Introduction: Chip! chip! chip! Not only mobile phones, manufacturing, chip famine has also spread to the automobile industry, becoming the "card neck" technology of China's automobile development. At the "Third World New Energy Vehicle Conference" (WNEVC 2021) in 2021, Zhang Rui, deputy director of the Institute of Advanced Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Technology of Zhejiang University, and Yuan Chengyin, general manager of the National New Energy Vehicle Technology Innovation Center, focused on the automotive chip industry, proposing that China's automotive chips rely heavily on imports and urgently need to increase the domestic production rate, and the key lies in the government's promotion to build a symbiotic and win-win ecosystem. This article is based on live shorthand and has not been reviewed by the speakers.
Zhang Rui:
In recent years, the development of new energy vehicles has been very fast, last year our country's new energy vehicle sales exceeded 1.36 million, because China has the government's promotion, carbon neutrality and carbon peak and other related policy support.
In the U.S. market, which is dominated by traditional fuel vehicles, the sales of new energy vehicles are also rising year by year, and they are rising very fast. There are technical reasons for the rapid development of the market, there are also policy reasons, which has brought great opportunities for the development of our car chips, and there are many types of chips in a car, and there are hundreds of electronic devices in the middle to use chips. Car production continues to increase, so what are the challenges we face now? How to solve these problems?
At the end of last year, the problem of chip shortage affected the overall development of the automotive industry, and many chip fuel vehicles and new energy vehicles were affected. From the perspective of chip manufacturing, the fundamental reason is that supply and demand are unfair: on the one hand, the epidemic has led to a decline in production capacity; on the other hand, for traditional chip manufacturing, the profit of electronic chips is relatively high, many manufacturers will do it first, but the investment capacity is insufficient, and the automotive industry has a very strong recovery after the demand surges, and the supply cannot keep up. The combination of the two has led to a shortage of automotive chips in our country.
Domestic self-manufacturing of automotive chips is facing several problems: first of all, the size of the market, or the scale of profits is relatively small; the verification cycle of the second car chip is very long, bringing some problems; in addition, enterprises to do the manufacture of automotive chips, is a thankless thing, to face very high barriers. The combination of these several reasons is that most of our country's chips are still imported, more than 5% of the front-loading chips, more than 80% of the post-installed chips are imported, and most of the international automotive chip suppliers are from Japan, Europe, and the United States, and our country is about 3% more.
So, why can our country produce chips, but can't produce automotive chips, especially high value-added chips?
At present, TSMC's best lithography function can do 7 nanometers to form a photo sheet, and the middle line uses Intel's 193i lithography machine, which produces its chip and TSMC's technology level is comparable, their chips are very similar, that is to say, a single device is not a must to develop the chip manufacturing process. The situation in our country is that SMIC manufactures chips, using equipment that is 193i lithography machine, and SMIC's 14 nanometers are slightly weaker than Intel's 14-nanometer level.
These three examples illustrate a problem, in today's integrated circuit manufacturing, the role of a single technological breakthrough is very limited. Moreover, the complete set of processes of our chip manufacturing has a certain gap with foreign countries, and the effect that the current process capability can achieve is still weaker than some foreign advanced levels, which makes it more difficult for the chips produced in our country to form a market advantage.
We often divide chip manufacturing into three stages of design, production, packaging and testing, but design and manufacturing is not only these three stages, around these three stages need to have a lot of support industries or enterprises to supply these chip manufacturing enterprises, including some raw materials of enterprises, chip manufacturing needs silicon wafers, lithography, chemical gases, etc., but also need a variety of equipment, including process equipment and testing equipment.
In addition, high-precision photoresist and photoresist plates in our country can not produce, including testing equipment such as measuring the thickness of the film, are the shortage of our country and some difficulties faced by automotive chip manufacturing. This is not the problem of our chip manufacturing itself, the competition in the field of chip manufacturing is actually the competition of the whole industry chain.
The current problems faced by chip manufacturing just show that we need to make progress in the entire industry chain. In order to form automotive chip products, it is necessary to integrate thin films and lithography machines, but this is a very large technical engineering, these devices to be verified, each different method will be reflected in the performance of the chip.
Smart car chips
After the development of key processes and the integration of key processes, and finally through the optimization of process parameters, improve the utilization rate of chips, the whole set down is called chip manufacturing complete sets of processes, in order to improve the chip manufacturing industry, or the level of this industry, we must strive to create.
