High-performance demand drives analog IC product upgrades

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High-performance demand drives analog IC product upgrades [Copy link]

　　In 2005, China's electronic product manufacturing industry continued to develop at a high speed, which ensured that the overall
Chinese integrated circuit market maintained a stable growth trend. In addition to communication products,
in the two major IC application fields of consumer electronics and computers, the output of various products in 2005 basically
maintained a stable growth trend. Among them,
the production growth momentum of portable electronic products such as MP3, DC, and laptops, which are widely used in analog ICs, was relatively prominent. Driven by the
strong , China's analog IC market continued to maintain a high growth trend in 2005. As an important type of IC product, analog IC plays an irreplaceable role
　　in power management, data conversion, power modulation, and processing. Due to the characteristics of analog IC itself, the performance of analog IC products directly affects the power consumption of electronic products, as well as the performance of power efficiency, etc., which are particularly important for many electronic products, especially mobile and portable electronic products . Under such circumstances, the ever-increasing performance requirements of electronic products for analog ICs have been driving the upgrade of analog IC products. 　　At present, there are two main manifestations of the upgrade of analog IC products: one is the continuous popularization of high-efficiency and low-power analog IC products; the other is the widespread application of high-performance power management chips. The application of these two types of high-performance analog IC products enables portable products to continuously increase their functions without sacrificing too much in terms of standby time. In addition, high-performance analog IC products are very consistent with the energy-saving needs of future electronic products and will be more widely used in the future. 　　In addition to product upgrades, integration is another major trend in the development of analog IC products in 2005. With the development of CMOS analog technology, more and more analog circuits are integrated into large-scale digital circuits, and the proportion of hybrid integrated circuits is increasing year by year. Many low-power analog ICs are integrated into the core chips of electronic complete products, which not only saves area but also reduces the chip cost of electronic products. At present, in mobile phone products, many power management chips are integrated into the core baseband chips, and some baseband chips with higher integration even integrate low-power RF chips for signal transceiver. 　　It is expected that in the next few years, the pace of analog IC product upgrades will continue to accelerate. In addition to the continuous improvement of product performance, with the continuous advancement of Si technology, hybrid integrated circuits will become popular, and large-scale single-chip SoCs will integrate more and more analog circuits into them . In the future, in addition to those traditional analog ICs such as data conversion and power amplification that are widely used and highly versatile , many analog ICs that are dedicated or applied to a specific field will not exist independently. 　　As analog ICs are continuously integrated, the classification and division of analog IC products have changed, and this change will directly affect the overall scale of the analog IC market. Since many analog circuits such as power management are integrated into the core ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), ASSP (application-specific standard circuit) or SoC (system on chip) of electronic products, these independent analog ICs do not exist in the electronic products, which will inevitably lead to a decrease in the sales volume . For example, in mobile phone products, most of the baseband chips of mobile phones currently integrate power management and some audio processing functions, and many baseband chips integrate some RF circuits at the signal transceiver end, which directly affects the market size of analog ICs such as power management and RF for mobile phones . 　　Although the market volume of some independent analog IC products has decreased, the role of analog circuits in electronic products has not decreased at all. The development of analog IC products is only one manifestation of the integrated development trend of integrated circuit products. In addition to having a huge impact on the market size, this development trend also puts forward higher requirements for IC companies. First of all, in terms of hybrid integrated circuit design, IC companies are required to have strong design capabilities in both analog IC and digital IC . Secondly, since relatively cheap semiconductor materials are basically used when integrating digital and analog circuits, the digital-analog hybrid process on Si materials is one of the necessary conditions for manufacturing analog ICs. With the increasing maturity of CMOS analog technology, the process barriers of hybrid ICs are gradually reduced, but when integrating high-frequency analog circuits such as RF, the process barriers brought about by replacing compound semiconductor materials such as GeSi or GaAs with Si must be overcome. 　　In any case, analog circuits are still indispensable in electronic products. With the continuous advancement of IC design and process technology, analog/hybrid ICs will continue to play a more important role.