The US sanctions against ZTE reflect the problems of China's IC industry: China has the world's largest semiconductor market, but the mainstream products of integrated circuit design companies are still concentrated in the low-end. The lack of basic capabilities, relying heavily on the advanced third parties IP core, advanced technology and outsourced design services, the final industry will be subject to people.
'Some things are laid down but it is easier'.
But semiconductors are not.
Not long ago, U.S. officials initiated a 7-year blockade against ZTE, which prohibited US companies from selling all electronic technology or communication components to ZTE.
Immediately afterwards, Reuters revealed that Huawei dismissed five employees in the United States. Among them were employees who had been operating for the United States for eight years.
'Some things are easy to let go.' This is a word spoken by Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun at yesterday's global analyst conference. Huawei has been actively expanding the US market, but it seems to go further with the United States.
At present, China’s only two communications giants in the world are facing unprecedented pressure in the context of the Sino-US trade war. ZTE’s reliance on the United States has met with the greatest crisis in history and may be devastated. .
Fight back. The 40th anniversary of the reform and opening up, we will still be in the key technology, 'shut the neck'. China has the world's largest semiconductor market, but the mainstream of integrated circuit design business products are still concentrated in the low-end.
Shi Shizhong. Some companies that once had a glorious past, relying heavily on third party advanced IP cores, advanced technology and outsourced design services, have lost their core competitiveness due to lack of basic capabilities. They have become the lessons of the industry.
Where did the problem go?
China's core pain: China's core integrated circuit domestic chip occupancy rate is 0, the trade deficit is as high as 165.7 billion US dollars
Yesterday, Weibo famous financial blogger @ Cao Shanshipo took a picture, showing the current status of China's core IC domestic chip.
In addition to mobile communication terminals and core network equipment, the share of some IC products exceeds 10%, including MPU in computer systems, FPGA/EPLD and DSP in general electronic systems, Embedded MPU and DSP in communication equipment, and storage devices. DRAM and Nand Flash, Display Driver in Display and Video System, Domestic Chip Occupancy are all 0.
This map originally originated from the article by Wei Shaojun, director of the Institute of Microelectronics of Tsinghua University, and was published in 2017 in the 34th issue of IC Application.
This article by Wei Shaojun shows that the Chinese integrated circuit industry continues to make rapid progress, with chip design, manufacturing, and packaging testing all achieving sales growth rates of over 10%.
But behind the booming industry, the mismatch between industrial structure and demand:
The chip manufacturing industry mainly processes overseas customers;
Chip design mainly uses overseas resources;
Chip packaging and testing mainly for overseas customers;
The most critical and most deadly thing is that the core IC's domestic chip occupancy is low, that is, the map of @Caoshanshi, even if there are domestic chips, either for overseas OEM, or no one cares.
On the other hand, there is a large trade deficit in the import and export of integrated circuits. In 2016, China’s integrated circuit imports reached US$227.07 billion, and exceeded US$200 billion for four consecutive years. It is the highest valued import commodity. During the same period, IC exports reached US$61.38 billion. , down 11.1%, trade deficit of up to 165.7 billion US dollars. It is expected that IC imports will remain high in the next few years.
The key components are almost no domestically produced, relying on large-scale imports. Against this backdrop, as the world’s fourth-largest manufacturer of network equipment, ZTE will face extinction once the United States imposes a ban.
Chinese people can not design a powerful chip? Scholars: Chinese people selectively ignore domestic core
At present, China's integrated circuit industry design, manufacturing, packaging and three industries at the same time, manufacturing can go OEM, package testing and the United States is not a big gap.
The biggest difference lies in the design. Now domestic chip design mainly depends on foreign countries. An expert from a university research institute in Beijing told Xinzhiyuan that it was not China that couldn't design a chip because there was no current condition for chip iteration.
'Intel, a big company like ARM, they designed the first generation of chips are very difficult to use, but it can be iterated, and finally there will be good chips.'
On the other hand, our domestic chips are difficult to survive. The main reason is that the industry will not give them an opportunity to iterate. This is because, on the one hand, the market already has chips with superior performance and even low costs. On the other hand, people do not have the patience to go. Such as domestic chips to iterate, which directly limits the improvement of China's chip design capabilities.
