Just last week, ARM announced that it would set up a joint venture with China to jointly explore the rapid development of the domestic chip industry. For this joint venture company, China holds 51% of the shares and ARM holds 49% of the shares. The domestic side holds a large degree of discourse for this chip joint venture. Although the right to speak is large, we have to dig deeper to find out why such a joint venture was established at this point in time, and for the domestic chip industry. What will this mean?
We all know that ARM has been occupying a huge global market for a long period of time in the fields of chips and semiconductors. At the same time, core technologies such as CPUs and GPUs also have autonomous and controllable core technologies. This is a rapid development for the domestic Internet of Things market. In terms of future prospects, the establishment of a joint venture company is indeed a very important market layout.
Chinese joint venture 'self-financing'?
According to the actual situation, ARM's relevant reality and key patents are still in the hands of ARM's own parent company. The original senior managers of ARM China are all Chinese, and they are old employees who have served the company for a long period of time. Their overall team The stability is very high. Therefore, experts in the industry stated that the capital injection from the joint venture will not affect the stability of the team. At the specific business level, all related businesses in China will be operated by joint ventures. The Chinese joint venture will also be Self-financing.
In terms of personnel composition, this joint venture strategy has already launched new talent introduction programs for graduate students, internships, social recruitment and other channels for the society and universities, among which the highest-level social recruitment lists 37 Positions, covering CPU, GPU, IoT, AI, software and other directions. From this we can easily analyze the future of the chip market for China, whether it is veteran chip makers or joint ventures are very optimistic about China's future chip field development .
The influence of the joint venture on the domestic future
We all know that for traditional chip makers such as ARM, the global semiconductor industry has always played a very important role, and to a large extent, it also maintains close links with the RISC architecture route. RISC and Intel’s dominant x86 represent Compared with the CISC architecture route, it is inherently more efficient. Also known by more and more people, ARM only does chip design, and design authorization. For the future-oriented Chinese market, it is actually for chip companies. The aim is to design the processor. All the chip design work will eventually be converted into the chip's source code. The vendor can sell the processor instruction set architecture license to the user according to the user's actual needs and capabilities, or it can be processed. IP source code and microarchitecture design.
Users can design their own processor based on their own needs in the architecture, and can also add other peripheral IP and their own design IP based on the processor IP provided by ARM, and then go through the simulation of integrated layout and wiring, and finally send it to The fab will produce these chips.
Some industry experts said that for the chip joint venture established this time, it can be imagined as a crowdfunding. These manufacturers and processors use the money, and ARM raises this money to study the next generation. Strong technology and products, and then to accept the next round of money manufacturers. In this mode, driving the entire ARM system continues to move forward, is no longer a manufacturer, nor a technology, but an entire ecosystem , And the business value behind it.
Current domestic semiconductor industry
For the domestic semiconductor chip industry, the words “autonomous and controllable” have been mentioned by us too many times. Of course, we have indeed made some achievements. In the case of the relative backwardness of the overall semiconductor industry, Godson Shen Wei also achieved good results in their respective fields. Godson continued to iterate. Although it failed to enter the consumer market, it also went to the Beidou satellite.
Shen Wei’s latest flagship was directly used to create the world’s fastest supercomputer, “Shenwei Taihu Light,” and because of its architectural and design advantages, it also beat many giants such as Intel and other foreign companies. Computers. But for fierce market competition, what we are currently doing is insignificant.
Objectively speaking, whether it is Godson or Shen Wei, although there has been some progress on the hardware level, there are still some challenges and difficulties in the software ecology. Look back at the x86 and ARM processors. The two major architectures, in fact, are very complicated behind their success. To have Wintel, an intimate software-side comrade-in-arms like 'AA', to be able to attract enough developers, to be able to continuously improve the hardware level over time, ultimately these factors It will form an ecology.
The Fundamental Significance of 'China Version' ARM
The current domestic situation is that there is not only a dominant instruction set architecture, but also that in order to develop autonomous processor technologies, we are still limited by the semiconductor manufacturers' technical confidentiality and weak software ecosystem. China has not been able to enter an ecological cycle. In the development environment, this way, the strategic approach of the joint venture company becomes obvious, foreign companies can still own the intellectual property ownership of the existing processor, and the market exclusivity of the joint venture company can develop the self-developed chip. Products are well-to-market, and they can also own property rights.
'Recruitment and use of local talent' should also be a subsidiary condition of Chinese capital injection, because the quantity is not too many. The main purpose of this batch of positions is to be responsible for the docking work of specific domestic projects and customers, and of course it is also possible to carry out certain patented technologies. For R&D, they will observe ARM's technical reserves and operating methods in close quarters and will definitely be a valuable learning opportunity.
For any foreign-funded enterprise, the Chinese market is an important market that cannot be ignored. Choosing to take root in China and understand the needs of domestic users is actually a very wise choice. In the evolving chip market, for the market Competition and snatching are no less than technological competition. Looking ahead, semiconductor manufacturers will continue to infiltrate each other, and cross-border competition will become more apparent.
