Introduction: Chinese enterprises have long suffered from the pain of "lack of core and less screen". This kind of "lack" and "less" are both at the level of intellectual property rights and high-end manufacturing capabilities. For example, Huawei fully has chip design capabilities, and the performance of the designed Kirin chip is not worse than Qualcomm, but in precision manufacturing, due to the level of local enterprises, Huawei has been in accordance with the global industrial chain division of labor, by Samsung, TSMC and other help to manufacture chips. When the international trade environment changes and the US government "jams" Huawei, people realize that only technology research and development capabilities and do not have precision manufacturing capabilities will also be inhibited. —— Excerpt from "Everything Is Born: TCL Dares to Be 40 Years"
Since the industrial revolution, globalization has developed rapidly, and an increasingly rich industrial ecology has gradually taken shape. With the support of national policies, Chinese enterprises have gradually integrated into the global industrial ecology after the reform and opening up, a large number of private enterprises such as TCL have emerged, and China's modern manufacturing industry has also ushered in a rapid rise. However, for a long time, China has faced the dilemma of "lack of cores and few screens", which is a big test of local enterprises by the times and the semiconductor industry.
In recent years, China's independent design capabilities are constantly catching up with the international leading level. At the same time, with intelligent manufacturing as the starting point, Chinese private enterprises are also trying to provide a game-breaking answer. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of TCL, the book "All Things Are Born - TCL Dares to Be 40 Years" will be officially released. By recording in detail the history of TCL's entrepreneurial development through the whole cycle of China's reform and opening up, the book shows readers the way of upward change, the way of outward expansion, and the way of inward change of Chinese enterprises.
The content of the article is excerpted from "All Things Are Born: TCL Dares to Be 40 Years", with slight deletions
Facing the problem of "less screen", TCL entered the semiconductor display industry
The "lack of cores and few screens" in the semiconductor industry has been China's heart disease for a long time. Taking the chip problem as an example, according to IC Insights, China's integrated circuit (IC) market size in 2020 is 143.4 billion US dollars. The IC market size produced in Chinese mainland is about $22.7 billion, accounting for only 15.9%, of which the total output value of the Chinese mainland-based company is $8.3 billion, accounting for only 5.9%.
The "less screen" dilemma also tightens people's nerves. When the subprime mortgage crisis broke out in 2008, the demand for LCD panels in only one major market in the world continued to grow, and that was the Chinese market. In 2008, the shipment of LCD TVs produced by Chinese color TV companies exceeded that of Japan, and also exceeded the shipments of CRT TVs. The scale of LCD TV is so large, but the lack of local LCD panel supply sources, China suffers from frequent shortages, as well as high procurement costs, subject to the dilemma of people, TCL founder and chairman Li Dongsheng for this "constant heartache".
In August 2008, Japanese and Korean color TV companies cancelled orders for LCD panel companies in Taiwan, leaving them on the verge of extinction. On January 16 of the following year, nine mainland TV companies stood up at a critical moment and signed a strategic cooperation agreement with LCD panel companies in Taiwan, purchasing more than 12 million pieces and ordering worth up to US$2.2 billion.
Unexpectedly, in less than a month, Korean color TV companies suddenly changed from canceling orders to purchasing inventory panels in Taiwan, and all of them were cash transactions. At this time, Chimei Electronics and AUO Optoelectronics, which have signed agreements with mainland enterprises, not only refused to perform the supply contract, but also allowed the Korean companies to buy out the inventory panels. Mainland color TV companies have no power to fight back, and can only increase the amount of panel procurement in 2009 to 4.4 billion US dollars, helplessly accepting the reality of price increases.
From March to August 2009, the import panel rose by more than 30%, and the mainland color TV companies not only had no profit to earn, but even had to lose money.
"All Things Are Born" new book tasting meeting
"If you don't master the upstream, you will always rely on people's sniffles and have the illusion of not continuing to rely on them." Li Dongsheng said.
On April 15, 2009, the State Council promulgated the "Adjustment and Revitalization Plan for the Electronic Information Industry", which opened the electronic information industry as a strategic, basic and leading pillar industry of the national economy, and for the first time included "new display devices" in the scope of national policy support. In January of the following year, TCL officially started construction of Huaxing Optoelectronics. From end products to LCD panels, TCL has entered the high-tech industry of semiconductor display.
TCL Huaxing Shenzhen T2 R&D Center
"Why did you make this big strategic choice at the time? For me, one is inspired by the success of South Korea's Samsung surpassing Japanese companies; the second is that the bottleneck problem of domestic 'lack of core and less screen' has become a major problem restricting the development of the industry, in the 'lack of core' and 'less screen' two key points, TCL chooses to break through the 'less screen' problem of success probability is higher, if you choose to enter the chip industry, objectively do not have the relevant conditions; third, after the international financial crisis, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and other countries and regions of the investment capacity are greatly limited, Between 2010 and 2015, Japan's Sharp only added one new LCD display production line, and South Korea's Samsung and LG each added a new LCD display production line, and it was located in Chinese mainland. Enterprises in Taiwan only invested half of the production line, while boe, Huaxing Optoelectronics, and Tianma, which Chinese mainland in the same period, invested a total of 12 panel production lines, and the market demand for global display products was still growing rapidly during this period. Entering the semiconductor display industry is not only the own needs of the development of the TCL industry, but also in line with the development direction of the strategic transformation and upgrading of Chinese enterprises. Li Dongsheng said in an interview.
