Professor Hu Zhengming, a famous semiconductor scholar, once pointed out in a forum in 2015 that the integrated circuit industry can grow for another 100 years.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Semiconductor Industry Watch” (ID: icbank) .
On April 1, Professor Wei Shaojun, director of the Department of Micro and Nanoelectronics at Tsinghua University and director of the Institute of Microelectronics, shared a theme in the online lecture hall of Wudaokou, Tsinghua University. “Chip will be with us for another hundred years.” .
Professor Wei Shaojun started with a couplet of Zhao Fan in the Wuhou Temple: “If you can attack the heart, you will be self-defeating, and you will know soldiers from the ancient times. He pointed out the importance of judging the situation, and the judgment and choice of the situation will affect the development of the individual. As far as the current situation is concerned, information technology has promoted the development of GDP in the past 20 years, but behind information technology, semiconductors are driving the development of this industry, and now the integrated circuit industry has become an important industry.
The past and present of the chip
Zhuangzi has a saying: “Hammer of the day is half of the day, and it will last forever.” The meaning of this sentence is to take half of a foot today, half of it tomorrow, half of the half tomorrow, and half of it will always be left, so it will never be exhausted, which reflects the material It is an infinitely separable thought. Professor Wei Shaojun said that the development of semiconductors and chips happened to shrink in half and half, and the process of shrinking has not stopped until now.
However, the narrowing process must be carried out according to certain rules, that is, according to the rules. If there are no rules, then it cannot be a circle. This confirms what Mencius said in Li Zhangzhang’s sentence: “It is a coincidence between Li Zhiming and the public to lose sons. The rule used for chip shrinkage is Moore’s Law.
Liang Qichao said in his speech at the Shanxi Ticket Vendor Welcome Meeting: “You are old and able to defend, and Sri Lanka is already good enough! But people think that people are like people, like sailing against the current, if you go against the current, you will retreat.” Professor Wei Shaojun explained that just like sailing against the current, if you don’t advance, you will retreat. In the process of chip development, there are many industries because they have not kept up with technological developments. In the end, they really retreat without even advancing, or even withdraw from the stage of history. Professor Wei Shaojun gave a few interesting examples:
Example 1: The disappearance of film.
Thirty or forty years ago, color film was a rarity. The internationally renowned Kodak company was founded in 1880, but a century-old store applied for bankruptcy protection in January 2012. So what beats the film? It is CIS and digital cameras that “kill” the film.
In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the photoelectric effect; 48 years later, there were two in 1969Scientists Boyle and Smith invented the world’s first electronic imaging technology-a charge-coupled device, that is, a camera; Kodak invented a digital camera in 1991. At that time, the price was as high as $ 13,000 and the weight was 5 kg. Few people can afford it, so Kodak I feel that digital cameras have no future, so there is no production, but the rapid development of semiconductor technology is beyond imagination. The weight and price of digital cameras have been rapidly developed. Digital cameras have gradually become popular, and many people have not. Buy film again. It now appears that the technology that “killed” the film at the time was fundamentally semiconductor technology.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Example 2: The disappearance of mechanical clocks. The mechanical timepiece invented in the 15th century has no value at all in terms of pure timekeeping function. There is no doubt that it is the electronic watch that kills the mechanical clock. In 1971, when Motorola launched the first electronic watch chip, they probably did not realize that after decades, electronic watches have begun to replace, and even basically drove mechanical watches from the field of timing functions.
Example 3: Magnetic storage has been gradually replaced by electrical storage. Representative products of magnetic storage such as magnetic tapes, magnetic disks, and magnetic disks in computers. In the 1960s, the mainstream of computer storage units was magnetic core memory, not the semiconductor memory of today. Today, magnetic core memory has long been replaced by semiconductor memory.
Example 4: The rise of Apple. Due to the development of semiconductor technology, electronic products have been greatly developed. Taking Apple as an example, the development of its chips and software has realized the value of the iPhone. During the same period, Nokia’s mobile phone, which had a very well-known market share of up to 60%, fell out of favor because of going against the current. The development of things is like this, we have to keep up with the development of things, otherwise we can only be eliminated by the tide of the world.
