In recent years, the "Chinese chip card neck" problem has attracted the attention of the whole people, in addition to the mobile phone communication industry in the whirlpool of public opinion, other industries such as automobiles, home appliances and other industries have also launched their own "core" projects. Taking the home appliance industry as an example, including Midea, Haier, Gree, Hisense, Galanz, TCL, Konka, etc., enterprises have released their own "chip semiconductor" planning, so what is the difference between the "core" movement of the home appliance industry and the mobile phone core, and what is the prospect of the "core" of home appliance companies, with these questions, we have opened a journey of exploration.
The "nervous system" of home appliances
If the home appliance is compared to an organic life, then steel, plastic, etc. constitute the exoskeleton of the home appliance, the motor, compressor, etc. are similar to the heart, the refrigerant, connectors, etc. are like the blood and connective tissue of the product, and to connect all the parts to run, it is necessary to give the product a "neural network", and the chip and semiconductor components assume this role.
Taking air conditioning as an example, when we turn on the power supply and hold the remote control in hand to issue instructions, a series of wonderful reactions occur inside the air conditioner. When we press a button, the circuit board in the remote control receives the signal, through the power management module "tell" the indoor unit control circuit "what should you do", the indoor unit processing operation system receives the signal, activates the sensing module to "feel" the temperature and humidity of the indoor environment and feedback to the operation processing system, gets the "conclusion" Of the operation processor will transmit the information to the fan circuit, the operation processing module in the fan will also dock the received information for "interpretation" and then transmit to the control circuit of the outdoor unit. The same signal reception, operation processing process is staged in the power supply, motor and compressor system of the outdoor unit, and the instructions on air conditioning refrigeration/heating are completed. This whole process is cyclical, allowing the air conditioner to run "endlessly".
In this process, the acquisition, perception and operation of signals or information are completed by many chips and semiconductor components. For example, the power management chip (PMI) is composed of many analog hybrid integrated circuits, which can manage the transformation, distribution, detection, etc. of electrical energy, such as AC/DC conversion, voltage modulation, display panel drive, battery charging management, etc. all require the participation of PMI modules.
Another example is the MCU chip, which is equivalent to the "brain" of the home appliance, and the corresponding function is similar to the computer CPU, but the computing power and function are relatively simple; The MCU carries the functions of integration, processing, storage and other functions of the overall information of home appliances. In the traditional non-smart home appliances, generally with 4-bit or 8-bit MCU chips can be used, but with the evolution of home appliance intelligence, 32-bit MCUs have begun to accelerate the application of smart homes and smart home appliances, which can meet the basic intelligent needs of the device. According to the relevant data of Arrow Electronics, in 2019, among China's large white electricity products, products equipped with 8-bit MCU chips accounted for about 56%, 16-bit MCU chips accounted for about 19%, and products equipped with 32-bit MCU chips accounted for about 21%. 64-bit MCU chips representing higher computing power have also emerged, and in terms of computing efficiency, this order of MCU chips has approached the 64-bit computer CPU.
In addition to power chips such as PMI and MCU master control chips, there are also a large number of sensor devices in home appliances, which are similar to neuronal cells, responsible for "collecting" information factors such as temperature, humidity, quality, electromagnetic, resistance, cleanliness, speed, odor particles, displacement, etc., to consult the processor "reference". In addition, with the increase in the demand for "interaction" between home appliances and the outside world, communication chips such as WIFI and Bluetooth have also begun to be widely used in home appliances.
Huaxi Securities survey shows that in order to achieve the frequency conversion function of home appliances, an ordinary frequency conversion ice, washing, and empty products need to use 2-3 PMI modules, and with the upgrading of product functions, a high-end inverter refrigerator needs to use 5 groups or more PMI chips. In the same way, the intelligent upgrading of home appliances is also calling for MCU chips with higher computing power and higher precision sensing components.
According to the home appliance industry insiders, the cost price of an ordinary PMI chip is traditionally about 1 yuan, the cost price of an MCU chip is about 2 yuan, and the cost of the chip for the whole machine generally does not exceed 5% in the traditional white tv products. However, with the development of home appliance frequency conversion and intelligence, the cost of the whole machine chip in a smart inverter home appliance has gradually increased to 10%-15%, and the cost will increase with the upgrading of product performance requirements.
For the improvement of demand for home appliance chips is a realistic side, the imperfection of domestic supporting is the other side, according to Wang Yun, director of the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the market size of China's home appliance chips in 2019 is about 50 billion yuan, while the industry's local matching rate is only 5%, and the short board of domestic home appliance chips needs to be filled urgently.
At present, there are some professional home appliance chip companies in the domestic industry, such as Xinpeng micro, which focuses on power management chips, China Resources Microelectronics, Wingtech Technology, etc., which focus on power modules, BGI Semiconductor, Zhongying Electronics, etc., but in terms of market share, domestic brands are still far behind overseas brands. Taking PMI chips as an example, 96% of China's power chip market share in 2019 is occupied by overseas brands, and also in MCU chips, foreign brands such as Renesas, Infineon, and Freescale occupy an absolute dominant position.
