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1. Samsung surpassed Intel for the first time in 25 years;
Set of Weibo messages, Intel has been a leader in semiconductors for the past 25 years, with Intel's annual sales in the 25 years ranked first among all semiconductor companies. But as demand for storage products is strong, Samsung will surpass Intel in annual sales, according to the Nikkei Chinese network. Samsung has catered to the growing trend in data center demand for storage devices, pointing to Intel, whose gains are more skewed towards PC semiconductors.
Samsung Electronics this year's performance is very good, and the stock price also rose a lot, a large part of the reason is that the storage business performance is strong. Samsung's semiconductor sales for January 2017 to September were 53.15 trillion won, up 46% from a year earlier. Intel's sales in the same period were only $45.7 billion trillion, up 6% from a year earlier. Samsung is one of the best in both DRAM and NAND, and prices are driving up earnings as global stockpiles are out of stock.
Image source: Nikkei Chinese web
Most semiconductor companies reported their earnings this July, and Samsung surpassed Intel in the first half of the year with less than 100 million dollars, and Samsung said revenues were mainly benefiting from strong demand for high-density storage products and solid-state drives. A number of securities firms are predicting that Samsung's sales will surpass Intel for the first time in 25 years, from annual chip sales, in the second half of the year if storage chip prices do not fall sharply.
Data show that Samsung Electronics January 2017 to September semiconductor sales of 53.15 trillion won (about 318.55 billion yuan), an increase of 46%. During the period, Intel's sales were 45.7 billion U.S. dollars (about 295.24 billion yuan), up only 6% per cent year-on-year. Even taking into account the exchange rate factor, Samsung surpassed Intel in the year of 2017 is a foregone conclusion.
According to current trends, Samsung has become the default winner.
Samsung invests heavily in production equipment and research and development, and the factory has a higher yield than its rivals. Samsung is pushing price negotiations with the ability to supply its weapons, prompting big customers such as Apple to promise to raise prices. Intel, on the other hand, relies heavily on PCs (CPU) for its gains. With the PC's demand on top, Intel is no longer in the past.
In the semiconductor industry, the demand for future storage is expected to continue to grow. But if the semiconductor companies are producing more output, prices will fall and prices will fluctuate considerably.
2. Market supply and demand has changed, the recent Nor Flash market price fear began to loosen;
Recently encoded memory (Nor Flash) because the market demand is not reduced, the price continues to maintain high-grade. However, at present, there are new production capacity in the mainland, coupled with the application of new solutions, resulting in a change in both supply and demand, the overall market prices began to have a tendency to loosen.
According to industry sources, the recent Nor flash price loosening, in the supply side, the recent SMIC took out a monthly 10,000 pieces of capacity to the trillion easy to innovate use, to produce Nor Flash, Wuhan New core may also be due to NAND flash production progress Backward, So will be part of spare capacity also come out to provide trillion easy to innovate, so that the trillion easy innovation has more capacity impact market prices.
In addition, in addition to the trillion easy to innovate in the core international and Wuhan new core cast, increase production capacity, another wafer foundry Shanghai Hua Li Micro, reportedly began to take out about the monthly production capacity, to attract Nor Flash manufacturers to Shanghai Huali micro-cast production. Coupled with the current Wuhan new core homemade low-cost Nor Flash products in the Chinese market to rob a single sale, so that the market price of Nor Flash began to loose signs.
In addition to supply side, Chinese manufacturers continue to have capacity out to affect market prices, demand surface also because of new applications led to Nor Flash price changes. Market Personage pointed out, the current Nor Flash supply Large company Macronix, long-term partner Nintendo (Nintendo) New game machine Switch selling, eat most Wang macro capacity, Nintendo recently also began to choose NAND Flash manufacturer Toshiba (Toshiba) to NAND Flash form The main solution, so that Nor flash demand is not increased, but also shook the market price.
In addition, has been the recent Nor Flash capacity of the largest main cause of OLED panel applications, the past Samsung production of OLED panels, including display brightness, color uniformity, current compensation, etc., are using Nor flash parameters memory. Previous Apple iphones and the OLED panels of Samsung phones were useful to Nor Flash.
