Liang Menglei of Maring Semiconductor: Quality and cost performance are king in the industrial field

 On January 16, the 2021 China Semiconductor Investment Alliance Annual Meeting and China IC Billboard Awards Ceremony were held in Beijing. Xiamen Maring Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Maring Semiconductor") won the 2021 China IC Billboard "Most Promising Growth Award".

Liang Menglei, general manager of Ma Ling Semiconductor, said in an interview with Jiwei.com that this year the company will continue to delve deeper into the industrial field, especially in the field of machine vision. It will insist on starting from the subdivided fields, fully understand the needs of the industry, and strive to occupy a considerable market share in each targeted subdivided field by relying on technical features such as high performance, low power consumption, stability and reliability, and security mechanisms.

Deeply cultivate the industrial market segments

Founded in 2018, Ma Ling Semiconductor is committed to the development and sales of embedded application processor (MPU) chips, and its products are mainly aimed at industrial market applications.

Liang Menglei said that industrial chips have a wide range of applications and a wide variety of products, and are the foundation of the entire industrial system architecture. Ma Ling Semiconductor focuses on solving basic and execution problems such as perception access, interconnection, computing, storage, and application in the field of digital industrial technology, and plays an important role in industrial production. With the development of the digital economy and industrial Internet, as well as the continuous expansion of new technologies such as 5G, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, they will become important driving factors for the growth of the embedded MPU market.

Relying on the product accumulation and technological innovation of industrial-grade processor chips, Maring Semiconductor has formed a complete technical system and technical barriers in the bus architecture optimization, graphics and image processing, chip security system and power domain management of high-performance processors, such as clock skew compensation adjustment methods that affect the chip operating temperature range and ESD indicators, discharge protection methods, methods for suppressing threshold voltage sensitivity in transistor arrays, etc., to ensure industrial-grade product requirements.

According to Liang Menglei, Maring Semiconductor is currently planning three technology platforms with different architectures and main frequency performance. By verifying mature technology platforms, it can expand a richer product series at a lower cost to meet the product needs of different application scenarios. Product applications cover smart factories, industrial Internet, smart business, financial payment, smart transportation, smart access control, smart office, e-government, smart grid and other fields, especially in high-end barcode reading equipment, face recognition equipment, industrial machine vision, industrial human-machine interaction interface HMI, industrial Internet of Things gateways and power concentrators. There are extensive and rich applications.

In 2020, Ma Ling Semiconductor successfully mass-produced the industrial-grade security processor chip 7UL. This product is an embedded MPU with a main frequency of 800MHz, rich peripheral interfaces, and integrated multiple security mechanisms. It has obvious advantages in performance, power consumption, industrial-grade indicators, reliability, and system security protection.

Liang Menglei said that 7UL's low power consumption can help customers design smaller products without causing heat dissipation problems. This feature has a great competitive advantage in scenarios that require high portability and battery life. Taking the application of high-end code scanning equipment as an example, 7UL can well improve and supplement the code scanning application in PDAs or tablet devices currently used by couriers.

Looking ahead to 2021, Liang Menglei said that this year, Maring Semiconductor will continue to deepen its roots in the industrial field, especially in the field of machine vision. It will insist on starting from the subdivided fields, fully understand the needs of the industry, and rely on technical characteristics such as high performance, low power consumption, stability and reliability, and security mechanisms. In each targeted subdivided field, we strive to occupy a considerable market share.

Product quality and cost performance are king

In recent years, due to the national guidance and the influence of geopolitical factors, the attitude of domestic industrial system manufacturers towards domestic chip products has also changed greatly. The market demand for high cost performance and specialized products in niche areas has become increasingly strong, and chip products that are safe and controllable have also become a strong demand. In the field of industrial-grade processor chips, domestic design companies entered the market relatively late and indeed have a high technical threshold, and domestic companies have a low market share in the application market.

"I believe that with solid technological accumulation, we will be able to achieve great things in a broad space. Ma Ling Semiconductor has already made efforts in the formulation of industry standards and domestic substitution, and will play an important role in the domestic market." Liang Menglei told Jiwei.com.

Liang Menglei is optimistic about the prospects of the industrial market. "Industry is the foundation of people's livelihood, and the market will continue to grow by double digits. Take machine vision as an example. According to a third-party report, the global market size of machine vision in 2018 was US$16 billion, and China's market size was RMB 12 billion. It is expected that the global market will increase to US$24.8 billion in 2023, and China's market size will be close to RMB 20 billion," said Liang Menglei.

At present, the entire semiconductor industry is facing challenges in terms of production capacity. Liang Menglei said that the most affected link of the company is currently the packaging substrate, but Liang Menglei emphasized that thanks to the foresight and unique layout of Xiamen Semiconductor Investment Group, a number of packaging and substrate manufacturers will be put into production in Xiamen in the near future, which will be an important supplement to domestic production capacity.

In recent years, the process of domestic substitution has accelerated, which has provided domestic semiconductor companies with good development opportunities. In Liang Menglei's view, product quality and cost-effectiveness are king.

“国产替代会是纯粹的市场行为，这个趋势给了国内厂商历史性的机遇。随着国内本土团队芯片设计水平的显著提升，我们对产品开发流程和质量品控的管理越来越科学和完善，同时相较于国际大厂我们在产品策略上更加灵活，服务意识更好，通过一定时间周期的验证和磨合，本土产品会有大量应用。”梁梦雷说。

Looking ahead, Liang Menglei said that Maring Semiconductor will increase investment in graphics and image processing, hardware implementation of algorithms, scenario-based artificial intelligence algorithm implementation, low-power design, security mechanisms, etc., to promote breakthroughs in chip power consumption and performance.