At present, the total annual production capacity of China's ice, washing, and air white electricity products exceeds 300 million units, accounting for about 70% of the global production capacity, and the overall scale of China's home appliance market exceeds one trillion yuan. At the same time, the domestic substitution of chips can maintain the stability of the mainland home appliance supply chain at a critical moment and enhance the status of China's home appliances in the global value chain division of labor system, which has been fully verified in the trade war and during the epidemic.
"Core building" is full of unknowns
At present, China's home appliance companies are full of enthusiasm for "making cores", but there are still many unknowns in the prospect of "core making".
Taking Midea as an example, as a comprehensive white electricity manufacturing enterprise, the PMI module applied by the United States has also mainly relied on imports, with the start of the Sino-US trade war in 2018, the United States has set up a project team to start PMI industrialization research, and announced in 2019 that it has realized the independent controllability of PMI modules. Similarly, on the MCU chip, in order to prevent being "stuck neck" by foreign countries, Midea established Shanghai Meiren Semiconductor Company in 2018 and achieved the goal of mass production of 10 million in 2021. In addition, in 2021, Midea also established Meicheng Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd., which is mainly engaged in the manufacture and sales of integrated circuit chips. In the future, Midea said that in addition to meeting the needs of home appliances, the company also plans to cover a wider range of chip research and development and manufacturing such as industrial, vehicle regulations, and medical treatment, and in 2024, Midea is expected to achieve mass production of chips for new energy vehicle pump control.
However, even with the support of supporting industries and a strong capital chain, midea still said that from the perspective of research and development thresholds, chips need high costs and a long time from design to manufacturing, and the number of future production and sales is still unknown; Layout chips, even for home appliance chips with relatively low technical thresholds, also means long-term investment in talents and technology for enterprises.
In fact, the chip from research and development to manufacturing, is definitely a "burning money" process, although many home appliance companies announced the investment of "10 billion", "50 billion" to do chips, but compared to professional chip R & D and production enterprises, these investments are still slightly insufficient.
Taking the global professional semiconductor companies as an example, the global semiconductor TOP6 brands in 2020 are Intel, Samsung, Broadcom, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, TSMC, mediatek, of which Intel invested 12.9 billion US dollars in research and development (about 82 billion yuan), and MediaTek invested about 17.8 billion yuan in scientific research and development. Looking at the R&D investment of Chinese Internet technology companies, huawei's overall R&D investment in 2020 is 141.8 billion yuan, ZTE's overall R&D investment is 14.7 billion yuan, and Xiaomi's is 9.3 billion yuan, of course, this is the overall R&D investment of the company, not limited to chip research and development. In that year, the overall R&D investment of home appliance companies was 10.1 billion yuan in Midea, 7.2 billion yuan in Haier, 6.5 billion yuan in TCL, 6.2 billion yuan in Gree, and R&D investment in Changhong, Skyworth, Hisense, Konka and other enterprises was less than 2 billion yuan.
Even if the overall technical difficulty of the chips for home appliances is much lower than that of mobile phones and automotive chips, if you want to do a good job of chips and make them into high-end quality, its self-research investment will also be an amazing expense. In fact, some semiconductor practitioners believe that home appliance companies' self-developed chips may not be to make money, but to prevent "card neck" and "chip shortage", in fact, many home appliance companies announced that the time point of self-developed chip planning is exactly around 2018 - the United States announced sanctions against Chinese companies such as ZTE and Huawei, and launched a trade war with China.
Of course, home appliance companies self-developed chips are not all without advantages, the semiconductor practitioners believe that after the home appliance companies add chips self-research projects, to a certain extent, they can skip chip designers to directly connect with the fab, and deal with the packaging and testing factory, shorten the product supply cycle and nodes, and have a certain vertical supply chain to ensure that production is continuous. For Midea, Gree and other enterprises interested in entering the new energy vehicle or industrial control track, the collaboration and migration of R&D personnel and technology will also help to share the investment in chip self-development.
Wang Yun suggested that as far as the chip for home appliances is concerned, the overall output value is low, and such investment in home appliance companies will have certain risks, so compared with the lonely courage of enterprises to "fight alone", he encourages home appliance companies to choose cross-border cooperation with other professional chip R & D and manufacturing enterprises to solve problems in development.
For home appliance companies to enter the chip manufacturing, many netizens also expressed their own views, such as netizens think, "home applianceS with MCU do not use a very high process, domestic manufacturing packaging is no problem, look at the current automotive MCU shortage is severe, if there is a self-developed MCU, it will not be reduced production and production stoppage, so it is still necessary to have a certain chip self-development capability." Some netizens believe, "It is always a good thing to have a beginning, and now there is no research and development ability to cultivate, otherwise how to do a good job in related industries?" Toshiba, Sony, and Samsung have all cultivated their own research and development capabilities, and their development of chips has also been successful, which can be learned by traditional Chinese home appliance manufacturers. ”
The wind direction of the home appliance industry has begun, and this time we also expect it to develop from a "small whirlwind" to an "atmospheric whirlwind" across the entire industry.
![Annual output of 10 million pieces! Domestic home appliance manufacturers have entered the field of core manufacturing: they will lay out automotive chips[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)