Consume 40% of imported chips! Guangdong spends hundreds of billions to build the third level of semiconductors! Where is the latest development of integrated circuits in the Greater Bay Area？
“The Greater Bay Area consumes 40% of China’s imported chips, with a scale of 170 billion US dollars. The Greater Bay Area plays a pivotal role in the integrated circuit chip market, but the local IC and semiconductor output value is only 170 billion yuan, which can only meet the local needs. 20% of the market demand.” Gao Gong Zhuang Wei, a foreign academician of the Russian Academy of Engineering and the subject leader of the Institute of Semiconductors of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, said recently.
According to data from the General Administration of Customs, the total number of chips imported by China in 2021 will be 635.48 billion, an increase of 16.9% over the same period. Affected by the epidemic, data from the General Administration of Customs shows that China imported 186 billion integrated circuits from January to April this year, down 11.4% from the 210 billion in the same period last year. However, the value of imports jumped 10% to $134.5 billion as a global shortage of chips pushed up prices.
Recently, at the 2022 Guangdong Semiconductor Industry Technology Summit, Professor Gao Gong Zhuang Wei, a foreign academician of the Russian Academy of Engineering and the subject leader of the Institute of Semiconductors of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, interpreted “New Opportunities for Integrated Circuits in the Greater Bay Area”. Lv Jianxin, executive vice president of Guangdong Semiconductor Association, was interviewed by electronic enthusiasts. This article analyzes the important viewpoints and cutting-edge observations they brought.
In 2021, Shanghai will be among the top three in terms of output value of integrated circuits in China, with Shanghai reaching 120 billion, a year-on-year increase of 26.3%. Shenzhen’s integrated circuit output value in 2021 will be 69.71 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 130 billion yuan output value, a decline of 46.4%. Guangdong proposed to closely follow the Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin-Bohai Rim region to build the third level of China’s integrated circuits. In April 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of Guangdong Province issued the “Key Points of Digital Economy Work in Guangdong Province in 2022”, and it is necessary to fully implement the “Guangdong Strong Core” project and accelerate the construction of three major industrial groups in the Bay Area: semiconductors, Rongzhi, and smart sensors.
Zhuang Wei pointed out that Guangdong Province is a major province of China’s information industry. In 2021, the information industry will reach an output value of 5 trillion yuan, accounting for 45% of the province’s GDP. Guangdong plans to achieve a new generation of electronic information industry revenue of 6.6 trillion yuan by 2025, forming a world-class new generation electronic information industry cluster. .
In 2020, the output value of Guangdong’s IC design industry is close to 140 billion yuan. In 2020, Huawei’s HiSilicon’s revenue will reach 96.3 billion yuan. At the end of the year, Huawei HiSilicon was sanctioned by the United States. below 100 million. Industry experts pointed out that the semiconductor industry in Guangdong Province is mainly based on IC design, and the output value of manufacturing, packaging and back-end materials and equipment is not as good as IC design. However, the design capabilities of Guangdong IC companies are seriously unbalanced. Except for HiSilicon, ZTE Microelectronics will be 9.731 billion yuan in 2021, and Huiding Technology will be 5.713 billion yuan in 2021. The revenue scale of other companies is not large.
In 2018, Jiangsu Province added 8-inch wafer production capacity a year, which is 4.22 million wafers per year. In 2021, Guangdong’s 8-inch wafer production capacity is only 480,000 wafers, a huge gap. In 2020, the sales of the packaging and testing industry in Guangdong Province will be 17 billion yuan. In 2020, the sales of Changdian Technology, a major packaging and testing company in Jiangsu, will be 26.4 billion yuan. In 2020, the Guangdong semiconductor equipment and materials industry will have 30 billion yuan in sales. In 2021, SMIC’s operating income will reach 35.63 billion, a year-on-year increase of 29.7%. What Guangdong is now facing is a chip supply capacity and production capacity that is very inconsistent with the information industry province. This year, Guangdong Province proposed to promote the construction and commissioning of key projects such as Shenzhen SMIC and Yuexin Semiconductor Phase II
Investing in the semiconductor industry, why is Guangdong later than Shanghai and Jiangsu?
