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Home > Mall Dynamic > Characteristic Technology Will Become The Main Theme OF Semiconductor Manufacturing In China In The Future
In recent years, under the geopolitical game, the global semiconductor industry chain has begun to appear fault, and the global competition has been interrupted. As countries have strengthened the semiconductor industry with policies, the process of "fragmentation" and "anti-globalization" of the industry has begun.
The Fabless+Foundry+Service model adopted in the past decades has enabled the rapid development of China's semiconductor industry. However, today's "fragmentation" model makes the "design-foundry" model unable to achieve the optimal allocation of global resources,
which is a severe challenge for China and even the global semiconductor industry. Especially China's IC manufacturing industry, how to get rid of the path dependence on advanced processes to open up a new track and promote the realization of "re-globalization"?
Has become one of the most concerned issues in the entire industry.
"Everyone cares about manufacturing, but in the short term, it will be difficult for us to break the process below 7 nanometers under the existing track." Where's the solution? It's about breaking new ground in special processes and packaging."
At the 29th Annual Meeting of China Integrated Circuit Design Industry 2023 and Guangzhou Integrated Circuit Industry Innovation and Development Summit Forum (ICCAD), Ye Tianchun, chairman of the Integrated Circuit Branch of China Semiconductor Industry Association,
said that this means that a large number of domestic IC design companies can develop their own products on a new path. And to achieve the local process innovation, system level packaging industry support.
As Professor Wei Shaojun, chairman of the Integrated Circuit Design Branch of the China Semiconductor Industry Association, said that in the future,
China's integrated circuit design industry should use mature processes to optimize the performance of products to do better - relying on advanced processes to do a good job of products is not really strong, and the ability to use 14 nm or even 28 nm to make 7 nm equivalent performance products is strong.
Focusing on products and taking industry solutions as traction can reshape the development strategy of the upgraded version of China's semiconductor industry.
At ICCAD 2023, many Semiconductor manufacturing companies such as Rongxin Semiconductor, TSMC, Tower Semiconductor, and Moore Elite accepted interviews with media such as Electronic Engineering Album,
and conducted in-depth discussions on hot topics such as the opportunities and challenges of mature/characteristic processes, how to develop private heavy assets, and the impact of market downtrend. From the point of view of the manufacturer, the author expressed his views on the current Chinese chip industry.
The industry is having to face the slowdown and "failure" of Moore's Law in the race for speed, while specialty processes are being positively impacted and revitalized. With the expansion of mature process capacity below 28nm, it is expected that mature process capacity will account for 70% of the capacity of TOP10 foundry by 2027. China is expected to have 33% of mature process capacity by 2027, with the possibility of further upward adjustment.
Founded in April 2021 and headquartered in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, Rongxin Semiconductor is a featured process integrated circuit manufacturing enterprise based on mature nodes. The main business involves providing services such as BCD (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) featured manufacturing process platform for CIS (CMOS image sensor), Driver (driver chip) and power management products.
"Characteristic process manufacturing focuses on niche markets, and the importance of characteristic processes is gradually increasing under the background that the development bottleneck of advanced processes is becoming increasingly prominent." Rongxin Semiconductor CEO Bai Peng shared that China's mature node characteristics are facing many opportunities, mainly from the vertical market development and market demand growth, innovative applications and emerging markets, policy support and industrial ecological construction of these three aspects.
Specifically, China's current terminal market is vast, such as artificial intelligence, 5G communications, automotive electronics, the Internet of things and industrial automation and other fields of customized chip solutions bring huge demand; Second, in industrial automation, intelligent manufacturing, medical equipment and other fields, featured process nodes can provide high-performance, low-power and reliable chip solutions.
Bai Peng introduced that the application range of the characteristic process (40nm to 180nm) mainly includes CIS, BCD, TDDI/DDIC, MCU and digital-analog mixing. In the CIS field, the CIS wafer production capacity can not keep up with the long-term growth of CIS demand for mobile phones and automobiles, Rongxin through strategic cooperation with domestic CIS design manufacturers, together to define differentiated products to quickly achieve product power transition. In the LCD field, the panel technology of mobile phones and automobiles is generally between 55nm and 90nm. China is the world's largest LCD panel production base, and Rongxin can obtain great room for growth by realizing the localization of the LCD industry chain.
In the Chinese characteristics of the process (40nm to 180nm) and its products how to standard the international IDM factory, the iterative completion of the problem of catch-up, Bai Peng believes that the first to pay attention to the simulator performance and high voltage devices, followed by the promotion of equipment and materials localization, and finally strategic customer binding. "The growth of domestic characteristic technology will also have a great benefit to the localization of equipment and materials."
Even for a giant such as TSMC, mature technology is equally important. When the Nanjing plant started mass production in 2017, it mainly did 12nm process, but began to expand 28nm process capacity two years ago. At this time, there was some domestic debate, but from the market feedback of the past two years, such expansion has brought a lot of orders.
