The inventory of high-end memory chips is urgent, and Chinese manufacturers are making efforts

CBN

2024-05-15 23:12Posted on the official account of Shanghai Yicai

Under the boom of artificial intelligence, the inventory of high-end memory chips (HBM) is urgent. SK hynix and Micron have warned customers that HBM chips for 2024 have been sold out, and the tight inventory situation is expected to continue until 2025, and orders for HBM chips for 2025 are also full.

Currently, South Korea's SK hynix dominates the HBM market, and the other two memory chip giants, Micron and Samsung, are catching up. It is worth noting that Chinese memory chip companies have also begun to invest in the research and development of HBM chips.

For large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, HBM chips play a crucial role in their model training. In the context of major technology giants competing to announce higher-performance AI large models, there is also a serious shortage of HBM chips for AI training, and it has become a new field for chip companies to compete fiercely.

Nvidia contracted most of it

HBM is a DRAM-standard memory chip that was first introduced in 2013 and its core technology relies on vertical stacking of chips to save space and reduce power consumption, making it ideal for processing large amounts of data generated by complex AI applications.

Kazunori Ito, director of equity research at Morningstar, said in a note last week: "We expect HBM memory supply to remain tight throughout 2024. "

Sheng Linghai, an analyst at Gartner, told the first financial reporter that the tight supply of HBM is mainly due to the demand from chip giants such as Nvidia and AMD, which have contracted almost all the production capacity. He also said that Nvidia's use of HBM for its GPUs has driven demand for HBM in the industry. AI training and inference require high-bandwidth memory chips. "

But the manufacture of these chips is more complex, and it is difficult to ramp up production. According to a March report by market intelligence firm TrendForce, HBM's production cycle is 1.5 to 2 months slower compared to DDR5 memory chips, which are commonly found in PCs and servers.

As of March this year, SK hynix is still the sole HBM supplier of Nvidia's AI chips, although Nvidia is also considering using HBM chips from other manufacturers such as Samsung. In NVIDIA's newly released Blackwell architecture AI chip, the entire GPU chip is packed with a 192GB high-speed HBM3e chip, which greatly enhances the data throughput capability.

Although SK hynix is the first memory chip company to have the mass production capacity of HBM3 standard chips, Samsung and Micron also have relevant mass production plans this year, and both are expected to use the HBM3 standard. The first financial reporter asked Micron for confirmation, and the other party said that there is no public mass production news for release.

Huang previously called HBM extremely difficult to manufacture and "a miracle." He revealed at the Nvidia GTC conference in March this year that in addition to SK hynix, Nvidia is testing Samsung's HBM chips and is expected to use them in the future.

To meet the growing demand, SK hynix is already planning to expand its production capacity by investing in an advanced packaging facility in Indiana, USA, as well as a semiconductor cluster in South Korea.

SK hynix said at a press conference earlier this month that it will start mass production of the latest generation of HBM chips, the 12-layer HBM3e, in the third quarter, and Samsung is also trying to catch up with SK hynix in this technology, and Samsung plans to start mass production in the second quarter, so that it is expected to be the first company in the industry to deliver samples of 12-layer HBM3e chips.

"Samsung is currently leading the way in the 12-layer HBM3e sample process, and if Samsung can achieve mass production delivery earlier than its peers, I think it can gain more market share by the end of 2024 and 2025." SK Kim, executive director and analyst at Daiwa Securities, said in an investment note.

Samsung said on its first-quarter earnings call last month that HBM will more than triple its storage capacity in 2024 compared to last year.

"We have completed negotiations with the customer on the promised supply. By 2025, we will continue to at least triple our supply year-on-year. Samsung said.

Chinese companies are also developing R&D

At present, Chinese companies have started the development of HBM chips. Although the mainland started late in this field, it has developed rapidly in the last two or three years.

Sheng Linghai told the first financial reporter that at present, China has the packaging technology of HBM chips, but the manufacturing capacity of HBM chips is still immature and is still in the early stage of development. In addition, compared with international memory chip giants, Chinese companies are also working hard to develop HBM2 chip products based on the previous generation technology.

The domestic NAND memory chip giant Yangtze River Storage previously said that the company does not have the ability to mass-produce HBM, but according to public information, the company's Wuhan Xinxin Company, which is planning an IPO, may be involved in the research and development and production of HBM chips.

According to the public information of Qichacha, Wuhan Xinxin is building a factory that can produce 3,000 pieces of 12-inch HBM wafers per month, and the construction began in February this year. Neither YMTC nor Wuhan Xinxin commented.

In this regard, Sheng Linghai told the first financial reporter: "The standard of the 12-inch production line is to produce 20,000 pieces per month, and Wuhan Xinxin may involve the purchase of some HBM equipment, but it does not have the mass production capacity." "

As a giant of memory chips in China, Changxin Storage has a leading advantage in HBM chip manufacturing.

According to Anaqua's AcclaimIP database, Changxin Storage has applied for nearly 130 patents in the United States, China and Taiwan, involving different technical issues related to HBM chip manufacturing and functions, of which more than half of the patents were filed this year, and also involve the technology required for the development of HBM3.

Nori Chiou, investment director at White Oak Capital, a financial institution, estimates that Chinese chipmakers still lag behind the world's advanced level in HBM, a gap of about 10 years. But he said China is working to improve its capabilities in memory and advanced packaging technology for the HBM market.

(This article is from Yicai)