#文章首发挑战赛#
We often hear people say that China will make chips the price of cabbage, but how can we make it the price of cabbage? I'm afraid few people can say clearly.
Since the end of last year, the United States has been frantically blocking it, and we may be able to see the development of this matter clearly.
Before and after 2024, three important news shook the global chip industry.
The first news, on December 21, 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that in order to "protect U.S. national security", it will begin a review of how U.S. companies purchase Chinese-made semiconductors in January 2024.
This measure is mainly aimed at the procurement of traditional Chinese chips by American companies.
The second news, on January 1, 2024, Dutch lithography machine giant ASML issued a statement that the export licenses of the company's two DUV lithography machines have been revoked by the Dutch government, and the largest buyer is a Chinese customer.
These two lithography machines are mainly used to produce traditional chips above 14 nanometers and below 38 nanometers.
The third news, on January 4, 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that under the "Chips and Science Act", it will provide $162 million in grants to Microchip Technology, a significant part of which is traditional chips used in goods such as cars and washing machines.
The CHIPS and Science Act, which originally set aside at least $2 billion for traditional chips, now looks set to expand.
Some experts analyzed that Americans believe that China's beating of traditional chips to the price of cabbage is a huge threat to the US chip industry, which makes them feel afraid.
Many people believe that China has the ability to beat chips to the price of cabbage, which is judged based on historical experience.
China's manufacturing industry chain and cost-effective capabilities, as well as follow-up investment in money-making industries, until the industry to overcapacity, so as long as we participate in many industries, the final result is to be beaten into cabbage prices.
Of course, this is not so simple, we have gone through decades of accumulation, only to have rich raw materials, strong processing capacity, complete supply chain, cheap labor, cost-effective production capacity, everything has become a matter of course.
Behind this is the unremitting efforts of several generations, long-term investment and accumulation in R&D and manufacturing engineering.
Nowadays, our labor is no longer so cheap, and the cost of production is getting more and more expensive, can we still replicate the miracle of the past in the field of chips?
What has happened in history is not necessarily inevitable, and we need to work hard in 3 aspects to make chips the price of cabbage.
The first is the chip material, the most important thing is, of course, the silicon wafer, the raw material is silicon, and we don't have much cost advantage at present.
From the perspective of the global pattern, the silicon wafer market is basically occupied by five giants such as Japan's Shin-Etsu, Global Wafer, and Germany's Silicon, who have carved up more than 86% of the market share.
We also have three companies in the top 10, Shanghai Silicon Industry, Jin Ruihong and Zhonghuan Shares.
Traditional chip manufacturing also involves hundreds of carefully configured and highly concentrated chemicals, gases, and materials, which together account for about 20% of the total cost of chip manufacturing, some of which are also closely related to oil.
In addition, to maintain the cost of ownership, you cannot stick to traditional chip materials, such as graphene chips, which are 10 times faster than silicon chips. At present, Huawei has achieved the production of graphene chip samples, but has not yet achieved a clear leading edge.
The second is the chip manufacturing process, which means that the cost is leading.
SMIC's innovative N+1 manufacturing process in 2020 is considered one of the world's leading commercial logic processes.
This process allows for a smaller transistor pitch, which increases the integration of the crystal, and allows more transistors and functional units to be accommodated in the same area, achieving a performance improvement of about 20%-30%.
However, compared with the decades of accumulation in the United States and the West, we still need to work the manufacturing process.
The third is talent, especially skilled workers.
Chips are a very typical skilled labor-intensive industry, which is why TSMC must relocate a large number of skilled workers from Taiwan, China if it wants to build a factory in the United States, precisely because there are not many skilled workers in the United States anymore.
In fact, skilled workers are where we really lead. Musk once said that in this era when skilled workers are very scarce all over the world, China's skilled workers can easily fill dozens of basketball factories.
By the end of 2021, the total number of skilled workers in the country exceeded 200 million, accounting for 26% of the employed population, of which more than 60 million were highly skilled talents.
This is due to the fact that we deployed secondary and higher vocational education on a large scale in advance more than 10 years ago and cultivated a large number of technical and operational talents.
In this situation, seeing that we are catching up quickly in the chip industry, the Americans can't sit still, they once again reneged on their promises, no longer only for advanced chips, and began to brazenly block our traditional chips, so the three things we talked about earlier happened.
So in 2024, is the decisive battle of traditional chips coming?