Based on the fact that integrated circuits have become an important high-tech industry in my country, the current situation is analyzed. The international market and domestic development status of chip production and design were introduced, and suggestions and prospects were put forward for the realization of independent controllability and independent innovation of domestic chips.
Entering 2018, the United States has significantly increased tariffs on goods imported from China [1]. Today, the powerful political and economic coordinated offensive of the United States has forced many changes in manufacturing design and related concepts that we did not pay much attention to in the past, especially the information industry and integrated circuit industry.
background
In April 2018, the U.S. imposed sanctions on ZTE, and the U.S. Department of Commerce issued an announcement prohibiting ZTE from purchasing sensitive products from U.S. companies for the next seven years. In May 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the bill (HR5515) to prohibit the U.S. federal government from purchasing video surveillance equipment from China’s Hikvision and Dahua.
In May 2019, the President of the United States signed a bill to sanction Huawei. Subsequently, the Bureau of Industry and Security of the U.S. Department of Commerce included Huawei on the U.S. Entity List. All U.S. companies that want to provide chips and software to Huawei must apply and be officially blocked. The possibility of Huawei importing American products. Shortly after the sanctions were promulgated, Intel first announced that it would stop providing CPUs to Huawei. Shortly afterwards, SoftBank announced that it would temporarily stop providing ARM technical support to Huawei. Although ARM and Intel are in the same semiconductor industry, they are in different fields. ARM is a giant company in the field of mobile terminals. From the beginning of mobile smart terminals, it has always been in a leading position in the market. The world’s major mobile phone chip suppliers such as Qualcomm, Samsung, and Taiwan MediaTek all use ARM’s architecture. More than 85% of the world’s smartphones Both tablets and tablets use ARM architecture processors. Intel, on the other hand, occupies the leading position in the traditional PC and server markets.
The two semiconductor giants stopped licensing Huawei’s products and technologies (ARM’s standard cooperation model), resulting in Huawei’s important products such as servers, switches, communication equipment, and consumer electronics handheld terminal products (mobile phones, tablets) and key technologies. Cut off supply. Against the background of rising trade frictions, data provided by the General Administration of Customs of China in January 2019[2] showed that China’s integrated circuit imports exceeded RMB 2 trillion for the first time, and have ranked first in the country’s import categories for several consecutive years. ranked first, surpassing total oil imports. Data shows that most of the high-end domestic semiconductor chips still need to be imported from abroad, and there is still a gap between the independent and controllable chips advocated by the country.
Industry overview
Domestic strength in digital chip design has gradually improved to a considerable level, but in terms of production and manufacturing, high-end processes still rely heavily on major international manufacturers. At present, the major wafer factories in the world’s chip production include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) in Taiwan, and Global Foundries in the United States. Domestic pure wafer foundries are mainly Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (SMIC), Huahong Group, Suzhou Hejian (HEJIAN), as well as Yangtze Memory and Hefei Changxin, which mainly produce memory chips, and have been sued by Micron of the United States. Fujian Jinhua Company is currently suspended due to U.S. sanctions. Since 2005, mainland China has been the largest consumer of integrated circuits, but according to IC Insights analysis [3], mainland China’s IC production has not increased significantly.
As shown in Figure 1, the compound annual growth rate of semiconductor production in mainland China reached 15% in 2018. But we cannot ignore that these figures actually include the contribution of large semiconductor manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in Taiwan, Intel in the United States, Samsung in South Korea, and SK Hynix in mainland my country. Among them, SK Hynix’s 12-inch wafer fab in mainland China has the largest production capacity, with a full production capacity of 200,000 wafers per month. Intel’s 12-inch wafer fab in Dalian has also reached a monthly production capacity of 70,000 wafers as of December 2018.
2 Chip Design Chip design is located at the most upstream of the semiconductor industry and is the core foundation of the semiconductor industry. It requires a large amount of manpower, material resources, financial investment and long-term accumulation.
In the CPU market in the second quarter of 2018, Intel’s market share accounted for 81.8%, continuing to lead the world. In the GPU market, the high-end GPU market of ATI and NVIDIA occupied an absolute position in the early days. Later, ATI was acquired by AMD. Due to AMD’s long-term absence in the ecosystem, NVIDIA currently has a dominant market share. Close to 70%.
In the FPGA market, Xilin On the other hand, the situation that domestic core chips mainly rely on imports has not changed much. In the fields of high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, the current international share of domestic chips is minimal.
CPU products
In recent years, a number of scientific research institutes and key enterprises have emerged in my country to design excellent central processing unit (CPU) products, among which the famous ones are Loongson [4,5] and Shenwei. The former CPU has been widely used in critical infrastructure and computer systems of important units. The latter Sunway 26010 multi-core processor is the main computing chip of the national supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight [6], with a total of 40,960 Sunway 26010 CPUs integrated and installed. Relying on the application results of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, Chinese researchers won the “Gordon Bell” Award for the first time, achieving my country’s first breakthrough in this award. The 2017 list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers was announced, and Sunway TaihuLight won the championship for the fourth time with a floating-point operation speed of 930 petaflops/s. Breaking through the restrictions imposed by the United States on banning the sale of high-performance processors to China in 2015.
