(Report Producer/Author: Huaxi Securities, Yu Nengfei)
1 MLCC is an extremely widely used passive component
1.1 MLCC is an extremely widely used passive component
Electronic components are divided into two categories: active electronic components and passive electronic components. Passive electronic components are components that consume only the input signal of the components Electrical energy, which do not need a power supply to process and transmit the signal, also known as passive devices; and active electronic components need to have devices to provide the corresponding power supply, also known as active devices.
Capacitors are widely used passive components, and their main role is to charge and discharge charges. Depending on the dielectric, capacitors can be divided into ceramic capacitors, aluminum electrolytic capacitors, tantalum electrolytic capacitors, and film capacitors. Ceramic capacitors currently occupy more than half of the market share in the capacitor market because of their small size and large voltage range.
Ceramic capacitors can be divided into single-layer ceramic capacitors (SLCC), multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) and leaded multilayer ceramic capacitors. Single-layer ceramic capacitors are made by printing silver layers on both sides of the ceramic substrate, and then firing silver film as a pole plate at low temperature, and their shape is mostly disc-shaped. Multilayer ceramic capacitors use a multilayer stacking process, a number of pairs of metal electrodes embedded in the ceramic medium, and then by high temperature co-firing and formation, which can be divided into leaded multilayer ceramic dielectric containers and chip multilayer ceramic capacitors.
THE MLCC is the main ceramic capacitor. Multilayer ceramic capacitors have the advantages of large capacitance range and small size, and have become the main ceramic capacitors. According to the Prospective Industry Research Institute, the multilayer ceramic capacitor market size accounts for 93% of the entire ceramic capacitor.
MLCC has a variety of advantages and is widely used. In addition to the characteristics of capacitor "through-pass-through", MLCC also has the advantages of small size, large capacitance, good frequency characteristics, wide working voltage and working temperature range, and non-polarity, and is the basic component of noise bypass, power filtering, energy storage, differentiation, integration, oscillation circuit, etc., and is widely used in consumer electronics, automotive electronics, aerospace, ships, weapons, medical equipment, rail transit and other fields.
MLCC downstream mobile terminals, automobiles, military applications accounted for the highest proportion. According to the data of Zhiduoxing Consultants, the application of MLCC in the fields of mobile terminals, automobiles and military industries accounted for 33.3%, 13.8% and 12.3% respectively in 2020, accounting for about 59.4% of the total.
The direction of technological development. With the continuous development of electronic machines to miniaturization, large capacity, high reliability and low cost. MLCC technology also continues to develop and upgrade, moving in the direction of size miniaturization, large capacity, and high frequency.
1.2 Driven by in-vehicle and 5G, the industry will grow steadily in the coming years
The new four modernizations have promoted the growth of automotive electronics market demand. Electrification, intelligence, networking, sharing has become the upgrading direction of the automotive industry, in which electric, intelligent and networked are through a variety of electronic components composed of functional modules to achieve, and MLCC as one of the most used passive components, with the upgrading of the automotive industry, the demand for vehicle-level MLCC continues to increase. According to the data of China Electronic Components Association, the MLCC single use of pure electric vehicles is about 18,000, and the number of uses far exceeds that of traditional fuel vehicles.
Vehicle grade MLCC quality requirements are high. Because passive components are used in a small and harsh automotive interior environment, they have high requirements for adaptability such as temperature, humidity, climate, and earthquake resistance. Taking the operating temperature range of MLCC as an example, the maximum operating temperature of consumer MLCC is generally 85 °C to 125 °C, but the vehicle grade MLCC generally requires a minimum of 125 °C. In addition, the life requirements of the vehicle grade MLCC have also increased significantly. The life requirement for consumer MLCC is generally 3-5 years, but the life requirement for vehicle-grade MLCC is more than 15 years.
Demand for automotive MLCC is expected to grow steadily. According to the data of Zhiduoxing Consultants, the global demand for automotive MLCC in 2020 will be about 379 billion, an increase of 9.1% year-on-year; it is expected that by 2025, the global demand for automotive MLCC will reach 473 billion, with a five-year average growth rate of about 4.6%. In 2020, China's automotive MLCC demand will be about 124 billion, an increase of 27.2% year-on-year, and China's automotive MLCC demand will reach 163 billion in 2025, with an average five-year growth rate of about 5.7%.
