The ZTE Incident made us see the “core” pain in China. It all said that a penny pinned the hero Han. A small chip, did it also baffle the Chinese people? Then, why China can build high-speed railways and have Alipay? Can you invent a shared bicycle, but you can't create a small chip?
Small and fine A 'core' requires 5,000 processes
IC update speed
Perhaps not everyone understands integrated circuits, but many people have heard of Moore's Law. Moore's Law states that the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit increases by about every 18 months when the price does not change. Times, performance will also be doubled. Half a century ago, this speculation put forward by one of Intel's founders, Moore, has continued for more than 50 years.
Moore's Law reveals the pace of development in the field of integrated circuits. In such high-speed innovations, integrated circuit products continue to reduce costs, improve performance, and increase functionality. It is also in such high-speed development that the gaps in integrated circuit technology in various countries have become increasingly wide. Big. Some insiders said that if China wants to catch up with top companies in the main integrated circuit field, it will take more than time, but the entire system will be upgraded.
The United States is a monolithic, all-round leading position, and we have only made breakthroughs in certain fields, and these areas are not the core, high-end areas, such as China in memory, CPU, FPG and high-end analog chips, power chips In areas such as China, there is almost nothing. If China makes R&D efforts, there may be some breakthroughs in certain small categories. But in the face of core, high-end fields, China and the United States are far apart!
There are dozens of gates and thousands of small gates
A chip, which refers to a silicon chip that contains integrated circuits, is small in size and is often part of a computer or other electronic device. A chipset is a set of interconnected chipsets. They are interdependent, and combining them can make more sense. For example, the central processing unit (CPU) in a computer and the radio frequency in a mobile phone, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in a baseband and a communication base station, etc., are larger integrated circuits that are composed of a plurality of chips.
Integrated circuits are very sophisticated instruments and their units are nanometers. A nanometer is one hundred thousandth of a millimeter. This has very strict requirements on design and manufacturing processes and high standards. There are many kinds of chips, and only in terms of product types, there are dozens of types of chips, and thousands of sub-categories; if there is equipment flow, it will be even more.
It takes 5,000 processes to make a chip
An expert in the field of chip manufacturing introduced that the manufacturing process of a chip is very complicated. A production line involves about 50 industries and has 2000-5000 processes. For the foundry, it is necessary to first purify the 'sand' into silicon. Then cut into wafers and process the wafer. The wafer processing plant contains two processes, the former and the latter are divided into several modules—lithography, thin film, etching, cleaning, and injection; the latter process is mainly encapsulation— Interconnection, wire bonding, sealing. Among them, lithography is the link between manufacturing and design.
Many of these processes are carried out in independent plants, and the equipment used also requires specialized equipment manufacturing; the materials used include several hundred special gases, liquids, and targets, all of which require specialized chemical industries. In addition, the production of integrated circuits They are all carried out in clean rooms, so systems such as exhaust air and air purification are also needed.
Global chip is almost monopolized by U.S., Japan and Europe
At present, the global chip market is still dominated by U.S., Japan, and European corporate products, and the high-end market is almost monopolized by these three main regions. In the high-end chip space, domestic manufacturers have not yet formed scale effect and clustering effect, so their production still uses ' OEM-based model.
As of the end of 2015, statistics show that there are 94 advanced wafer manufacturers globally, of which 17 are in the United States, 71 are in Asia (China has 9), and 6 are in Europe. Japan was in the leading position in the 1980s. However, since the 1990s, its global semiconductor market share has dropped significantly. By 2015, only three Japanese chip makers were ranked among the world’s top 20 – Toshiba, Renesas Electronics and Sony. Meanwhile, other East Asian countries Has become the main company in the dynamic random access memory market. South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Haishi Li are currently the second and third largest semiconductor companies in the world.
According to the latest statistics from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the share of the chip market in China and the United States increased by 33.10% and 19.73% from January to February 2017; the market share of chips in Japan and Europe declined. , 9.29% and 9.12%, respectively. The Chinese chip market is the world's largest and fastest growing market, but its foreign dependence is too high.