On how to define mature process and advanced process, Qin Lei, vice president of operations at Tower Semiconductor China, believes that from the perspective of CMOS, 40nm is a mature process in China, and advanced process is more below 22nm or even 14nm. "But mature and advanced is difficult to distinguish simply by digital nodes, the same performance indicators in 0.18 microns and 12 inches 65nm, and even can do the same, this time the definition of mature and advanced is not the process node, but the frequency or noise factor, so many special processes do not use digital nodes to measure." For example, the BCD process is available from 0.18 microns to 55nm, but the Fab talks more about parameters such as voltage, drive current and isolation.
In China, we have seen the opportunity of special processes in the direction of simulation, such as Gekwei, Haowei, and Stewei in the field of CIS in the global mobile phone and security market share is very high. On the other hand, AI has promoted the development of big data centers, and the bandwidth has come directly from 200G and 400G to 800G or even 1.6T. Qin Lei believes that optical communication will also be a big opportunity for featured processes.
While embracing the opportunities, Bai Peng also pointed out three challenges facing the craft with Chinese characteristics: technological innovation and research and development, market competition and positioning, talent training and technology transfer. On the one hand, the domestic market is undergoing fierce competition, and on the other hand, there are non-commercial considerations and uncertainties in the global chip manufacturing industry. In addition, due to the rapid expansion of China's semiconductor industry, the supply of technical professionals can not keep up with demand, especially high-end talents, and talent training takes time, and overseas technology transfer is particularly difficult.
Under the demand of localization, to make more meaningful products on the characteristic process and mature node, the key lies in technology, "only with better special technology can do this thing." Bai Peng said that this is because the entire semiconductor industry chain and supply chain are now being restructured, and the characteristic process done by Rongxin Semiconductor is not highly restricted and has great development potential.
"At present, the demand for many domestic chips is increasing, because many high-end chips with mature processes in China are made by overseas Foundry." At present, the main problem in China is that there is still a certain gap between the technical capability in this area and the international leading level." Bai Peng for example, such as CIS and BCD power management, if the local fabs can bring the technical level to the highest, then many domestic chip design companies originally handed over to the foreign chip orders will come back, which is a very large demand for the local chip manufacturing industry.
Bai Peng explained from the point of view of the process, taking BCD as an example, it is relatively difficult in the mature process, but many applications in the future put forward higher reliability requirements for the device, such as the reliability requirements of the car gauge chip is much higher than that of the consumer. "There is a big gap between the domestic technology and the most advanced international level in this field, and this is exactly what Rongxin wants to focus on. If it can be done well, it will be good for all the characteristic process fabs in China."
Luo Zhenqiu, general manager of TSMC (China), also believes that automotive electronics is an industry that needs to spend a lot of effort to operate, corresponding to different safety levels of chips, have different requirements in the manufacturing process. "Now we see that the mainland chip design companies have a deep understanding of the AEC-Q100, and down-to-earth implementation, which is very gratifying."
From the wafer manufacturing point of view, the difficulty of automotive chip production is that the certification cycle is at least 18 months, if it is a start-up, if there is no revenue in such a long cycle, it is even difficult to survive. Therefore, in the major Tier 1 companies in the automotive industry, almost no new companies can replace, "automotive chip companies are those decades of old companies, and now new companies to enter really need to have another track." Luo Zhenqiu said that at present, Chinese chip design companies are also actively layout automotive electronics, from navigation chips, power management chips to AI chips for autonomous driving applications.
Five years ago, in the absence of special demand for localization, design companies choose foundries to see more cost performance. However, most analog chip companies will choose to go to TSMC, because the same design in different fabs will use different processes and EDA software simulation, which directly affects the ADC and DAC performance in product design.
"Performance depends on the design, but the process and EDA software can help to compensate for a lot of design flaws, and all three must be combined to make a higher-performance, high-end product." Qin Lei said that although there are many successful simulation companies in China, if you do not take the alienated things in the face of international established manufacturers, only do simple substitutes, you will not get much cake.
"Now everyone in the country is saying 'internal volume', but if the product performance is improved by a grade, there is no need for internal volume." In addition, Qin Lei believes that the most basic two points can achieve a breakthrough, one is to make the cost low, the second is to enrich the product variety. This is also the problem faced by China's analog chip companies, analog chip companies should stack the product line, and then optimize the design to reduce the cost, special process manufacturers will play a great role in it. Taking analog chip leader Texas Instruments (TI) as an example, not only does the product performance do well, under the strong process support of its own factory, the cost can also be controlled to the extreme, which is unmatched by the conventional design + wafer foundry model. "Against the IDM model of the international simulation giants, not a few domestic design companies can do, but to Foundry, the whole industry to join forces to do."
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