Qiaobao reported that the U.S. government has banned the sale of components, software and technology to ZTE within seven years. Sino-U.S. trade frictions have been upgraded to high-tech fields, and China’s communications industry has experienced 'core pain' for the first time. According to research firm International Business Strategies Inc It is estimated that nearly 90% of China’s chips are imported or produced in China by foreign companies, while Chinese domestic chips only account for about 8% of local demand.
Lack of 'core'
The technical bottleneck reflected in the layout of the global semiconductor market is the lack of competitiveness of Chinese companies. At present, 77% of the world's mobile phones are made in China, but less than 3% of them are from China; 54% of the world's chips are exported to China. However, China's domestic chip market share only accounts for 10%.
At present, it is still unknown whether ZTE can successfully survive this “catastrophe.” Even if the immediate crisis is resolved, how to prevent the United States from seizing the “Gate of Life” is not only a problem for ZTE, but also a problem for China. Because behind the ban on ZTE, it highlights China's 'core pain' in the game of big powers.
Comprehensive Beijing "China News Weekly", "China Economic Weekly" reported that chips, also known as microcircuits, microchips, integrated circuits, refers to silicon chips containing integrated circuits, small size, but it is a mobile phone, computer or other electronic device The core component can be said that the chip is the 'brain' of electronic devices.
The chip is the 'base stone' of the information era. The chip industry is a comprehensive embodiment of a country's high-end manufacturing capabilities. It is a strategic commanding point for all countries to participate in global high-tech competition. Behind it lies huge commercial value and national interests.
China is the world's largest consumer market for semiconductor chips, but ICs have long relied heavily on imports and the trade deficit has continued to widen.
According to a survey company International Business Strategies Inc., nearly 90% of China's chips are imported or produced in China, while Chinese domestic chips only account for about 8% of local demand.
Reliance on imported chips has caused China to consume a large amount of foreign exchange reserves. According to statistics from the China Chamber of Commerce, the total import volume of integrated circuits in China reached 260.14 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, an increase of 14.6% year-on-year, exceeding imports of petroleum and becoming the largest importer of goods. In the same period, IC exports amounted to only US$66.88 billion, an increase of 9.8% year-on-year.
Behind the high cost is the weakness of the Chinese chip industry. According to the Shanghai First Finance Network, in the field of software, design, manufacture, packaging and testing, materials, and equipment included in the chip industry, China's backwardness is 'all-round'.
On April 18 this year at the China Computer Society Youth Computer Technology Forum (hereinafter referred to as the forum), academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary chairman of the CCF Li Guojie also expressed similar views: 'In the chip manufacturing process, we and the United States' strength difference To two generations, we can now achieve 14nm process, and the process is not yet complete, and overseas has done 10nm to 7nm.
Taking the good Huawei Huawei, which is currently developing in China's chip design field, as an example, the chip manufacturing process still needs to be built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
All-round backwardness has caused China's domestic chips to be used mainly in the consumer sector. However, in the communications, industrial, medical, and military fields where stability and reliability are more demanding, Chinese domestic chips still have a large gap with the international level.
The technical gap has caused China to be the world's largest chip market, but it has no right to speak.
In the strong demand for chip imports, the United States is an important chip importer in China. The Research Report on China-US Economic and Trade Relations issued by the Ministry of Commerce last year showed that 15% of ICs exported by the United States are sold to China.
The Chinese market has already occupied half of the U.S. chip giant. Qualcomm’s revenue in mainland China for FY 2017 was 14.579 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 65% of total revenue. Another memory chip giant, Micron, was in 2017. The revenue of the Chinese mainland market reached 10.4 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 51% of its total revenue.
However, the huge market is not in exchange for real technology. China is still relatively weak in chips and components. China's domestic semiconductor industry is more concentrated in back-end processes, but upstream basic raw materials, semiconductor equipment and core components such as RF, FPGA, high-speed digital-to-analog conversion, storage and other core chip technologies are still in the hands of overseas manufacturers.
Some analysts pointed out that on the terminal baseband chip, there are Chinese companies like MediaTek and Spreadtrum competing; However, at the server chip level, the U.S. suppliers are the largest; at the core optical chip level of the communications network, U.S. suppliers are mainly responsible. .
The technical bottleneck reflected in the layout of the global semiconductor market is the lack of competitiveness of Chinese companies. At present, 77% of the world's mobile phones are made in China, but less than 3% of them are from China; 54% of the world's chips are exported to China. However, China's domestic chip market share only accounts for 10%.
According to a report released by IC Insights, a market research institution, the current global semiconductor market reaches US$438.5 billion and the top ten semiconductor manufacturers (Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, Micron, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Nvidia and NXP). Occupy 58.5% of the entire market share, which did not appear in the shadow of Chinese manufacturers.
Sorry to miss the golden age
According to Bao Yungang, a researcher at the Institute of Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s semiconductor industry has unfortunately missed a golden age. At present, the international semiconductor giants almost all started in the 1970s and 1980s, using long time and huge amounts of talent. Put in exchange for today's technology accumulation.
Since 1978, China’s reform and opening up has gone through 40 years. With the addition of the world's second largest economy and the addition of halo, BAT, and Huawei’s birth, why has China fallen behind in the crucial chip field?