GPU products
Compared with CPUs, the output value of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) products in the international market is relatively small. NVIDIA and AMD are the only two companies in the world that develop high-performance GPUs, and their combined annual revenue is only 100 About US$100 million. Changsha Jingjia Microelectronics, founded in 2006, is the only domestic enterprise that has successfully independently developed and industrialized domestically produced graphics processing chips. In 2014, the company successfully developed the JM5400 GPU chip, which is claimed to be the first high-performance GPU chip with independent intellectual property rights in China. In addition to Jingjiawei, the 709 and 716 institutes of China State Shipbuilding Industry Corporation also develop domestic GPUs.But overall, there is still a big gap between domestic GPUs and leading international manufacturers in terms of talent, technology and patent barriers.
FPGA products
Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products [10-14] have small market capacity and difficult investment recovery costs. In addition, Xilinx and Altera have built patent barriers. Domestic Most FPGA manufacturers are in a relatively difficult stage of development. Domestic FPGA manufacturers are currently represented by companies such as Gowin Semiconductor, Shanghai Anlu, Unisoc, AGM and Shanghai Fudan Micro. However, in the domestic FPGA market of more than 10 billion yuan, the domestic market share is less than 3%. However, at a military-civilian integration exhibition, a subsidiary of CETC demonstrated a forward-designed 35-million-gate FPGA. Subsequently, China Electronics Corporation (CEC) publicly announced the successful development of a 70-million-gate FPGA. The two major groups achieved The technological breakthrough has solved the problems of developing some high-end FPGAs from scratch, which is exciting.
EDA products In the field of chip design, chip design tools are Electronic Design Automation [15] (Electronics Design Automation, EDA) products. At present, the world’s major EDA manufacturers such as Synopsys and Cadence in the United States account for almost 90% of the EDA market share. If the US company Mentor is added, the market share reaches nearly 100%. These giant companies adopt a business strategy of encircling the monopoly against the up-and-coming EDA design companies. That is to say, once a company’s EDA tool research and development reaches a certain level and is widely used by chip designers, these giant companies will offer quite attractive prices to fully acquire these backward companies. So far, there has been no case of acquisition failure.
People in my country’s integrated circuit industry said that by analyzing the development history of BGI Jiutian, we can see the development path of China’s EDA [16].
Under the monopoly of the three major EDA market giants in the United States, BGI Jiutian can currently only provide about 1/3 of the EDA solutions required by the industry. Although BGI Jiutian is relatively mature in terms of 16 nm and 28 nm processes, similar to Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin chip, it has already achieved 7 nm process technology. Therefore, BGI Jiutian still has a longer way to go in terms of more advanced process technology. Walk.
Solutions and prospects
The semiconductor industry is a highly technology- and capital-intensive industry, so it requires more national policy preferences, talent training, financial subsidies, and more importantly, long-term investment, rather than expecting short-term profits. Whether in the upstream, midstream or downstream of semiconductors, there is a large amount of technology accumulation and talent construction. In order to narrow the gap and achieve catch-up, China’s semiconductor manufacturing has begun to continuously introduce talents from various places. What attracts attention is that key figures joined from Samsung to SMIC. SMIC has successfully promoted the 28nm process and developed the 14nm process, which shows the importance of talents.
Secondly, the country should insist on adopting the model of dividing its troops into multiple routes. Yangtze Storage and Hefei Changxin located in Wuhan have begun to gradually exert their efforts and will not be absent in the storage market. Moreover, the government should elevate semiconductor development to a national strategic level. Integrated circuits, especially the manufacturing side, investing tens of billions or even tens of billions of dollars may not be effective in the short term. From the perspective of investment returns, ordinary investors find that the investment threshold is too high and the risk is too great, so it must rely on government leadership. The country has established an integrated circuit industry investment fund[17]. The second phase of fund-raising has been completed, with a scale of about 200 billion yuan. It has been reported to the State Council for approval, reflecting a very positive national orientation towards the semiconductor industry. Whether it is chip manufacturing companies SMIC, Huahong, Sanan Optoelectronics, or chip design companies GigaDevice, BeidouStar, or even the domestic GPU leader Jingjiawei mentioned above and packaging and testing companies Changdian, Taiji, and Tongfu Micro Electricity, etc., have all received investment coverage from large funds.
Wei Shaojun, leader of China’s national nuclear high-tech major project team, said that by 2020, China’s semiconductor industry will need between 700,000 and 800,000 talents, but the current talent gap is at least more than half. It is worth noting that although the country is currently beginning to introduce overseas talents with high salaries to fill the gap in high-end talents, for the cultivation of basic talents, higher education should become a top priority, coupled with strong teaching staff and continuous strengthening of corporate training. Mr. Wei Shaojun specifically pointed out [19-20] that to solve the problem of insufficient integrated circuit talents in my country, we must adopt a reform mentality and establish a long-term development mechanism to solve the talent shortage through supply-side reform. Only in this way can we solve the shortcomings of Chinese chips, shorten the technological gap with international manufacturers, and enhance the competitiveness of domestic chips.
The level of economic development is a manifestation of the country’s overall strength. In recent years, China has gradually caught up with the world and reached the leading level in many fields. In order to protect their national interests, the United States and other developed countries have successively launched ZTE incidents and even sanctioned Huawei. These are all models of political means affecting economic development. But behind these events, we deeply realize that we still lack technology in many aspects of critical infrastructure, whether it is software, hardware, or even manufacturing, and we need to rely on foreign technology for support.
Under these profound lessons, the development of the chip industry and even all walks of life can be independently controlled, and there is no chance of anything left. To solve the stuck dilemma, only by working together, accumulating, and moving forward steadily can we gradually realize the great historical task of localized substitution.Keywords: Ethernet