There are hundreds of chips in a communication base station mostly from the United States
Taking the operator's business as an example, the communication base station equipment is one of its most important products. In a communication base station, there are hundreds of chips responsible for implementing different functions. 'Simply speaking, a base station transmits and recovers signals and recovers signals. After the first, there must be chip filtering to stabilize the signal; then there is the chip to amplify this particularly small signal; then there is the chip for analysis and processing; then the chip is responsible for transmission and distribution. The base station core is similar to the computer and can achieve various functions. , But it can support multiple phones, so faster, more complex chip. 'The above said.
Among them, the most typical is the ADC chip. China is currently unable to produce alternative products. The ADC chip is an analog-to-digital conversion chip and is responsible for converting the continuous analog signal received by the antenna into a digital signal for talking or surfing the Internet. Currently, ADCs mainly rely on sub- Deno, Texas Instruments and other companies supply.
From software aspect, EDA simulation software is another typical example. With this software, the electronic designer can design the chip system on the computer, a large amount of work can be done by using a computer, and multiple products can be combined and tested. If not EDA simulation software requires manual design, testing, manpower consumption, and time and other costs. There are more than a dozen EDA softwares that have entered China and have extensive impact, basically all from the United States.
The top three Chinese semiconductors are Huawei, Ziguang, and ZTE.
At home, China’s semiconductor industry is also accelerating in recent years.
According to the statistics of China Semiconductor Industry Association, sales of China's integrated circuit industry reached 541.13 billion yuan in 2017, an increase of 24.8% year-on-year. Among them, IC manufacturing industry grew fastest, with a year-on-year increase of 28.5% in 2017, and sales reached 144.81 billion yuan. The design and packaging and testing industries continued to maintain rapid growth, with growth rates of 26.1% and 20.8%, respectively, and sales of 207.35 billion yuan and 188.97 billion yuan, respectively.
According to data from the General Administration of Customs, China exported 204.35 billion integrated circuits in 2017, an increase of 13.1% year-on-year; export value was US$66.88 billion, an increase of 9.8% year-on-year.
A latest ranking report of the top ten integrated circuit design/manufacturing industries in 2017 announced by the Semiconductor Association and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China’s Institute of Electronic Information Industry Development shows that among the top ten integrated circuit design companies in China, Huawei Hass Semiconductor has 361 Billion sales ranked first; Tsinghua Unisplendour ranked second with RMB 11 billion; ZTE Microelectronics ranked third with RMB 7.6 billion. Then there was Huada Semiconductor, Wisdom Microelectronics, Huiding Technology, Silan. Microelectronics, Duntai Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., Geco Microelectronics and Vimicro.
Can China jump off the U.S. IP nuclear?
Some experts indicated that China's integrated circuit is not a late start. It was only a few years later than the United States. However, due to various factors such as European and American technology blockades, domestic historical issues and other factors, the gap between the current and European countries is relatively large. It is difficult to catch up.
From the perspective of the entire industry, the US card is 'IP (intellectual property)' and the war around IP is even more intense. Even if you use other people's technology, people have property rights. You can't bypass it to solve the problem.' The IP core designs some commonly used but more complex functional blocks in digital circuits, such as FIR filters, SDRAM controllers, PCI interfaces, etc., as modules that can modify parameters. The above-mentioned sources stated that China’s integrated circuit industry has always been a popular term. Curvy Road Overtaking', many people wondered if they could jump out of the US IP core and start a new one. In addition to developing a whole ecosystem, it is too complicated.
Many industry study said that at present China's integrated circuit is systemic behind, enhancing the overall need to do the basic research and personnel training, a relatively long time, 'we need to cultivate talent base mathematics, physics and other disciplines. these people put up, and then cultured with other interdisciplinary talent by them. they need to have industrial design and other technologies. '