At present because OLED panel process mature, so that low-end OLED no longer use Nor Flash storage parameters, to reduce costs; The midrange OLED part, the current manufacturers are also discussing whether to take off Nor flash applications, so the next 2018 mobile phones, only high-end machine use of the OLED panel will continue to retain Nor flash applications.
Due to the above supply and demand reasons, resulting in the recent market Nor Flash price loosening trend, as to how much impact, how long time, but also must continue to observe. Technews
3. The United States and light optimistic view of the operational outlook on the transformation of High-value products, the cost of a successful decline;
Mei Guang (Micron) recently released the company's 2018 fiscal year 1th quarter earnings, revenue of 6.8 billion U.S. dollars, the annual growth of 71%, better than the market analyst consensus forecast of 6.4 billion U.S. dollars, adjusted earnings per share of $2.45 trillion, significantly better than the average market analyst expected 2.19 dollars, The 2nd-quarter guideline, released by the US Light management, also led the market analyst's view sharply, the top management of the United States and China believes that the current industrial situation is different from the past, even if the memory chip prices fell, but the United States and the light in the continued high value-added solutions to move forward and the cost of the decline, the United States and the light still has ample opportunity to expand earnings performance, Looking forward to 2018, the United States and light senior also optimistic to stay. According to the Motley Fool report, the U.S.-light management of the senior analyst with the financial results of the conference call, from a few analysis of the United States and light business prospects, such as in the current market conditions and profit performance, the U.S. optical memory chip average sales price (ASP) for the U.S. Unlike in the past, U.S. light revenue, profit and so will be due to the fierce memory market price war and then hit, now, as the memory industry has been reshaping, including the United States, the world's three major memory chip manufacturers also appear new fiscal discipline, the situation is different from the past, although memory chip prices in a few quarters stabilized after the fall again , but a gradual slowdown, while the cost of production has fallen even faster. In this case, Ernie Maddock, the US-light finance minister, said as the cost of US light falls and continues to move toward High-value solutions, there is plenty of room for the US to expand its margin, including a continuous adjustment of 0 component sales to higher value-added solutions, in the direction of High-value solutions. This shows that in the current memory chip price environment, Maddock still think the U.S. light margin expansion still has enough space. In terms of supply and demand, the demand for DRAM chips is healthy and buoyant in the short term, while NAND flash storage orders are also fast rising, such as the US-light CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the US-China supply and demand forecasts remain consistent with the company's forecasts in the previous quarter, The U.S. light 2018 DRAM industry supply bit growth rate is expected to be about 20%, in the Continuous Enterprise Information Center, cloud and mobile trends, such as driven by the United States and light expected market environment will present a healthy situation. NAND Flash Industry, the U.S. light is expected to 2018-bit growth rate will be close to 50%, mainly benefiting from the industry continued to accelerate the 64-tier design production process, in addition, cloud computing and data Center application of solid-state hard disk (SSD) of the use of continuous increase in the future with more supplies to emerge, The increased use of this SSD will be further expanded. Now it is also moving toward producing more and more profitable product lines, while limiting the direction of supply of low-value chip products, such as Mehrotra, which improves its portfolio of High-value solutions, produces record SSD revenues and further increases its SSD market share, Recently the United States light also began to ship the company's first 64-layer NAND consumer SSD products. The US light also launches the industry's fastest high-density 32GB nvdimm-n, combining US-light DRAM and NAND to provide a continuous memory solution that can handle intensive data analysis loads. It is noteworthy that the United States of America and the light of the seasonal sales model is disappearing, such as the United States and light finance chief Maddock pointed out that Mehrotra previously mentioned the diversity of DRAM demand, of course, this is also true on the NAND side, in terms of the diversity of demand flows, such as the automotive sector is not If you are in the Information Center deployment of all key competitors, it must be that every customer has a specific pattern, but if you put it all together, there is no macroscopic seasonal pattern, so as the US light has moved towards these diverse demand drivers, the concept of seasonality has been redefined, The seasonal effects of the season may now be slightly less than in the past. Mehrotra finally said, looking forward to 2018, the United States saw the company in the shape of modern life in the technological trend of more and more opportunities to play a corner, memory and flash storage as the United States to the largest technology growth trend at the crossroads of strategic assets, the United States light is also optimistic about the future to stay, Also because the United States and light to provide a differentiated solution, the company's customers in the early design discussions, the United States and the light as an important partner. Digitimes
4. Two new technologies to hold Samsung second generation 10 nm DRAM volume of production and looting business opportunities;
Short-based DRAM Market Opportunity, Samsung Electronics announces volume production of its second-generation 10 nm grade (1Y-NM) 8Gb DDR4 dram. The component uses a highly sensitive unit data sensing System (cell sensing system) and an air space spacer solution to achieve higher performance, lower power consumption, and smaller volumes.
