According to foreign media reports, the United States has begun to pay attention to China's newly emerging memory chip industry, and even named Yangtze Memory , intending to restrict European and American equipment manufacturers from supplying chip production equipment to these Chinese memory chip companies; at the same time, the United States It has launched a chip subsidy plan to provide tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for American chips. Such an arrogant attitude is undoubtedly hoping to improve the competition of American chips. However, the author believes that the United States' approach will not help the development of American chips.
1. U.S. chips are not enterprising.
The main reason why the competitiveness of U.S. chips is increasingly weakened is the U.S. chips themselves. In the past 10 years, U.S. chips have been somewhat sluggish, among which the leading American chip Intel has shown the most obvious performance. Intel has been the leader in the global chip industry for more than 20 years. However, in recent years, it has been surpassed by Samsung in terms of revenue, and has been overtaken by AMD and TSMC in terms of technology.
Samsung’s overtaking Intel lies in the rise of the memory chip industry. In recent years, the price of memory chips has continued to rise. As a result, Samsung, the world’s leader in NAND flash and DRAM, has achieved rapid growth in revenue. With the rise of the memory chip industry, in recent years In 2009, Intel turned around and entered the memory chip industry again, and gained a considerable market share. However, earlier this year, Intel decided to sell its memory chip business to SK Hynix , thus withdrawing from the memory chip industry.
Intel's main business is PC processors and server chips. Both Intel and AMD use the X86 architecture . However, Intel's processor research and development has been criticized for being toothpaste. AMD has suddenly emerged with the Zen architecture; TSMC has also helped AMD a lot. Since the 10nm process, TSMC has been ahead of Intel in terms of process technology, and AMD's processors are manufactured by TSMC. Together, the two have pushed AMD to defeat Intel in desktop processors and have also achieved 10% in the server chip market. Intel's market share in the server chip market fell below 90% for the first time.
Intel can be said to be a representative of American chips that do not want to make progress. Intel itself is not short of money. Before 2016, its net profit was higher than TSMC, and its revenue was nearly 20 billion US dollars more than TSMC. AMD continued to lose money, and when it had enough money In many cases, Intel has been surpassed by AMD and TSMC in terms of chip architecture and process research and development.
Other chip companies in the United States are similar to Intel. They are reluctant to invest despite the huge profits. As a result, they are gradually lagging behind in many chip industries and are even surpassed by chip companies in Asia. This is the main reason for the decline in U.S. chip competitiveness. reason.
2. The actions of the United States will not help improve the competitiveness of American chips.
In order to support American chips, the United States is now taking action against Chinese chips on the one hand, and proposing a chip subsidy plan of tens of billions of dollars on the other. These measures are actually counterproductive.
Due to the practices of the United States, China has vigorously developed its chip industry in recent years. As a result, China's chip production capacity has rapidly increased from outside the top five in the world to today's third in the world. Moreover, China's chip manufacturing capacity is still rising rapidly, and process research and development is also increasing. It is accelerating and is shortening the gap with chip companies outside mainland China.
In the chip design industry, because American chips are restricted from supplying 5G radio frequency chips to Huawei , Chinese radio frequency chip companies have seen opportunities. Fuman Micro, Zhuosheng Micro, etc. have developed domestic 5G radio frequency chips and successfully It breaks the gap. Compared with radio frequency chips, the memory chip industry, which has a greater impact, develops faster.
China only started to develop memory chips a few years ago. At that time, the world had developed 96-layer NAND flash memory chips, and China was still developing backward 32-layer NAND flash. However, after three years, China has developed 128-layer NAND flash memory chips. , reaching the global mainstream level. Now the 192-layer NAND flash memory chip technology has been successfully developed and is being promoted into mass production, and is expected to reach the world's leading level.
Thanks to the efforts of Chinese memory chip companies, they are currently advancing the second phase of the project. The second phase of the project is expected to triple China's NAND flash and DRAM production capacity. In this way, China is expected to become the next largest country after South Korea, the United States, and Japan. The fourth largest memory chip producer.
Under such circumstances, American chip companies are still immersed in the huge profits of the past and making money instead of continuing to innovate to maintain their leading technological advantages. The chip subsidy plan proposed by the United States will only allow these American chip companies to get more profits. In order to achieve greater profits, they will not strive to innovate if they do not feel the crisis of survival.
This forms a sharp contrast. Under the approach of the United States, Made in China has recognized the importance of chips and strived to promote the development of the chip industry, which has strong development momentum; American chip companies have already been too comfortable, and American subsidies have allowed them to It can lie down and live more comfortably, and naturally it is less enterprising. Therefore, the United States' approach can be said to further cultivate American chips into adou, and stimulate the struggle of Chinese chips. This should be something it did not expect.
