Rockchip: Part RK3588 has already started production in small batches

Set micro network news, recently, Rockchip said in an institutional survey that at present, in the eight major product directions of RK3588, almost all of the domestic head customers are in research and development, and some have reached the stage of small batch production. Some well-known brands in Europe and South Korea are also in the process of research and development.

Rockchip said that the RK3588 has eight application directions, including high-performance tablets, ARM PCs, smart cockpits, multi-eye cameras, smart NVR, smart large-screen/multi-screen applications, cloud services and edge computing, VR/AR and other application areas. In the first half of the year, it is expected that there will be four major directions of products, including multi-eye cameras. Different application products have different R&D and import cycles, and it is expected that there will be a prototype release for customers in April and May.

RK3588 has multiple customer projects in AR, VR products, automotive, edge computing and many other application scenarios. The R&D cycle of AR, VR and in-vehicle is relatively longer, and mass production is expected in the second half of the year. The RK3588 is mainly used in the vehicle side of intelligent cockpit and surround view camera. The RK3588M is already in the process of vehicle specification certification, and the current research and development progress of in-vehicle customers is faster than expected.

Regarding the production capacity situation, Rockchip said that the production capacity situation is still tight from this year's point of view, and there are structural capacity constraints in different wafer foundries, especially mature processes such as 28nm, 40nm, 180nm. There are problems with the capacity supply of a major supplier in 2021, but several other suppliers have provided great support. The company has signed some contracts with the main suppliers last year, the original production capacity will be a relatively large increase, and this year will be through product upgrades and product structure adjustment to solve the capacity problem, this year as a whole our company's production capacity will be greatly relieved than 2021, but the industry to see the production capacity is still very tight.

On the issue of fab price increases, wafer foundries have different increases in different batches and at different times, and we maintain a gross profit margin of about 40% according to the company's affordability, while some products have increased prices.

In 2022, the manufacturing side of the mature process itself did not add much capacity, and it is expected that it will not be alleviated until the second half of 2023.

Regarding the current competitive landscape, Rockchip pointed out that there is competition in ICs in security, consumer electronics, and various application markets. We believe that the next ten years will be a decade of new hardware, and new hardware needs ICs to combine hardware, data, algorithms, clouds, etc., to do a good job in various scenarios, reflecting the value of products, rather than relying solely on low prices to compete.

In the 20-year development process, Rockchip has continued to develop core technologies around big audio, big video, big perception and big software, highlighting the technical advantages in core IP in products, and continuously optimizing and iterating products to improve product competitiveness. At the same time, Rockchip has also accumulated industry-leading, rich customers, scenarios and ecology. These are our unique advantages in the market competition.

In terms of automotive electronics, Rockchip pointed out that the company has many years of experience in the field of automotive electronics, and has a product layout in the front and rear of the car, and did not dare to formally talk about entering automotive electronics before because entering this field requires the support of enough engineer resources. This year is the first year that the company entered the front loading of cars. At present, well-known domestic electric vehicle manufacturers have begun to introduce RK3588. This year's goal, we only seek to land.

According to Rockchip, the RK3588 uses high-performance CPU and GPU cores, adds 6T NPU processing units, has powerful multimedia processing capabilities, and many peripheral interfaces, which can adapt to the needs of many complex scene applications, can run a variety of operating systems, and is the company's new generation of flagship products. This year is the first year of official mass production of the RK3588 series, which is expected to account for a very high proportion, and with the launch of product applications in various directions, continuous mass production, the proportion of sales will increase year by year.

Regarding the application of RK3588 in security, Rockchip said that the product development and introduction cycle of different applications is fast and slow. In the first half of the year, it is expected that there will be product launches in four major directions, including multi-eye camera products; in the second half of the year, it will continue to increase in the other four directions.

Taking the RK3588's 8K decoder as an example, if you only focus on the current, this performance is excessive in some scenarios; but the 8K broadcast of the Winter Olympics and 32-channel video access scenarios already require 8K performance.

Looking to the future, the demand for computing power of AIoT products will even develop faster than Moore's Law describes.

Our products should focus on the long term, not just the short term. AIoT chips and mobile phone chips are not the same, mobile phones are a flagship product a year, and AIoT products in industry, robotics and all walks of life applications, customers require a long product life cycle, and even require us to promise 7-10 years of chips do not stop production. We have a number of AIoT chips that have been released for more than 5 years, and customer demand is increasing year by year.

Regarding the adoption of the RISC-V core, Rockchip said that the promotion of a new instruction set or kernel mainly lies in the software ecology, and the ecology takes time, and RISC-V related processors have developed very fast in recent years. Rockchip micro products RK3588 or other SoC chips of the main processor core are still using ARM, in the closed small system we will use a little RISC-V internal-oriented simple control, without interrupting the main processor to do some parallel control, in order to improve efficiency.

It is understood that the company's sales model of distribution as the main and direct sales as a supplement is the practice in accordance with the industry practice more than ten years ago. But in actual operation, including most of the technical support, market development, business negotiations, etc., we are directly facing the end customer.

Rockchip said that most companies in the semiconductor industry will encounter a very serious structural shortage problem in 2021. The price reversal from the original large amount preferential price to the greater the demand, the higher the price. The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and international tensions have all had an impact on supply chains, and in this case, companies are actively stockpiling reasonable inventories to cope with future supply chain uncertainties, which is the result of efforts in the absence of capacity. Earlier we also mentioned that the life cycle of the company's products is long. In 2021, from wafers, substrates, packaging, materials and equipment, the entire industry chain is very tight. In order to reduce the uncertainty of supply, the company took the initiative to increase safety stocks. (Proofreading/Arden)