DRAM market performance is strong, IC Insights forecast, 2017 dram market will soar 74%, the biggest increase since 1994; Future DRAM is expected to be the largest single product category in the semiconductor industry so far, with a value of $72 billion trillion.
In order to meet the market demand, Samsung Memory Business Department President Gyoyoung Jin said that the second generation of DDR4 DRAM circuit design and process technology, so that the company breakthrough DRAM scalability major obstacles; Samsung will accelerate the production of new products, while also actively expanding the output of the first generation of DDR4 DRAM.
It is reported that the second generation of Samsung 10 nm process produced by the 8Gb DDR4 DRAM, than the first generation in the production efficiency of nearly 30%. At the same time, to enhance DRAM performance, the component uses a new technology, which is a highly sensitive unit data sensing system and an "air gap" scheme, rather than a EUV technology.
Samsung pointed out that through the highly sensitive unit data sensing system, it is more accurate to determine the data stored in each memory unit, improve the integration of the circuit and manufacturing productivity; By placing air intervals around character lines (Bit Lines), the parasitic capacitors can be lowered to achieve a higher level of miniaturization and rapid unit operation.
The addition of new technology increases the performance and efficiency of the second generation 8Gb DDR4 dram by about 10% and 15% respectively. And each pin can run at the speed of 3,600mbit/s per second, up to 10% faster than the first generation of 8Gb DDR4 dram 3,200mbit/s speed.
Samsung points out that the innovative technology used in the second-generation 10-NM DRAM will allow the company to accelerate the advent of future DRAM chips, including DDR5, HBM3, LPDDR5 and GDDR6, for enterprise Servers, supercomputers, high-performance computing systems, and mobile devices.
Samsung has already completed the second generation of 8Gb DDR4 DRAM module verification with CPU manufacturers, and is planning to work closely with global IT companies to develop more efficient computing systems. In addition to rapidly increasing the second generation of 10 nm DRAM output, Samsung will continue to produce more first generation DDR4 DRAM production to meet the growing DRAM market. New electronics
5.AI boom brings new opportunities to high frequency wide memory three-dimensional packaging cost is the key to competition
In order to meet the needs of artificial intelligence and deep learning intensive parallel operation, 2016-2017-year GPU chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA, AMD introduced the new chip Tesla P100/quadro GP100, Radeon Vega and so on, all choose to carry a high-frequency width and vertical stacking HBM2 (Second-generation high bandwidth Memory) HF memory. Development of high frequency wide vertical stacked memory so far, in addition to the above HBM types, the HMC (Hybrid Memory Cube) is another type. Both are in the form of multilayer dram grains (Die) plus logic Die vertically stacked packages, and basically, HBM and HMC each favor 2.5D, 3D encapsulation stacking technology. At present, the wafer-level packaging technology production into the latest HBM2 structure of the chip manufacturers have Hynix (SK Hynix), Samsung (Samsung) and wafer foundry manufacturers TSMC, TSMC mining cowos process (Chip on Wafer on substrate); The micron/Intel (Intel) camp is the primary manufacturer of the HMC Storage architecture import volume production. Deep learning application chips from Intel's acquisition of Nervana Lake Crest can find that the chip is configured with HBM2, so the HBM architecture is undoubtedly the main development direction of GPU manufacturers in the 2017 High Performance Computing (HPC) configuration memory. However, the HBM2 of high package cost and interconnection technology is still the key to affect the application and diffusion progress of this type of product. Digitimes study observed that GPU memory will still maintain hbm/gddr coexistence situation. If the 2018-year production of GDDR6 (Graphics Double Data Rate), in the high efficiency of the operation of the configuration will be hbm2/gddr6, while the medium and lower-level products to pick up gddr5/gddr5x as the main direction. Digitimes