high-end market is almost monopolized by these three major regions. In the high-end chip field, domestic manufacturers still rely on the "OEM" model because they have not yet formed scale effect and clustering effect.

As of the end of 2015, statistics show that there are 94 advanced wafer manufacturers globally, of which 17 are in the United States, 71 are in Asia (China has 9), and 6 are in Europe. Japan had a leading position in the 1980s, but its share of the global semiconductor market has dropped significantly since the 1990s. By 2015, only three Japanese chip makers were among the top 20 in the world—Toshiba, Renesas Electronics, and Sony. . At the same time, other countries in East Asia have become major players in the dynamic random access memory market. South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Haishi Li are currently the second and third largest semiconductor companies in the world.

According to the latest statistics from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the share of the chip market in China and the United States increased by 33.10% and 19.73% from January to February 2017; the chip market share in Japan and Europe declined. , 9.29% and 9.12%, respectively. The Chinese chip market is the largest and fastest growing market in the world, but its foreign dependence is too high.

Hot spots

Intel has been the world's largest chip maker

Since January 1993, Intel has been the world's largest chip maker. Of the CPUs used in personal computers, Intel has a 80% share. People familiar with Pentium, Celeron, and Core Duo all come from Intel. At present, Intel's annual revenue continues to grow - whether it is from PCs, data center servers, or IoT chips.

In 2016, Intel remained the world's largest chip supplier. Its annual chip sales reached 54.09 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 4.6% from 2015; its market share was 15.7%.

In the mobile phone chip, Qualcomm is another giant. At present, in addition to Huawei, Samsung and other mobile phone manufacturers, all other Android phone manufacturers use Qualcomm processors. In addition to the cost of purchasing chips, Qualcomm also charges royalties for each handset. Previously, Meizu and Qualcomm to the court, Meizu Vice President Li Nan said that more than 100 mobile phone manufacturers have signed an agreement with Qualcomm to purchase patents.

Highlights

The first three Chinese semiconductors are Huawei, Ziguang, and ZTE.

At home, China’s semiconductor industry is also accelerating in recent years.

According to statistics from the China Semiconductor Industry Association, sales of China's integrated circuit industry reached 541.13 billion yuan in 2017, a year-on-year increase of 24.8%. Among them, IC manufacturing industry grew fastest, with a year-on-year increase of 28.5% in 2017, and sales amounted to RMB 144.81 billion. The design industry and the packaging and testing industry continued to maintain rapid growth, with growth rates of 26.1% and 20.8%, and sales of 207.35 billion yuan and 188.97 billion yuan respectively.

According to data from the General Administration of Customs, China exported 204.35 billion integrated circuits in 2017, an increase of 13.1% year-on-year; export value was US$66.88 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.8%.

A latest ranking report of the top ten integrated circuit design/manufacturing industries in 2017 announced by the Semiconductor Association and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China's Institute of Electronic Information Industry Development shows that among the top ten integrated circuit design companies in China, Huawei Hass Semiconductor has 361 Billion sales ranked first; Tsinghua Unisplendour ranked second with RMB 11 billion; ZTE Microelectronics ranked third with RMB 7.6 billion. Then there were Huada Semiconductor, Zhixin Microelectronics, Huiding Technology, Silan Microelectronics, Duntai Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., Geke Microelectronics, and Vimicro.

Financial observation

Can China jump off the U.S. IP nuclear?

Some experts said that the start of China's integrated circuit is not too late, only a few years later than the United States. However, due to various factors such as European and American technology blockades and domestic historical problems, the gap between Europe and the United States is relatively large, and it is difficult to catch up in a short time.

A practitioner told reporters that from the perspective of the entire industry, the US card is "IP (intellectual property)" and "the war around IP is even fiercer. Even if you use other people's technology, people have property rights, and you cannot bypass it." It solves the problem.” According to data, the IP core designs some functional blocks that are commonly used in digital circuits, such as FIR filters, SDRAM controllers, and PCI interfaces, as modules that can modify parameters. According to the above sources, the Chinese integrated circuit industry has been popularizing the word “overtaking the curve”. Many people are wondering if they can jump out of the US IP core and start another one, and develop another set of ecosystems. But this is too complicated.

A number of industry researchers said that at present, China's integrated circuits are systematic and backward, and the overall improvement needs to be done from basic research and personnel training. It takes a relatively long time. “We need to train basic talents in mathematics, physics, and other disciplines first. After these people come up, they will train talents who cross over with other disciplines. They need to master technologies such as industrial design."

Case presentation

Huawei Hass Semiconductor Co., Ltd. was established in 2004. It was formerly known as Huawei Integrated Circuit Design Center established in 1991. Currently, HiSilicon is headquartered in Shenzhen and has design divisions in Beijing, Shanghai and the United States, Silicon Valley and Sweden. Its products cover the wireless network, fixed network, digital media and other fields of chips and solutions, successfully applied in more than 100 countries and regions in the world; in the field of digital media, has launched SoC network monitoring chip and solutions, video phone chips and Solutions, DVB chips and solutions and IPTV chips and solutions. Huawei Hass products are used in a number of business lines such as carrier business and consumer business. The average consumer is more likely to be aware of the unicorn processor on Huawei's mobile phones. Currently, Huawei's mobile phones include the Mate series and P. Series and glory phones are available. Kirin 960 has also been rated by the foreign media as the "2016 best Andrews processor", outperforming Qualcomm processors. He Tingbo, president of Hass, once said, “We are starting to do 7 nanometers and we are also following the industry to see more advanced processes of 5 nanometers.”

Huawei Hass Kirin 960 Named "2016 Best Android Machine Processor"

Ziguang Zhanrui is committed to research and development of domestically-controlled architecture of the CPU

Ziguang Zengrui is Ziguang Group’s response to the nation’s integrated circuit development strategy, which has been vigorously developed through capital operation and corporate layout. In December 2013, Ziguang Group acquired No. 1 domestic company listed on Nasdaq in the United States and Spreadtrum Communications, the world’s third-ranking communications baseband chip design company, and completed the same NASDAQ in July 2014. Listed company and domestic No.2 chip maker Rui Dike Microelectronics. In 2016, Ziguang Holdings Shanghai Hongmao Microelectronics Co., Ltd. placed IC packaging and testing areas. At the same time, in 2016, Ziguang Holdings Wuhan Changjiang Storage Co., Ltd., and Chengdu and Nanjing, signed a total of nearly 100 billion US dollars in total investment in memory chips and memory manufacturing plants.

According to its official website, in 2015, Ziguang Zengrui and Intel reached a cooperation to develop and market an Intel x86-based system chip. At present, Ziguang Zengrui has more than 5,000 employees, of whom more than 90% are R&D personnel; there are 16 technology R&D centers in the world. Ziguang Zengrui is working hard to develop a self-contained and controllable CPU.