Our biggest opportunity is the physical opportunity - Moore's Law, due to some physical limitations, the evolution of the Moore effect is slower, the last 5 years of each generation of technology performance improvement of only 3.5%, meaning that the intelligent improvement is very limited. The Moore effect allows us to have a longer time to catch up with technology, and in the process of technological catch-up, we face the problem of cost and technology itself, and if we break through these two restrictions, we may catch up.
Another opportunity, starting from the actual situation in our country, we need to impact more advanced manufacturing processes, but also to see more products need the most advanced 14-nanometer node process or 10-nanometer node process, and the revenue of leading enterprises accounts for more than 80%. We want to do chip manufacturing in China, the focus must be on nodes above 55 nanometers, which also has technical advantages: many product lines, long life, and high price. In the future, if you want to further break through the limitations of the card neck, you need to focus on the nodes that are easier to localize, and the preferred solution for the development of our chip manufacturing industry must be to develop some industrial technologies from relatively mature nodes.
Of course, in the process of industrial technology development, there are also some characteristics, schools or research institutes do more is prototype technology, is borderless innovation, the direction is not clear, in the innovation process is in accordance with their own interests to do; and enterprise-led innovation is product-oriented, to market demand as the goal, must be able to sell money products.
However, among the cutting-edge technologies and industrial technologies, there are still some technologies classified as industrial technologies, but they have not yet reached the maturity of industrialization. This step is a blank in our current industrial development process, so we must have the government, schools, and enterprises to do cutting-edge technology research and development.
Such a platform is not unique to our country, and there are many successful experiences in the world. One is IMEC, and the other is DARPA in the United States, no matter who it is based on, the effect is similar to the research and development of some property rights technologies, while absorbing cutting-edge technologies and transferring cutting-edge technologies to industry.
The road to the development of domestic automotive chips is arduous and long, not a problem that can be solved in three or five years, although the road to development is long, but it does not mean that we do not do it, and we must bravely accept such a challenge.
In the context of the current era, we have challenges and opportunities, many industries are in the case of high-speed growth, if combined with high-speed growth industries, the chip industry still has good prospects for development. Automotive chips have special characteristics, if you want to cut into the automotive chip industry, many enterprises and entrepreneurial innovation companies have a certain degree of difficulty, if you want to promote the development of automotive chips, we inevitably need administrative strength and national support to achieve such a purpose.
Chengyin Yuan:
Since the formal establishment of the Auto Chip Alliance in September last year, it has mainly done a lot of work around the following aspects: first of all, the commercial insurance of automotive chips has been launched, so that car companies dare to use domestic automotive chips; secondly, it is coordinated with all walks of life in the industrial chain to jointly promote the construction of the standard system of automotive chips, which is expected to be released at the end of the year; in addition, we are also actively promoting the test and verification process of automotive chips, and promoting the upstream and downstream supply and demand docking of automotive chip manufacturers and vehicle companies, including joint development. to enhance mutual trust and mutual recognition. Combined with the above work and the current needs of the automotive chip industry, the title of my report is "Practice of Ecological Construction of China's Automotive Chip Industry".
First of all, new energy vehicles are very clear strategic industries to be developed, and in the Chinese market, the share of new energy vehicles has increased rapidly, and it is predicted that there will be 2.5 million or more vehicles this year. In addition to the amplification of the market, there are also technologies, how do we tap out the technologies that are suitable for the industry, suitable for users, and more suitable for market demand? The entire industry of new energy vehicles and traditional cars are not the same, the product positioning of new energy vehicle companies is becoming more and more high-end, unlike the previous independent brands are below 100,000 yuan, some new power brands have the opportunity to compete for high value-added markets.
The automotive industry has undergone tremendous changes in recent years, the new four modernizations have put forward higher requirements for us, and we are facing greater challenges for those who make cars, and we may have more attempts in the business model operation of the whole vehicle from the architecture of software and hardware, including new technologies and even new ideas. Our future trend is the development of emerging electrical and electronic architecture from distributed to domain centralized to centralized, including software, hardware and communication technology three major upgrades, coupled with big data technology to build a complete closed loop.
Second, the intelligent network connection accelerates the introduction. In the process of accelerating the introduction of intelligent network connection, we found that the power of car manufacturing has also changed, the first batch of people who joined the car manufacturing are successful people in Internet companies, they see the opportunity of personal entrepreneurship, including some other technology companies to enter the market, the entire industry chain includes traditional OEMs, new car-making forces, traditional Tier1, new technology companies have accelerated the layout of intelligent driving technology, hoping that more software companies will join.
