For a long time, the development of China's semiconductor industry is backward, there is no capacity to produce chip particles, rely heavily on foreign chip particles.
In China's import trade, from January to October 2016, China spent 1.2 trillion yuan on imported chips, which is twice the amount of crude oil imported. Fortunately, China is now increasing its presence in the chip field. Investment, progress is still good. People hope that domestic memory can break the monopoly of DRAM prices to purchase cheaper memory. But is this really the case?
List of domestic memory progress: low yield, immature technology
DRAM R&D is an extremely cost-effective technology. In 2016, Ziguang Group spent a total of 100 billion yuan to build storage chips and memory manufacturing plants in Wuhan, Nanjing, and Chengdu, aiming to build domestic wafers and DRAM particles and 3D NAND. Among them, DRAM technology research and development of the most difficult, the progress is the slowest.
At the end of 2017, a small amount of violet DDR3 memory came out of the e-commerce platform. The DRAM technology came from Infineon Technologies' storage division, which was acquired by Ziguang Group, and the production capacity has been insufficient. The problem of low yield rate has not been solved, so it has not been solved. Formal sale. On February 28, 2018, Ziguang Group announced that its DDR4 memory will be gradually introduced to the market during the year, admitting that its sales scale will not be too high and will have little impact on the annual financial report.
Before we can buy purple DDR4 memory without public sale, this memory has not used violet particles, of course, or DRAM production capacity.With the purple particles of DDR3 memory performance can also be tested by netizens, violet DDR3 memory can be in The default voltage overclocked to 2000MHz, but this is nothing strange, after all, the industry standard DDR3 memory on it.
In terms of price, Violet Memory does not seem too conscientious.DDR4 4GB memory up to 420 yuan, and people want to break the foreign monopoly price of domestic memory far cry from the wishes of other brands of memory compared with no advantage.Of course, purple The true price of memory have to wait for the official listing we can just to comment.
Domestic memory and memory price has nothing to do
Memory price ferocious, some people look forward to domestic-made memory can break the monopoly of foreign technology, memory prices can come down, but here I want to pour a pot of cold water, because the domestic memory for the time being can not affect the DRAM price trend for three reasons:
1, Ziguang Group, smaller memory capacity, the market size is small, can not compete with Samsung, Micron, Hynix and other DRAM manufacturers.
2, 2018, the demand for memory is still very large, coupled with raw materials is now in a substantial increase in supply stage, which led to the high cost of memory purple, the actual product prices will not be realized in a short period of decline.
3, both the product brand or technology, the advantage of domestic purple memory is not large, difficult to profit in the short term. Can not affect the financial, so there is no ability to price war.
See here you may ask, that country is so energetic R & D memory what is the use?
For us, memory made no difference between domestic and imported, but rose to the national level, the importance of domestic memory as much as the domestic CPU and domestic system as early as 2015, the supercomputer industry in China encountered the United States Department of Commerce ban Sale of Intel Xeon processors.A notice issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce on February 18, 2015 states that the Milky Way 2 system using two Intel microprocessor chips and the previous Tianhe 1-A system, It is believed to be used in nuclear explosions simulation. '
So we can see that if the technology is controlled by others, the future will inevitably face more lock-up events.In addition, the memory technology in the hands of other countries also means that the national information security there Achilles heel, a great risk .Modern society Electronic products are ubiquitous, and memory is a critical component of electronics, and if there are 'backdoors' in memory, this can lead to the disclosure of many sensitive national information.
Therefore, China vigorously develop DRAM, 3D NAND is a national strategy, the memory price reduction for the Chinese semiconductor industry no benefit, or even risk, which we will mention below.
Watch out for risk: prepare for DDR5
A few years ago a lot of DRAM manufacturers have closed down, leaving only Samsung, Hynix, Micron three, the reason is that DRAM is not profitable.
Market demand is too strong in 2017, DRAM manufacturers can not keep up production capacity has led to short supply, the soaring price of the 'super good' period However, the world's first and second largest dram maker Samsung Electronics and sk hynix are scrambling to expand DRAM output.It is estimated that if the two giants continue to increase production, then the global supply and demand will be reversed DRAM, DRAM prices will plummet once the memory prices fall, the Chinese semiconductor industry is likely to lose or even be worn down.
This round of DRAM plant is not groundless, a survey by Taiwanese enterprises show that 'Samsung is trying to increase dram production in order to improve market barriers to entry, to prevent DRAM prices from rising further.'
Samsung Electronics also said in the third quarter 2017 performance conference that it will convert the Hana flash memory production facility to a DRAM production facility and use the second floor of the Pyeongtaer factory to produce DRAM. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, one of the largest financial institutions, predicts that Samsung's DRAM production capacity will increase by 20.3% over the next two years.
sk hynix is no exception.In July 2017, sk hynix increased the investment scale by nearly 40%, thereby doubling the production capacity of the DRAM plant in Wuxi, China.However, the report said that in dram production The three Micron companies did not follow up.In the industry view, Samsung and Hynix's behavior is to suppress the rise of China's semiconductor industry means memory of the domestic road, at great risk.
Into 2018, the memory industry will officially announce DDR5 memory specifications, the next generation of DDR memory bandwidth and density are now twice the technical difficulty will reach an unprecedented height, DRAM is facing a new round of reshuffle, which is Chinese enterprises The challenge is also the best time to turn around the corner, the future hope that China's semiconductor companies can make a big difference in DDR5 memory, breaking the industry monopoly, highlight the style of the big country.