'A lot of people could actually design a good chip, but because the ecology of the market does not give you an opportunity to make domestic chips iteratively and ignore domestically, so domestic companies cannot and do not give engineers the 'sacrificial' Opportunity, this is where our problem lies. '
On the other hand, the lack of R&D investment is also the reason for not producing high-end universal chips. In addition to major national science and technology projects, other national science and technology plans have basically no integrated circuit-related projects and funding. The core electronic devices launched in 2008, high-end “General chip and basic software products' and “Very large scale integrated circuit equipments and complete sets of processes” Two national major scientific and technological special projects spend an average of 4 to 5 billion yuan per year on R&D in integrated circuits, which is less than 5.2% of Intel’s R&D costs. 7.7%.
Wei Shaojun also pointed out:
At present, the mainstream products of integrated circuit design enterprises in China are still concentrated in the low-end and not yet fully enter the international battlefield. In addition to more important breakthroughs in the field of communications, in the CPU, memory, programmable logic array (FPGA), digital The large number of strategic product areas, such as signal processors (DSPs), has made little progress.
Although strongly supported by national science and technology projects such as 'Nuclear High Base', Shanghai SMIC's R&D desktop CPUs and 'Godson' series CPUs have achieved batch applications in specific areas, but are subject to deficiencies in intellectual property, processing capabilities, and basic design capabilities. China's enterprises have not yet entered mass production in the above-mentioned areas, let alone fully participate in market competition.
Although we have made important progress in supercomputers with high-performance multi-core CPUs, dynamic random access memories, and embedded CPUs, there is still a big gap between the overall IC industry and the international advanced level.
If there is no definitive breakthrough in the high-end general-purpose chip field, the development space of the integrated circuit design industry in China will be greatly limited.
86% of companies will adopt AI in the future, domestic AI chips need 0 to 1 chance
At Huawei's Analyst Conference, Huawei first released the Global Industry Vision 2025 forecast: By 2025, the total number of global connections will reach 100 billion, video traffic will account for 89%, and 86% of enterprises will adopt AI. , And create a 23 trillion dollar digital economy.
Networks + AI, Phones + AI, and HuaweiCloud are three solutions proposed by Huawei to build a smart world. In the future, people, families, and organizations will all realize smart interconnection. To truly realize the application of artificial intelligence, it must be implemented from software. To hardware, hard and soft one.
Google decided to research and develop TPU seven years ago and saw the results today: It not only shines on AlphaGO, but more importantly it also makes it an AI service. The potential for business is huge. Behind this phenomenon, it reflects a new Trends: A deep understanding of artificial intelligence software will promote the efficiency of R&D of processor architectures. AI chips for application scenarios may be an opportunity for China.
Huawei introduced the Kirin 970 chip last year to bring greater visual, audio, and tactile experience; and through the open HiAI ecosystem based on NPU's computing power, the benefits of AI were extended to the entire terminal industry, which made the chip industry ecologically changeable. More rich.
The application scenario determines the algorithm, the algorithm defines the chip, and the hardware and software co-design. China's Horizon also saw the opportunity of the AI chip three years ago.
In December last year, Horizon introduced China's first embedded artificial intelligence vision chip - a self-driving journey processor and a sunburst processor for smart cameras, and landed in three areas: smart driving, smart city, and intelligent business.
Horizon AI chip specifications and core architecture
On the technical level, the BPU of the horizon is worth mentioning.
The BPU belongs to Heterogeneous Multiple Instruction Multiple Data computing architecture. One of the core computing devices is Elastic Tensor Core, which can adjust the calculated mode to the maximum according to the shape of the data to be processed. Utilization efficiency of multipliers. With specially designed data routing bridges, the BPU can flexibly connect multiple operating devices (ALUs) to multiple static storage banks (SRAM Banks) simultaneously. Compiler and Runtime strategies are optimized to enable DDR data to be read or written and computed, as well as synchronous execution between different types of operations.
A startup company like Horizon can independently research and develop AI chips, which proves that the domestic chips continue to improve in design. The aforementioned experts from Beijing University Research Institute also stated that do not think that domestic chips are just a technical problem. It is an ecological issue. Some domestic companies Not necessarily bad in the chip design, but the lack of relative or experimental opportunities.
'The problem is that there isn't even a chance for an experiment, even if it only gives a space from 0 to 1, then there's no problem keeping them in the gap.'