Our old car building was mechanically defined, the engine, the acceleration of 100 kilometers, but now, it has come to the era of software-defined cars. More and more software applications can run on top of embedded, high-estranged, redundant hardware and powerful computing platforms, through software settings and subsequent upgrades to achieve centralized control of vehicle functions, to meet the user's on-demand implementation of functions, on-schedule upgrade functions and "thousands of faces" experience, different needs of different people to be met, which requires a strong enough hardware platform support.
In addition, the main engine factory is no longer a business that sells products, more is a set of full-life cycle products and providers, one-time delivery mode will gradually be replaced by a variety of software iterations, a variety of services, in this mode there will be a lot of main engine factories from the sale of product hardware to the software, into the continuous service model, which puts forward requirements for the basic platform in the early stage of the product.
Finally, the trend we see is the complete reconstruction of the value ecology, from upstream parts and manufacturers to downstream 4S stores, and will also extend to automobiles, end customers, and online and offline collaboration, which shows that the future product competition is a complete ecosystem competition.
Automotive electronics market is very huge, China's market will grow, the proportion of automotive electronics in the process will continue to increase, with the realization of the new four large-scale car, it is expected that by 2030 the proportion of automotive electronics costs will increase to 51% of the vehicle cost, by 2023 the automotive electronics market size will exceed 800 billion.
However, at present, the autonomy rate of localization of vehicle-grade chips is very low, and it is very dependent on imports, and the Internet of Vehicles or autonomous driving entrepreneurial enterprises have gradually launched "independent and controllable" products with intellectual property rights. The development of China's automobile industry has been lacking cores and souls, for the entire automotive chip industry, we must slow down, calm down, and work hard for 10 years, we may see the industrial chain form a complete system.
In the entire industrial scale, the import chip rate is 90%, the key system chips are all foreign monopolies, the autonomy rate of other body electronic simple systems is just over 10%, the national ministries and commissions suggest that there are some requirements for the autonomy rate of automotive chips of independent brands in the future, but the market is still huge, the cost of single car chips for new energy intelligent vehicles may be from 300 to 400 US dollars for traditional cars, and quickly increase to 1000 to 2000 US dollars, how much market share China can occupy is the problem we are facing.
The chip industry is a strongly bound supply chain system, and the industry barriers are relatively high. Analysis and combing of the entire automotive industry chain, after the new product design to get to the main engine factory can not be quickly on the car, because for most of the main engine factory we are an integrator, need to complete the corresponding reliability test, certification including performance evaluation, in addition to chip companies also need to complete the quality management system process.
Generally, a chip takes 2-3 years to complete the vehicle specification certification and enter the supply chain of the oem, and generally has a supply cycle of up to 5-10 years after entering. Entering the automotive chain is a very long cycle, a product development of 36 months to 48 months, the product life cycle is 10 years, so the requirements of 10 years of spare parts for chip companies put forward higher requirements, the need for everyone's perseverance and perseverance.
The core problem of the entire industrial innovation ecology is that the standard system is not perfect, especially the application of key products, and the construction of entrepreneurial innovation ecology is seriously insufficient, from industry standards and key technology research, to core chip development, product evaluation and certification, and then to final real vehicle verification, which is a complete life cycle.
To solve this problem, we recommend creating such a chain: led by a common innovation platform, to achieve information smoothness, enterprise leadership, government support, industrial chain, and alliance generation. Therefore, in September last year, we initiated the establishment of the China Automotive Chip Industry Strategic Alliance, from design, standards, certification, to manufacturing and assembly, vehicle applications. Pull different organizations to participate together, including automotive electronics manufacturers to form a new format of linkage, cross-border integration, symbiosis and win-win, in order to have the opportunity to do this thing. Let each member have responsibility, obligation, and harvest, and this alliance will have value.
The goal of the China Automotive Chip Industry Innovation Strategic Alliance is cross-border integration, symbiosis and win-win, truly create an innovative industrial ecology, and promote the development of China's chip industry. It is hoped that with the support of the alliance, we can truly create a technical ecology and industrial ecosystem suitable for new energy vehicle chips. We also state to you that the alliance will play a good role in supporting everyone's innovation and cooperation, and better link the various organizations and institutions of the industry through the alliance, so that everyone can form a cross-border integration, symbiosis and win-win ecosystem.
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