According to Beijing’s “China News Weekly”, Li Guojie, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary chairman of the CCF, believes that on the one hand, the accumulation of relevant technologies is not enough, and on the other hand, policies often fluctuate.
Speaking of the technological accumulation of chip design and manufacturing, Li Guojie said that 'it can be solved without spending money'.
According to analysis by industry insiders, the trial and error costs and troubleshooting of chip design are difficult, and the time period is often calculated in months or even years.
The long trial-and-error cycle requires a rigorous and meticulous work attitude, and the difficulty of troubleshooting requires a set of scientific experimentation methods. These two aspects are precisely the soft underbelly of Chinese education.
Hu Weiwu, a researcher at the Institute of Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said at the forum that the person in charge of training the chip industry is extremely unbalanced, with many applied talents and few basic research personnel.
In this regard, Li Guojie also holds the same view. He believes that the reserve and cultivation of talents is relatively weak. This is a key factor in the apparent gap between China's chip semiconductor industry and the international top level. In his opinion, most talents are concentrated. In technology applications, there are too few talents in the bottom-level systems such as algorithms and chips.
Regarding policy, Du Zide, secretary-general of the China Computer Federation (CCF), also stated at the forum that China’s long-term lack of attention to basic research and insufficient attention to core technologies and platforms is a question worthy of deep reflection. Li Guojie believes that the state is in civilian chips. In the past, the policy of the past was not very firm. 'This is not the result of one day or two. It needs long-term support'.
According to the China Youth Daily, the researcher of the Institute of Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the doctoral tutor Bao Yungang believe that China's semiconductor industry has unfortunately missed a golden age. At present, the international semiconductor giants almost all started in the 1970s and 1980s, and they used a long period of time. The time and huge amount of talent input in exchange for today's technology accumulation.
In fact, over the world, only the United States has a well-structured computer industry. The United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, and France all have their own strengths. In the semiconductor semiconductor industry, where the industry chain is very long, China still lacks perfect upstream supply.
Zhang Yongfeng, an associate professor at Dalian Neusoft Institute of Information, said that the upgrading of Chinese domestic chips mainly depends on the progress of production processes and EDA tools (chip design assistance software, programmable chip aided design software, system design assistance software, etc.), but most of these upstream tools are Mastered by overseas companies.
An example is the lithography machine, an extremely accurate camera used to process high-end chips. The precision of the lithography machine determines the upper limit of the precision of the chip. The high-precision lithography machines are mainly produced from ASML in the Netherlands and Nikon and Canon in Japan. Three companies, the world's top lithography machines, are basically monopolized by ASML. In the production process, international chip giants generally give chip production to South Korea’s Samsung, Taiwan’s TSMC and other companies in China, and Chinese companies lack relevant information. Accumulated experience.
'We have also followed the trend of others, but we have been left far behind. The current design process is still far behind the advanced COT design methods of large international companies.' Zhang Yongfeng said that objective reality has caused Chinese chip companies to compare with overseas giants. The overall situation is still weak and scattered.
Chip talent shortage 400,000
The "White Paper on Talents in China's IC Industry (2016-2017)" published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in May 2017 shows that the total number of IC employees currently employed in China is less than 300,000, but it is calculated on the basis of total output value. , 700,000 people are needed, and there is a serious shortage of personnel training.
In addition to the weak R&D strength and the low level of corporate concentration, there is also a shortage of R&D talent that affects the development of Chinese chips.
Beijing’s “China Youth Daily” reported that Li Jiaodong, an associate professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, was recently worried. He saw that in the discussion of the ZTE event and the national chip, he paid more attention to the technology gap and paid less attention to talent issues. In his view, China The lack of R&D and application of domestic chips, the more fundamental issue is the 'top-heavy' cultivation of computer talent in China.
He observed that undergraduates and postgraduates majoring in computer science are generally reluctant to learn a more basic computer system structure, but are more concerned with computer applications.
'The talent pool in the university's chip industry is worrying. Almost everyone is doing something about computer applications rather than basic things.' Li Shudong understands the objective differences in talent between the computer basic field and the application field, 'the employment rate of colleges and universities, Students look at the market's expectations, but he believes that there is a big difference between salary and total talent.
According to the White Paper on China's Integrated Circuit Industry (2016-2017) (hereinafter referred to as the white paper) issued by China Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion Center (CSIP) of China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in May 2017, the total number of IC industry employees in China is currently less than 30. Ten thousand people, but according to the total output value, it needs 700,000 people. The total amount of personnel training is seriously insufficient.
"Essentially it's all about teaching students how to use computers, not teaching students how to build computers. Just like a car major teaches a bunch of drivers." Talking about the topic of chip talent, researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 'Lonse' Hu Weiwu, the head of the processor, has a lot to say. In his view, China's chip industry is extremely unbalanced in talent development. Most of the talents are focused on technology applications. However, there are too few talents on the underlying systems such as algorithms and chips.
He readily gave a practical example: The vast majority of Internet companies are programming in Java, with corresponding talent pools of hundreds of thousands or even millions, but researching Java Virtual Machines (simulating various computers on real computers) There are very few talented people who have abstracted the functions of computers. "I didn't even have 10 people when I started a business in 2010." Today, China may still not have more than 100.
'College education not only teaches people who use computers, but also teaches an architecture, an operating system, and these teaching systems should be developed.' Hu Weiwu called for computer professionals to strengthen the training of basic talents.