Many things have disappeared in the past 40 years, such as MP3, DVD, electronic dictionary, walkman, etc. From this point of view, any integrated circuit technology can inevitably become a “loser” in the end.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Incredible chip technology
There is a sentence in “The Analects of Confucius · Xue Er” called “Such as learning from each other, like cutting like grinding”. Zhu Xi, a university scholar in the Song Dynasty, had such a note: “Those who treat the bones rigorously will be cut back and revived; those who treat jade will be refined and polished, and the cure will be refined, and they will pursue their fine work” The meaning of this sentence is to keep improving. The word is most appropriate when used on integrated circuits or chips.
The following picture is the 2007 international semiconductor technology roadmap. The vertical axis in the figure refers to the continuous scaling down along Moore’s Law. As of today, the process technology node has reached 7nm, and soon 5nm will follow. The horizontal axis is a diversified development path for various semiconductor technologies and sensors.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
The pace of technology advancement never stops, and now we are still exploring further technology. What is behind the 7nm and 5nm processes? In the post-CMOS era, there will be new transistors. The chip size reduction is far from over. For example, people have prepared 1nm transistors based on two-dimensional materials.
But Professor Wei Shaojun also mentioned that as a materialist, any single thing must always come to an end, especially today ’s linear technology, which actually has 4 important limits:
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Physical limit: it is the minimum size, it seems that if our material does not break through too much, our minimum size may beAt around 1nm, by 2030, the feature size of the transistor may be close to 1.5nm;
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Power consumption limit: It means that the power consumption density of the device under the physical limit will reach several kilowatts / cm²;
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Process limit: Pushing CMOS to the limit requires revolutionary material and device innovations. In the process, it will inevitably encounter huge technical and engineering obstacles;
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Economic limit: To realize the above-mentioned various technological innovations will inevitably lead to a very sharp increase in manufacturing and development costs, so only a few global companies can support it.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
The global semiconductor market is shrinking in 2019, and China is remarkable
People often ask what kind of industry the semiconductor industry is? Professor Wei Shaojun quoted it from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter ’s words, “Innovation is not a technical concept, but an economic concept”. The semiconductor or chip industry is precisely an innovation-driven industry. Its invention eventually turns into money, and it is developed by means of innovation. So it is an innovation-driven industry.
After understanding the form of the semiconductor industry, let’s look at the development of the semiconductor industry. Taking history as a mirror, during the period from 1987 to 2019, it is not difficult to find that the development of the semiconductor industry has not progressed all the way. Take 2019 as an example, last year’s semiconductor sales revenue was 412.1 billion US dollars, a decrease of 12.1% over the previous year. This is a recession that reappeared after 7 years after a slight recession in 2012. It is also the largest recession since 2001.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
From the perspective of the global semiconductor market distribution, the global market shrank to US $ 412.1 billion in 2019The US market is 78.5 billion US dollars, the European market is 39.8 billion US dollars, the Japanese market is 36 billion US dollars, the Chinese market is 144.6 billion US dollars, and other Asia-Pacific regions are 113.3 billion US dollars. Overall, the global semiconductor market has declined, but it is very interesting that China’s share has increased to 35.1%.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Last year, all kinds of semiconductor products in the world have shrunk. Among them, memory has shrunk by 34.2%. After the memory recession, it is consistent with the market share of logic chips, accounting for about 25.8%.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
From the perspective of global semiconductor product applications, in addition to the growth of government applications, other applications have shrunk in 2019. Is it because the Chinese government bought a lot of chips, Professor Wei Shaojun explained: “According to the data, it really is not, because the increase in the purchase volume of the US government has caused the increase in government purchases. So in fact, the application of semiconductors, in addition to our conventional Knowing consumer cars, computers, and industrial application communications, the government also plays a very important role. “
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Which companies’ sales decline caused the global semiconductor decline to be so severe in 2019? We can find clues from the sales revenue of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers in the world in 2019. The top ten chip manufacturers in the worldAmong them, Samsung, Hynix, Micron, and Toshiba, the four companies with the most severe sales declines, fell by 37.3%, 40.4%, 36.9%, and 42.9% respectively. Because of the sharp shrinkage of these four manufacturers, the global The shrinking rate is so high. And what is interesting is that the top ten global companies accounted for 65.5% in 2018, shrinking to 56% last year.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Compared to the global semiconductor situation in China, China’s semiconductor is a very important part of the world. In 2019, China’s integrated circuit industry continued to maintain double-digit growth, an increase of 16.2% compared to 2018, reaching 7991 100 million yuan. From a global perspective, the growth of China’s integrated circuit industry is still the highest.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
From the perspective of the development of China’s integrated circuit industry chain, in 2019, in the context of the turbulent trade environment, China’s integrated circuit industry has maintained a double-digit growth rate. The design industry has the highest growth rate of 16.31%; the packaging and testing industry is closely followed by 16.26%; the growth rate of the chip manufacturing industry is 16.07%. In the past few years, the growth rate of the first three sub-sectors has been less than 20%, but it is also the first time that the sales of the three sub-sectors have exceeded 200 billion yuan.