5G drives the growth of the MLCC market demand. The complexity and diversification of mobile phone product functions and the popularization of 5G communication technology have led to an increase in demand for consumer electronics passive components. According to the new Raffle prospectus (filing draft), the amount of MLCC single-machine use in 5G mobile phones will rise to more than 1,000, while the mlCC single-machine usage of traditional mobile phones is only 290 to 350. According to Murata's forecast data, with the development of 5G, the demand for MLCC such as smartphones and base stations will continue to grow.
At the same time, 5G puts forward higher requirements for MLCC products. 1) 5G equipment frequency is higher, bandwidth is wider, the high-frequency performance requirements of MLCC are higher; 2) 5G base station layout is denser, smaller size, making MLCC to miniaturization; 3) 5G data operation increases, power consumption is easy to create local high temperature, the upper limit of MLCC operating temperature requirements are increased, but also need higher withstand voltage.
Global MLCC 100 billion market. According to the data of Zhiduoxing Consultant, the global MLCC market size in 2020 is 101.7 billion yuan. According to the data of China Electronic Components Association, the size of China's MLCC market in 2019 is about 43.8 billion yuan, which is the world's largest MLCC market.
MLCC shipments are growing steadily. According to Paumanok data, global MLCC shipments increased from 2.3 trillion to 4.49 trillion from 2011 to 2019, with a CAGR of about 8.72%.
According to the forecast of Zhiduoxing Consultants, the global MLCC market size is expected to reach 149 billion yuan by 2025, with a compound growth rate of about 7.9% from 2020 to 2025. (Source: Future Think Tank)
2 Detailed explanation of production process and equipment
2.1 MLCC production process and corresponding equipment
MLCC production process: MLCC is made by alternating stacking ceramic dielectrics and metal inner electrodes and co-firing. Two adjacent inner electrodes form a flat plate capacitor, and one MLCC is equivalent to several such flat capacitors in parallel, so the number of layers, the thickness of the dielectric material, and the dielectric constant determine the capacity of the entire MLCC.
2.2 Key processes
Cast
Ingredients: preparation of porcelain paste, the main equipment is ball mill and sand mill. The ingredient is the ceramic powder, adhesive and solvent and various additives according to a certain ratio after a certain period of ball grinding or sand grinding, forming a uniform and stable porcelain paste. Porcelain paste is generally composed of porcelain powder, solvent, dispersant, adhesive, plasticizer, defoamer and so on. The main equipment is ball mill and sand mill.
Ball mill: is the material is crushed, and then crushed the key equipment, suitable for powder equipment and other materials. When the equipment is working, through the ball grinding as a rotary motion, the medium in the tank is lifted and then slides down in a tilting state, and the spheres collide with each other or rub against each other, so that the large particles in the porcelain paste are depolypted, and the slurry between the balls is in a highly flowing state, so that the porcelain paste is dispersed.
Sand mill: Sand mill belongs to wet ultra-fine grinding equipment, which is developed from ball mill. The use of the pump in the slurry barrel by stirring and mixing porcelain pulp into the closed grinding chamber, in contact with the high-speed rotating grinding medium, through collision, friction and shear to achieve the purpose of accelerating the grinding of fine particles and dispersed aggregates. After several cycles, the porcelain pulp reaches the required fineness and a very narrow particle size range.
Cast: the porcelain pulp through the casting port of the casting machine, so that it is coated on the circumvention silicone film, thereby forming a uniform thin layer of porcelain paste, and then through the hot air zone (the vast majority of the solvent in the porcelain paste volatilization), by heating drying, the formation of a film with a certain thickness, density and uniformity (the thickness of the general diaphragm is between 1um-20um).
