Three major difficulties that restrict the development of China's IC industry

In 2012, the total sales of the top 10 design enterprises in China reached 23.117 billion yuan, an increase of 2.97 billion yuan over the previous year. The total sales of the 10 companies accounted for 33.97% of the total sales of the industry, an increase of 2.21 percentage points over the previous year's 31.76%.

What are the fundamental factors or driving forces for the development of the IC industry? The industry generally believes that the government's strong support, pragmatic policy system, good infrastructure, and abundant human resources are the key factors behind the IC industry in emerging countries and regions. There are a large number of countries and regions that understand these factors. Why only companies from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in China stand out? Research shows that the reasons for this phenomenon are closely related to policy guidance and institutional innovation.

Global IC industry development presents three major trends

According to the professional division of labor, IC companies can be divided into independent companies such as IDM, waferless, manufacturing, packaging and testing, equipment manufacturing, and material production.

There are three main trends in the development of IC technology: First, the development of technology continues to follow Moore's Law (MM). Intel's CMOS technology has reached 22nm process node. It is planned to introduce 14nm process node in 2013 and is currently deploying 7nm. TSMC’s highest-end CMOS reaches 28nm and is planning to reach 10nm in 2015. The second is functional integration, known as Extended Molt's Law (MtM), which means more integrated functional units such as RF, power control, passive components, sensors, and brakes on a single chip/package/module. The third is to develop new materials and devices. It is expected that by 2019, new devices that exceed the performance of CMOS devices will be developed and can be used to continue to improve the capabilities of the CMOS process.

There are three new features in the development of the IC industry. First, the strong IDM companies are on the one hand. Such as Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments, ADI, Infineon, MAXIM and so on. At present, Intel and other super-large enterprises have leading technologies in general-purpose production such as microprocessors, dynamic memory, and flash memory. Others focus on smaller or subdivided markets to produce high-performance or specialty products, such as data converters in Analog Devices' analog ICs, whose products are close to global monopolies. Some other system manufacturers use the chip manufacturing plant as their own subsidiary to produce products for their own systems or complete machines.

The second is the trend towards light assets (wafers). According to the division of labor, IC companies can be divided into IDM (from chip design, manufacturing to packaging all completed by themselves), no-wafer (design), manufacturing (including pure foundry), packaging and testing, equipment manufacturing, and material production. Independent company. The so-called light-wafer mode refers to the traditional IDM manufacturers to leave the core process in their own manufacturing plant, and gradually outsource the non-core technology to the foundry business model.

The third is the development of the virtual enterprise operating model. Some IDMs and foundries have united to “hug and warm up” to form a generalized IDM. The common definitions of various virtual enterprises are: temporary alliances of independent organizations, dynamic exchanges among partners, taking the needs of end users as the starting point, combining the main capabilities of partners, and highly utilizing information and communication technologies. For example, IBM, Samsung, and Chartered Semiconductor's Common Platform Technology Alliance is a virtual enterprise operating model. Its main feature is the development of a common platform technology that can span three companies. Customers can use multiple technologies at the same time without additional costs. Manufacturing plant.

China's mainland IC industry faces three major obstacles

The inefficient operation of the innovation alliance and the official R&D collaboration R&D mechanism is one of the major factors restricting the rapid development of China's mainland integrated circuit industry.

China's mainland integrated circuit industry has achieved rapid development in recent years, and the competitiveness of some competitive enterprises has begun to show. Taking the fastest growing design industry as an example, overall sales of the IC design industry continued to maintain a relatively high growth rate in 2011, reaching a scale of 47.374 billion yuan, a significant year-on-year increase of 30.2%. In 2012, the total sales of the top 10 design enterprises in China reached 23.117 billion yuan, an increase of 2.97 billion yuan over the previous year. The total sales of the 10 companies accounted for 33.97% of the total sales of the industry, an increase of 2.21 percentage points over the previous year's 31.76%. The first company’s sales reached 1.183 billion U.S. dollars. Companies such as Spreadtrum Communications, RDA, Hass, and Zhuhai Quanzhi have made remarkable achievements in the field of smart mobile terminal SoC. However, compared with Taiwanese companies and Korean companies in China, there are still cases where the development rate is relatively slow, the technology content of products is low, and the competitiveness of enterprises is poor. The price war is still the main business strategy of the company. The "forward design" is still not in the mainstream, and the situation of slowing basic capabilities has not changed. The total sales of the entire industry may be less than the sales of the world's number one design company.