Lv Jianxin, executive vice president of the Guangdong Semiconductor Association, said that Guangdong is the province with the largest chip usage in the country, mainly driven by consumer electronics, including smartphones, TVs, Internet of Things applications and 5G chip applications. For a long time, Guangdong Province and Shanghai have achieved dislocation development. Guangdong has vigorously developed the optoelectronic display industry, while Shanghai has laid out the chip industry in the 1980s. The most important decision for Shanghai to lay out the chip industry is that SMIC was established in Shanghai in 2000, There is a large wafer manufacturing plant such as Hua Hong Semiconductor, which focuses on the introduction of talents from TSMC. After more than 20 years of development, Shanghai has formed a complete domestic chip industry supply chain. The development of semiconductors in Shanghai has a historical background.
Now there are SMIC’s Shenzhen factory in Guangdong, and the 12-inch integrated circuit production line project of SMIC Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. has brought 28nm technology to Guangdong. The total investment of the project is 15.3 billion yuan. It will build a 12-inch integrated circuit production line with a monthly production capacity of 40,000 pieces/month. The focused process node is 28 nanometers and above. Completed a cumulative investment of 2 billion yuan. In 2022, the planned investment is 3 billion yuan, and the main construction contents include civil construction and equipment installation.
Yuexin Semiconductor, located in Guangzhou, is mainly a 12-inch chip manufacturing company from 90nm to 100nm, focusing on analog chip manufacturing. It has the first 12-inch chip production line in Guangzhou, and it is also the only one in Guangdong Province and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to enter mass production. 12-inch chip production platform. It is reported that even if the next five phases of Yuexin are fully produced, it is estimated that the production capacity of more than 300,000 pieces will still not be able to meet the needs of Guangdong.
Lv Jianxin analyzed that there are two major challenges for the development of semiconductors in Guangdong Province. First, the semiconductor production line cannot be rebuilt; second, even if it is built, it will face the dilemma of lack of equipment, lack of materials, and lack of chip talents. Introducing the production capacity of external companies, such as China Resources Micro’s construction of a factory in Guangdong, this company mainly focuses on third-generation semiconductors, and the construction will not be so fast.
At present, in the domestic chip field, only Ziguang Zhanrui can supplement Huawei HiSilicon, not in Guangdong. Now, many start-up design companies continue to join, and some are listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, but there are very few companies that play a leading role in Guangdong Province.
At present, the semiconductor industry is led by Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Guangdong Province has some unique features in the third-generation semiconductor field, such as BYD Semiconductor in IGBT chips, Innosec in gallium nitride production lines, Tianyu Semiconductor Silicon carbide epitaxial wafers have their own characteristics, and Nexperia has a layout in chip manufacturing in the fields of automotive electronics and communications, which form some local characteristics.
Guangdong Semiconductor Supplementary Course! From IC design to manufacturing, investing hundreds of billions of dollars to help the layout of the semiconductor industry
In 2022, integrated circuit product planning and policies in Guangdong Province will be intensively introduced. Guangdong will accelerate the construction of the third level of China’s integrated circuit industry. It is estimated that by 2025, the main business of semiconductor and integrated circuits will exceed 400 billion yuan, and the integrated circuit design industry will exceed 200 billion yuan. , the integrated circuit manufacturing industry exceeds 100 billion. It can be said that the “strong core project” in Guangdong Province is a timely rain for the development of Guangdong’s semiconductors.
Zhuang Wei pointed out that the world semiconductor has experienced six development cycles since its development in 1990. Every cycle is an upward cycle, and every cycle has lows and highs. It is currently entering its sixth cycle with a highly expansive posture. The characteristics of this cycle are determined by the heavy asset investment in semiconductors. In the early stage, PCs were driven by computer demand, followed by the development of mobile communication technology, followed by the development of smartphones and wearable devices; the latest wave was driven by the Internet of Things. , artificial intelligence, big data and demand for autonomous driving systems.