Delayed delivery has become the norm.
Author | Create it
Edit | Momo
Apple recently stated that the current iPhone sales are limited by a shortage of chips. Sony also said on Wednesday that it may not be able to fully meet consumer demand for PS5 in 2021 due to the supply of key microprocessor components. Panasonic and Yamaha also warned investors that due to chip shortages, the production of consumer products including cameras and speakers will be slowed.
In addition, Volkswagen stated at the beginning of the year that it will adjust the production rhythm of its factories in the three major markets of North America, Europe and China due to the tight semiconductor supply chain.
The global chip shortage is accelerating, and the industry predicts that this may cause delays in the delivery of some industrial products for one to two years.
Smart phones and the automotive industry are greatly affected
It seems that the entire electronics industry is facing a chip shortage problem, from WiFi chips, Bluetooth chips, to smart headset control chips, processing chips, various car chips ...So that the needs of the mobile phone, laptop, and automotive industries cannot be met.
There are many reasons for the chip shortage problem. The main explanation is that the production capacity of the chip industry chain has been fully expanded, and consumer demand is still expanding.
According to industry insiders, the surge in demand has overloaded the production of 8-inch chips, and the 8-inch chip manufacturing process is a relatively simple and not advanced production line.
Including Samsung, TSMC, SMIC, UMC, and Dongbu Hi-Tech have all predicted that the tight supply chain may continue until the second half of next year.
The most severely affected areas are mobile phones and automobiles. Smart phones are a big consumer of chips, including 4G chips and power managers, which are generally in short supply, but terminal consumers are currently not aware of the price fluctuations caused by this shortage.
The shortage of such chips is related to Huawei. Under the control of U.S. policy, Huawei is hoarding goods frantically. The decline in Huawei's market share has also caused manufacturers such as Xiaomi and OV to increase orders.
In many cases, this kind of preemption is blind. Manufacturers do not conduct strict market research. The separation of glory also retains some uncertainty. The surge in demand caused by this self-confidence directly leads to the imbalance of supply and demand.
Automobiles also need large chip components. The person in charge of Volkswagen said in detail that the entire automobile industry was hit hard at the beginning of the epidemic, and the corresponding orders were greatly reduced. This made semiconductor production capacity tilted to other areas, and when Volkswagen tried to resume production , There is no spare capacity space.
Volkswagen Group ID.3 electric vehicle production line is affected by the shortage of chips.
The CEO of the supplier XPU said:
"The speed of recovery of the automotive chip business has exceeded expectations. In the past, orders had to be booked several months in advance, and these customers placed their orders too late, which made us unable to meet demand in the short term. At the same time, home office has caused orders for electronic consumer products such as tablets to skyrocket. These products are also competing for the resources of chip factories."
The American Bernstein Research Company predicts that due to chip problems, major car companies will generate contracts in 2021. The loss of 4.5 million car production accounts for 5% of total production.
TSMC President Wei Zhejia responded to this that the semiconductor industry has a long production cycle and it takes time to respond to the rebound in demand from automobile companies. For the time being, he will consider expanding production capacity instead of transferring production capacity to solve the problem.
TSMC does not seem to care about customers in the automotive industry. After all, automotive chips only account for 3% of the company's annual revenue, while 5nm and 7nm high-performance chips account for 33%. The priority of customers is clear at a glance.
The expansion of production capacity will involve issues such as yield rate, and the new crown epidemic is far from over. For manufacturers, they will not make much money and will face new risks.
In this case, many manufacturers can only purchase at a higher price, and the chip's growth rate has risen by 15% in recent months.
Opportunities for domestic chips?
For domestic chips,This may be a new opportunity. Under the influence of policy, domestic chip design companies will reach 2,218 in 2020, an increase of 25% compared to 2019.
Domestic chips are currently focused on the low-end and mid-range, and have solved many basic industrial problems. Take silicon wafer as an example. Silicon wafer is the most basic and core material in the integrated circuit industry, which is equivalent to the "land" for building a house. The larger the size of the silicon wafer, the greater the requirements for the production process, equipment, and materials of semiconductor silicon wafers. high.
In 2018, the Shanghai Silicon Industry achieved mass production of 300mm large silicon wafers, which was in line with the international mainstream level.
In the subsequent manufacturing process, the most critical steps involved-lithography, plasma etching, chemical vapor deposition, polishing, cleaning, in addition to the lithography machine mentioned above, several other technologies The localization has reached the sprint stage.
For example, Anji Microelectronics broke the international monopoly in mechanical polishing liquid.
There is also an etching link. China Micro Semiconductors, also a listed company on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, announced as early as 2018 that it has mastered the 5nm etching machine technology and passed the verification by TSMC to enter TSMC’s 5nm process production line, successfully integrating internationally Frontier level.
It is worth mentioning that, as an important equipment in chip manufacturing, plasma etching machines have been included in the "National Security Export Control" list by the United States for decades. In 2015, China Micro Semiconductor broke the international monopoly on this technology, and the United States determined that export restrictions no longer have a restrictive effect, and then removed the device from the list.
From the perspective of the overall environment, the booming development of artificial intelligence also provides us with an opportunity to overtake a corner.
AI chips have a lower threshold than general-purpose chips. At present, in the two categories of AI chips, domestic chips have products that match the international advanced level, such as the Huawei Shengteng 910 released in August last year. In terms of data, it has been comparable to the Nvidia Tesla V100. Of course, productivity, iteration, and optimization for the scene still need time to polish.
China has missed the PC chip era. In the mobile chip era, Huawei can only build wheels from scratch in order to make the first come first.
AI era,The relatively low threshold for building AI dedicated chips makes it possible for us to make chips from the underlying architecture. In some subdivided vertical fields, Chinese companies have already achieved world-leading achievements.
The chip war is fought from 2018 to 2020, from export restrictions, technology blockades to competition for enterprises and transfer of production. Even without the catalysis of the epidemic, the construction of the moat around the chip industry in various countries will not stop. However, the new crown has aggravated people's fear of uncertainty, and raised national security and industrial chain security to a new level.
However, no matter how backward the process of globalization, the intricate connections established by mankind in the 200-odd years from the Industrial Revolution to the present cannot be completely broken. No matter how powerful it is, a country like Trump's "never dependent" can no longer exist in modern society.
The appearance of anti-globalization is downward, and a new global division of labor pattern in the chip industry is brewing.
.
