"Lack of core technology and soul" is a major problem for Chinese companies, and domestic chips are accelerating the development

"Lack of core components" is a major problem in the development of China's information industry. The successive chip supply cuts faced by ZTE and Huawei from the United States have further highlighted this problem, attracting widespread attention from the national and international communities.

While people are condemning US trade bullying, they are also concerned about China's chip technology and industry.

At present, the proportion of "domestic chips" in domestic bodies is increasing year by year. Judging from the use of core components in domestic bodies, the proportion of purely imported components has declined significantly, and the proportion of domestic bodies using "imported + domestic" and "purely domestic" has increased rapidly.

Automotive electronics, the Internet of Things, and servers have become the main forces driving demand for the integrated circuit industry.

However, there are still many difficulties to be solved in the localization of core components: the technical difficulty of the controller is mainly reflected in control algorithms such as trajectory planning, vibration suppression, and process adaptation; the technical difficulty of the servo system is mainly reflected in processing technology, high dynamic performance, and variable load stability; and the technical difficulty of the reducer is mainly reflected in material properties, equipment precision, processing and assembly technology, and difficulties in mass production.

With the diversified development of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence technology and downstream application fields, the application scenarios of chips are becoming more and more extensive, and more requirements are put forward for chip manufacturers. Domestic chip manufacturers that can meet market demands such as low power consumption and high computing power are expected to seize the opportunities in emerging markets. We believe that Internet of Things chips and AI chips are expected to be the first to be localized.

From the perspective of downstream applications, according to estimates by Jingzhun Research Institute, the scale of my country's integrated circuit market was US$135.6 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach US$150.3 billion and US$169 billion in 2019 and 2020, respectively, with a three-year compound growth rate of 10%.

In the semiconductor investment boom, domestic equipment substitution has gone from easy to difficult, that is, test equipment manufacturers are expected to benefit first. According to estimates, the current investment in wafer fabs under construction in China exceeds 700 billion yuan. Assuming that 70% of the investment in wafer fabs is used to purchase equipment, in the next few years, the investment in domestic equipment will be 500 billion yuan, and test equipment will account for 10%, or 50 billion yuan. Even in the field of sorting machines and analog test machines (accounting for 20%), where the technical difficulty is relatively low and domestic substitution is the best, there is a market size of 10 billion. However, the revenue of Changchuan Technology, the leading domestic test equipment company, was only 216 million yuan in 2018, and the domestic test equipment market still has a lot of room for growth.

In the development of artificial intelligence technology, deep learning has come to people as a new computing method. The deep learning model is different from the traditional computer model. It does not require programming, but requires massive data parallel computing. Traditional processor architectures (such as X86 and ARM) cannot support large-scale parallel computing for deep learning. Therefore, new underlying hardware is needed to accelerate computing. Since artificial intelligence chips have high-performance parallel computing capabilities and also support various neural network algorithms, artificial intelligence chips have become a new development trend.