The British "Financial Times" July 29th titled "The US chip industry sounded the alarm" commentary said that as one of the key pillars of US technology leadership, the industry has shown signs of collapse of self-confidence.
On the one hand, Moore's Law is no longer the case, chip performance improvement continues to weaken, chip companies struggle to cope with the decline in R&D returns; on the other hand, the US government is worried that Chinese companies rely on government support to bring 'reinventing the market'.
'Because of the crisis,' the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced last week that it would spend $1.5 billion to revive the US chip industry, which is the first time in 40 years that the agency has been involved in the chip field.
The article points out that it is often predicted that Moore's Law will soon fail, and DARPA chief microelectronics expert Bill Chappell points out that Moore's Law ' died as early as ten years ago'.
'Reigning' Moore's Law for more than 50 years of transistor development, proposed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, predicting that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. In the next 30 years, by shrinking the chip The size of the upper components, chip development has always followed Moore's Law. However, in the 21st century, the practice of simply relying on the reduction of size has clearly come to an end.
John Hennessy, chairman of the parent company of Google's parent company, said that the chip's performance improvement track has fallen below Moore's law's exponential growth curve over the past decade, and today the transistor density on the chip is only one-tenth of the 'should density'. .
The article pointed out that the US chip industry is now beginning to face a disturbing reality. For a long time, the stable performance of the chip has supported the development of the industry and provided computing power to open up new technology markets. But for some time, this performance improvement Continued to weaken.
Erica Fuchs, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, points out that this phenomenon has been evident since 2004.
The Financial Times commented that it was time to divert attention.
Chapel said that the rise of machine learning has given people a glimpse of the possible face of this new world. Since the artificial intelligence deep learning system requires a lot of data during training, the market demand for dedicated chips that can handle massive amounts of data is NVIDIA ( Nvidia) brings new vitality.
In addition, NVIDIA's graphics processing unit was originally designed to handle video. This demand also opened a door for Google, and Google introduced a big data chip design called TPU.
Henness believes that the rise of such 'domain-specific architecture' represents the most important factor affecting the development of the chip industry.
According to reports, this may set a model in other emerging computing markets. For example, we can imagine a new processor that is specifically designed for use with personal robots that need to be run with people in the real world.
For companies such as Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm, this trend may bode well.
France International Radio said on July 22 that the US Senate ended the suspense and controversy over the sanctions against China's ZTE Corporation, giving ZTE a chance to regenerate. However, the ZTE crisis triggered the current situation of Chinese chips relying on Western technology and the worries. China official warning, chip The problem still exists. Xin Guobin, deputy minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, pointed out that more than 95% of the high-end chips used in computers and servers still need to be imported, and there are still decades of gaps with developed countries.
Chinese officials issued warnings about chip dependence on imports. The Financial Times quoted a Chinese government minister as warning that China still lags far behind foreign competitors in producing semiconductors, and that more than 95% of high-end chips for computers and servers need to be imported. , despite having invested huge amounts of money to catch up.
The report also pointed out that according to Xin Guobin's warning, more than 95% of the manufacturing and testing equipment used in China's aircraft, aircraft engines and automobiles are imported.