There are two types of cast extrusion methods during the molding process. The On roll method is generally suitable for thick film, which is the slit die extrusion method, so that the center of the rear roller is on the nozzle of the mold; the Off roll method is generally used for the film, which is the mold spray outlet above the centerline of the rear roller, and the substrate is coated with slurry at the rear roller without contact, which is also called the air cushion method or the tension net method.
Printing: The inner electrode slurry is printed onto the ceramic diaphragm by screen plate, and the clear and complete media diaphragm is obtained after drying.
Printing methods include letterpress, gravure, lithography and screen printing. Among them, screen printing has the advantages of low equipment tooling cost, high utilization rate of inner pulp and less waste, less electrode pattern seepage edge, flexible screen design, etc., so it is more widely used.
Lamination: The printed media diaphragms are neatly stacked together one by one according to a certain misalignment to form a block of consistent thickness. When stacking, the bottom and top surfaces also need to be added with ceramic film protective sheets to increase mechanical strength and improve insulation properties. The process needs to control the temperature, pressure, time, and alignment control of the misalignment position and the cleanliness of the environment, so it also needs to be completed in the clean room.
The stacking process has high requirements for the number of stackable layers and the accuracy of the stacking machine, and the number of stacked layers of domestic enterprises is still far from that of Japan and South Korea, and the current high-end lamination machine is still mainly imported.
Sintering: A core process of MLCC is sintering, which sinters the ceramic billet into porcelain at a temperature of more than 1000 °C. Sintering can make the debinded chip become a ceramic body with intact inner electrode, good compactness, qualified size, high mechanical strength and excellent electrical properties, which can be divided into two stages: the densification stage and the reoxidation stage.
THE MLCC has strict requirements for the performance of the sintering furnace. The sintering of the MLCC is co-fired by ceramics and internal electrodes containing metals, and the temperature and shrinkage rate at which the two begin to shrink are different. Extreme high-end MLCC products, only 3-5 ceramic particles on the single-layer ceramic medium, up to several hundred to a thousand layers, the change of internal structure is very easy to lead to cracks inside the product, so the sintering furnace heating rate, temperature control accuracy and reasonable sintering process is very critical.
MLCC testing includes performance testing and appearance testing.
First of all, it is necessary to test the performance of the capacitor product in four aspects: capacity, loss, insulation and withstand voltage. In addition, it is also necessary to inspect the appearance of the product, using high-speed optical screening equipment, using machine vision technology for automated testing, and the equipment used is a six-sided inspection machine. After that, the MLCC needs to be packaged and tested, and the equipment used is the packet testing machine.
The appearance detection of electronic components requires high accuracy and speed of the equipment. Components before entering the circuit board need to carry out a full range of detection, because the component size is very small, generally for the millimeter level, and the number of detection is huge, so the detection accuracy and detection speed of the detection equipment put forward higher requirements, the current advanced six-sided detector per minute detection number of more than 10,000.
The working principle of the six-sided detector: The process of detection includes: material correction, high-definition photography, rapid analysis, and accurate classification. The detection equipment first aligns the detected components through the correction mechanism, and the response speed is in the millisecond level. There are six stations on the glass plate of the equipment, each station is equipped with an optical imaging magnifying glass, the arranged components are lined up through each station, the optical system takes pictures of each component, and then the equipment automatically analyzes whether the components are defective, and then the high-speed solenoid valve will accurately classify the components.
2.3 MLCC equipment market space calculation
According to the announcement of Fenghua Hi-Tech, the proposed investment amount of the construction project of Xianghe Industrial Park is 7.5 billion yuan, of which the equipment purchase and installation costs total 5.494 billion yuan, and it is expected to achieve a new annual production scale of about 540 billion high-end MLCC.
MLCC production: In 2019, the global MLCC output was 4.49 trillion, according to the market size data of the China Electricity Yuan Association, roughly assuming that the output and scale change in the same proportion, the global MLCC output in 2021 = 4.49 * (1148/963) = 5.35 trillion pieces. According to this calculation, the market size of the global MLCC equipment ownership = 53500/5400 * 54.94 = 54.4 billion yuan. Assuming that the global MLCC is expanding at a rate of 10% per year, and the stock production line update cycle is 10 years, the annual new market size of MLCC equipment is about 544* (10% + 10%) = 10.9 billion yuan.
