It is beyond doubt that Chinese companies will become a new force in the semiconductor memory market in the very near future, and the Chinese government is committed to developing the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry. For more than a decade, the Chinese government has already invested more than 160 billion U.S. dollars in the industry , Most of which are for memory startups, and Tsinghua Unigroup itself announced plans to invest more than $ 50 billion in two large-scale foundries, along with more in-building plans or drafts.
Memory, and DRAM in particular, is still largely regarded as a purely commodity business, and though it seems less easy today, the prevailing view was that as long as enough money was invested, China's memory was new Startups can also easily enter the high-risk memory chip race and immediately begin to fight with the top three giants in the industry, South Korea's Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and the United States, Micron Technology.
However, as they were eyeing the Big Three, China's memory companies - including Ziguang Group and its subsidiaries, Yangtze River Storage Technology (YRST) and Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company (Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co .; JHICC), etc., may meet with these opponents in another place: the court.
Bill McClean, president and chief executive officer of IC Insights, recently told EE Times: "I do not know how they want to make a memory chip without touching the patents owned by Samsung, Hynix and Micron."
Micron has issued an early warning earlier this month. On December 4, Micron, under the Defend Trade Secrets Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, Filed a civil lawsuit in a federal court in northern California suing Microsoft Taiwan Corp. (UMC) and Fujian Jinhua for stealing its trade secrets and other misconduct. A Micron spokesman confirmed the lawsuit and said: "Micron is actively protecting Its global intellectual property rights and will use all available legal weapons to solve all misappropriation. '
Although this particular case reminds McClean of a commercial espionage, he believes that when Jinhua, Fujian and other Chinese companies started selling memory chips when the crucial lawsuit came, he said that once they started producing chips, Samsung Hynix and Micron will have the opportunity to reverse engineer these products for evidence of a patent infringement.
McClean said: 'When Chinese companies start production, there will be products available for analysis, and when the real fun begins, lawyers will be fulfilled every day.'
For example, there have been reports that Cheung Kong Storage Technologies is rapidly developing 3D NAND flash memory, knowing that the most advanced memory technology nowadays is being led and developed by Samsung Corp. McClean does not know how Chinese companies can avoid Samsung NAND made 3D NAND, saying: 'I do not think anyone can make 3D NAND without patented.'
According to McClean, Samsung, Hynix and Micron tend to close their eyes to each other in patent infringement. In theory, because they both have such a large patent library, so the patent battle between each other "But for a new company to enter the market, they would not give such a favor." This is especially true for Samsung and Hynix because the South Korean government considers the technology of both companies to be State-owned Assets.
McClean made a similar point several years ago when he said that STMicroelectronics is considering entering the programmable logic market, but after some research, STMicroelectronics realized that Xilinx ) And Altera accounted for more than 90% of the total market share at that time, with all the important patents in the field, no one can enter the market without infringement.
This does not mean that China's upstart memory companies can not get the attention of the Big Three in memory.In fact, McClean believes that this year's Samsung's capital expenditure plan is quite positive, from last year's 11.3 billion US dollars to 26 billion US dollars, a substantial increase of a This is the ironclad attempt to preemptively strike at Chinese enterprises with the goal of further promoting the trend of new technologies and letting Chinese enterprises not even arbitrarily enter the patent thunder pool.
Samsung's capital expenditures have risen significantly over the past few years (Source: IC Insights)
In the end, McClean said, Chinese memory companies will not do better than Chinese foundries SMIC, the largest foundry firm in China, was founded in 2000 and now operates in pure crystalline Ranked fourth in the foundry industry, its market share in 2016 was about 5%, representing a market share of 59% compared with the market leader TSMC.
McClean said: "When SMIC and Chinese semiconductor foundry Grace Semiconductor became fledgling, they quickly accounted for about 13% of the world's pure-play foundries, but up to now, China Foundry companies have accumulated less than 8% market share. "TSMC's patent infringement litigation has brought a big blow to SMIC and has therefore become a minority shareholder of SMIC.
McClean said: 'I think Chinese memory companies will gain a foothold in the market in the future, but the process may be similar to what has happened in the foundry industry.'
Compile: Luffy Liu