As the two leading economies in chip manufacturing, SMIC and Intel can be seen as the epitome of the scale and level of chip manufacturing in these two markets, both in the past and in the future.

Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “ Semiconductor industry observation ” (ID: icbank), author Zhang Jian keya.

The worse the economic situation, the more it is necessary to focus on investment and development of basic manufacturing, which seems to have become the consensus of the development of major global markets. This situation can be traced back to the 1930s of the last century, when a rare economic crisis broke out in the United States. At that time, President Roosevelt’s measure was to increase investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, thereby driving the market and the national economy out of the trough. After the subprime mortgage crisis broke out in the United States in 2008, it affected many countries, including China. At that time, China also invested huge amounts of money in infrastructure construction and boosted domestic consumption.

The same situation seems to be happening in the semiconductor industry too. 2018 and 2019 are the low years for the global semiconductor industry. Since the launch of the “Big Fund” in 2014, China has placed semiconductor manufacturing at the core of its development industry, and investment has mainly flowed into semiconductor manufacturing. With the global semiconductor industry in the past two years stagnating, this increased investment in manufacturing The measures have continued to increase. Not only did the “big fund” vigorously support local IDM and wafer foundries, but also various local provinces and cities have spared no effort in building wafer fabs, and many IDM and wafer foundry projects have sprung up.

Invariably, in the past two years, the United States has also emphasized the return of its domestic manufacturing industry, including semiconductor manufacturing, and has given many preferential policies and financial support to new factories in the United States.

It can be said that, compared with IC design and packaging and testing, the scale and level of chip manufacturing are the core elements for testing the development level of the local semiconductor market, including IDM and wafer foundries.

In the United States, Intel, Texas Instruments (TI) and GF represent the highest level of semiconductor manufacturing. Among them, Intel is IDM, ranking first in the global semiconductor market for a long time. It mainly designs and manufactures CPUs. Representative logic chips, as well as NAND flash memory chips; TI is also IDM, which also ranks first among global analog chip manufacturers, mainly based on high-performance analog chip design and manufacturing; GF is a wafer foundry, worldwide Ranked third after TSMC and Samsung.

In mainland China, there are few IDMs with large scale and international influence throughout the semiconductor manufacturing industry. This is also the main reason for vigorously promoting the revitalization of local IDMs in recent years. Therefore, it can be regarded as China The companies represented by mainland chip manufacturing only have foundriesIt was found in the factory, and its representative companies are SMIC and Huahong.

Among the three leading semiconductor manufacturing companies in the United States, Intel is undoubtedly ranked first in terms of history, market influence, process level, and revenue capability. In mainland China, SMIC has high hopes, and it ranks fifth among global wafer foundry companies, the highest ranking among similar companies in mainland China, and has become the most watched and expected local chip manufacturing company.

Therefore, it can be said that SMIC and Intel are currently the most outstanding representatives in the field of semiconductor manufacturing in mainland China and the United States, and are at the peak of their respective markets. Of course, the formats of the two companies are different. One is a wafer foundry and the other is IDM. However, for chip manufacturing, the two formats have a high degree of similarity and are comparable.

History

Intel has gone through 51 years. In July 1968, an electronics company named Mornoise was quietly born in California, USA. The company was founded by two engineers: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Shortly after the company was founded, the two founders found that the name Mornoise sounded like More Noise, and it didn’t sound good. So they decided to change to a new name. They thought of the English word Intelligence, and the word was similar to Integrated Electronics. So they decided to change the company name to Intel.

After the establishment of Intel Corporation, its main business was memory, but as competition became more intense, its memory business gradually declined. Therefore, Intel was forced to step up the development of new product lines to develop into the microprocessor market, 1971 In 2004, Intel developed the world’s first commercial processor, Intel 4004. In 1978, Intel produced the famous 16-bit 8086 processor, which is the first x86 processor in history and will also become a personal computer in the future. Standard platform. Since then, after a series of market competition twists and turns, Intel has gradually reached the peak of the global processor market and has achieved today’s CPU empire.

Comparatively, SMIC is a young company. It was founded by Zhang Rujing in 2000. The company has gone all the way. It has been stumbled. Many stories happened during the period. For a long time after its establishment, SMIC is at a loss, but for an asset-heavy chip manufacturing company, this is a necessary stage of development. In the process, the company has also experienced patent lawsuits, CEO changes, and so on. After years of struggle, it finally entered a healthy development stage and became the most concerned chip manufacturing company in mainland China.

Fab and capacity

Intel has many wafer fabs, about 70