3 Domestic enterprises actively expand production, equipment manufacturers to meet the development opportunities
3.1 The industry pattern is concentrated, and the space for import substitution is large
From the perspective of production technology level, global MLCC manufacturers can be divided into three echelons: the first echelon is a Japanese enterprise represented by Murata, TDK, and Solar Electric, whose products cover four areas: small size low capacity, small size high capacity, large size low capacity and large size high capacity, with strong technical and scale advantages. The second echelon is south Korean and Taiwanese enterprises represented by Samsung Motor, Guoju and Huaxinke, and the MLCC production capacity is large, but there is still a certain gap in the technical level compared with Japanese manufacturers. Chinese mainland Fenghua Hi-Tech, Sanhuan Group, Yuyang Technology, Torch Electronics, Hongyuan Electronics and Weirong Technology ranked in the third echelon of MLCC, and there was a gap between the first and second echelons in terms of technology and scale.
The industry concentration is high, with a CR5 market share of 79% in 2020. Japanese and Korean enterprises such as Murata and Samsung Electromechanical have been deeply engaged in MLCC for many years, and with the accumulation of materials, processes, equipment, etc. accumulated over the years, they are in an advantageous position in the MLCC market and occupy a high market share. According to the data of Zhiduoxing Consultants, the top five manufacturers in 2020 occupy about 79% of the market share, of which high-end production capacity is concentrated in Japanese manufacturers.
The mainland MLCC industry has a high degree of import dependence, and it has always been in a trade deficit from 2017 to 2020, and there is a large space for import substitution.
Quantity: According to data from the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of MLCC imports on the mainland in 2020 is 3.08 trillion, and the number of exports is 1.63 trillion.
Amount: In 2020, the import value was 8.116 billion US dollars, while the export value was 3.887 billion US dollars, and the trade deficit was always in 2017-2020, and the import dependence was high
The average unit price of imports is higher than that of exports: According to the quantity and amount of imports and exports, the average unit price of imports and exports of MLCC in mainland China in 2020 is 26.35 US dollars / 10,000 US dollars and 23.60 US dollars / 10,000 pieces, respectively.
3.2 Domestic MLCC enterprises actively expand production
Driven by 5G and new energy vehicles, the MLCC industry has developed rapidly. At the same time, the technology of domestic enterprises has continued to advance, and the substitution of domestic enterprises has gradually advanced. In the context of the industry's improvement and localization, enterprises have a strong willingness to expand production. Fenghua Hi-Tech plans to invest 7.505 billion yuan in the construction of the "Xianghe Industrial Park High-end Capacitor Base Construction Project", which is expected to reach production in 2024 and will achieve a new monthly production capacity of about 45 billion high-end MCCC (about 540 billion new annual production capacity). Sanhuan Group plans to invest 4.102 billion yuan in the "high-capacity series multilayer chip ceramic capacitor expansion project", which will add 300 billion MLCC production capacity per year after the project reaches production.
3.3 Domestic equipment manufacturers have gradually achieved technological breakthroughs and are expected to develop rapidly
MLCC core equipment barriers are higher, before the high-end casting machine, lamination machine, six-sided detection machine, etc. mainly for Japanese and Korean enterprises supply, with the development of the domestic MLCC industry, as well as the continuous progress of domestic enterprise technology, domestic MLCC equipment manufacturers in some links gradually achieve breakthroughs, to Bojie shares of Audway as an example, its six-sided detection machine detection speed has exceeded 1W / min, detection speed and accuracy have reached the industry-leading level, is expected to quickly achieve localization. According to the announcement of Bojie shares, the company's vision inspection equipment applied to the field of passive components such as MLCC has been recognized and praised by customers, and the order scale has increased and the business growth is also good. In addition, the company has also independently developed other MLCC equipment such as bag measuring machines, and is expected to achieve rapid development in the future.
Excerpts from the report:
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Featured report source: [Future Think Tank]. Future Think Tank - Official website