(Source: Wei Shaojun’s speechReport screenshot)
In 2019, the annual sales of China’s chip manufacturing industry reached 211.04 billion yuan, exceeding 200 billion yuan for the first time, but the growth rate dropped to 16.1%. It is worth noting that this statistics contains the revenue data of wholly foreign-owned enterprises in China. Therefore, the rapid growth of the manufacturing industry also includes the contributions of these enterprises. In China’s integrated circuit manufacturing sales statistics, it is estimated that about 50% is Contributed by foreign companies in China.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Similarly, in the packaging and testing industry, there are also the contributions of foreign-funded enterprises in China. However, it can be expected that these enterprises will have a lower proportion in the packaging and testing field than in the chip manufacturing field. Foreign investment is in China. The contribution of the company is about 30%.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
The chip design industry is China’s largest industry in the semiconductor field, and more than 99% is contributed by local Chinese companies. The chip design industry is a sub-sector with the largest contribution by local companies in China. In 2019, the design industry sales reached 293 billion yuan, an increase of 16.3% over 2018.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
High-end chip import dependence is difficult to get rid of
Although we have made some achievements in the field of integrated circuits, the proportion of chips in China is still very low. In terms of value, the proportion is only about 10.3%;According to the local market, it accounts for 29.5%; therefore, most of it still needs to be imported. Since 2013, China’s imports of integrated circuits have exceeded US $ 200 billion, in 2018 it has exceeded US $ 300 billion, and it will continue to exceed US $ 300 billion in 2019. Although it has decreased by 2.6%, it is still very high. Professor Wei also specifically mentioned that the import of more than 300 billion US dollars, we only use more than 100 billion US dollars, the difference between them is installed in the whole machine and exported to foreign countries.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
China is a big chip importer, so which chips do we import? Professor Wei Shaojun further analyzed and pointed out that in 2019, we used 16.8 billion US dollars in microprocessors and microcontrollers, 41.6 billion US dollars in memory, 35.6 billion US dollars in logic circuits, and 21.3 billion analog integrated circuits. It probably accounts for about 70% or 80% of our local market for imported circuits. However, the imported chips are not fully used locally. We only use one-third of them, and the remaining parts are assembled into a complete machine and exported again.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
Overall, China’s dependence on some high-end chip products is still very high. In the past 20 years, the main driving force of China’s integrated circuit design industry has been to rely on smart card chips, communication chips and mobile smartThe development of terminal chips. The number of enterprises in the five fields of related communications, smart cards, computers, navigation and consumer electronics has increased.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
From the sales situation of the main chip products in the Chinese market, it is mainly microprocessors and controllers, semiconductor memories, logic integrated circuits and analog integrated circuits. This situation shows that China’s semiconductor products are not rich enough, and the competitiveness is not strong enough, especially in the traditional field, our technical capabilities are still lacking.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
The United States is still the leader in the semiconductor industry. How should China catch up?
There is no doubt that the semiconductor industry is the most thoroughly globalized industry. The United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China are the gathering places of the global semiconductor industry, representing 95% of global production capacity and nearly 100% of products and 98% Market. But we also need to recognize the reality. In this globalized industry, there is still a certain gap between China’s semiconductor and semiconductor power. From the perspective of the development of American semiconductors, the United States is still the leader in the semiconductor field. In many applications, American companies still occupy the leading position.
(Picture source: screenshot of Wei Shaojun’s speech report)
The advantage of the development of American semiconductors is that the investment intensity and scale of American semiconductor companies are large enough. According to relevant statistics,