After 40 years, TCL, once a small tape manufacturer in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, has grown into a globally competitive technology group with business covering more than 160 countries and regions, spanning the three core industries of intelligent terminals, semiconductor displays, semiconductor photovoltaics and semiconductor materials. Huaxing Optoelectronics, a subsidiary of TCL, focuses on innovation in the field of semiconductor display, which is already an important part of its strategic layout.
Towards intelligence: China's manufacturing industry is ushering in butterfly changes
TCL Huaxing currently has 8 panel production lines, 4 module factories, with an investment of more than 240 billion yuan, and has become one of the world's leading semiconductor display companies. Its products cover large, medium, and small size panels and touch modules, electronic whiteboards, splicing walls, vehicles, e-sports and other high-end display applications, building the core competitiveness of the global panel industry. In this process, intelligence is indispensable.
In the product development and design process, in the past, the product design cycle was long, the new process, and the verification process of new materials was long and costly. Now TCL Huaxing has introduced an artificial intelligence engine to use the "
IoT x AI" technology, all product design data and data output for simulation verification, reducing the design process, greatly improving design efficiency.
The production process of semiconductors is very complex, from a piece of glass to a display screen, the middle to go through dozens or even nearly a hundred processes, the defect problems and backgrounds faced are also very complex, the use of traditional optical inspection equipment can not be detailed defect detection and classification. TCL Huaxing developed the ADC (Automatic Defect Classification) system, using deep learning and artificial intelligence technology, so that the machine to defect products for automatic detection, classification, segmentation and logical judgment, quality inspection efficiency has been greatly improved, the previous abnormal interception takes 1-2 hours, now shortened to the original 40%, for TCL Huaxing each factory to save tens of millions of yuan in labor costs per year.
In addition, TCL Huaxing has invested tens of millions of yuan to establish a full-coverage Internet of Things system, which can detect small changes in the environment, measure the characteristics of micron-level circuits, and analyze the drift of data through big data analysis, so as to predict product quality, make early warnings in advance, and find and dispose of them as early as possible. Now, regardless of product or equipment problems, directly responsible employees and supervisors can immediately receive information and process it in a timely manner.
It can be said that in terms of business synergy, plan adaptability, cost measurability, process transparency and performance measurability, TCL Huaxing's flexible intelligent manufacturing system has played a key role.
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: By 2025, key enterprises in key industries will initially achieve intelligent transformation
TCL Huaxing started from the first year of intelligent manufacturing: when multi-engine drive is carried out
Intelligence is not the only highlight of TCL Huaxing's intelligent manufacturing.
In fact, as early as 2016, TCL Huaxing planned the intelligent manufacturing development route of "three modernizations and four steps". The "three modernizations" are automation, dataization and intelligence. This year has also become the first year of Huaxing's intelligent manufacturing development.
In terms of automation: TCL Huaxing started from the blueprint planning of factory construction, and simultaneously planned how to realize the automatic operation of the factory, the data interaction between the systems, and the control and analysis of the background production process. TCL Huaxing combines actual needs and industry experience, cooperates with the world's top information technology enterprises, and gradually establishes a comprehensive computer integrated manufacturing production system, including manufacturing execution system (MES), automatic control (BC), automated delivery system (DSP), reporting system (RPT), central monitoring system (CFM) and other systems, and gradually explores an intelligent manufacturing development route with "Internet +" as the core.
TCL Huaxing t1 project is China's first high-generation LCD panel production line that completely relies on independent innovation. When the t1 and t2 projects were launched, TCL Huaxing's degree of automation was at an extremely high level. Because the glass substrate is 2.5 meters long, 2.2 meters wide and only 0.5 mm thick, it needs to be processed and circulated in thousands of precision equipment, which lasts more than 10 days and a journey of 4 kilometers, which cannot be completed by manual labor alone. At that time, TCL Huaxing had accumulated more than 2 billion yuan in automation equipment investment. The automated workshop consists of thousands of sets of robots and hundreds of thousands of sensors, and a huge number of robots and sensors form the basis of TCL Huaxing Intelligent Factory. TCL Huaxing has nearly 70 automatic production systems, about 3,000 robots to support automated production, in 140 processes and testing sites, about 120 are fully automatic, the other 20 automation more than 70%, automated production equipment accounts for more than 95% of the total production equipment of enterprises.
In recent years, TCL Huaxing has realized the automatic acquisition, automatic reporting and automatic recording of data through the Internet of Things technology, reducing the on-site inspection manpower by 80%, greatly improving the timeliness, and using data analysis tools to reduce the risk of abnormal manufacturing equipment downtime.
A scene of Huaxing workshop, video screenshot
In terms of data, each product of TCL Huaxing needs to control about 25,000 parameters in all processes, more than 2TB of production data is generated and collected every day, and there are nearly 1,000 detection sites in the entire production process, of which the optical and lighting sites need to determine the number of pictures every day more than 2 million, which is of great help to the operation and management of TCL Huaxing. At the same time, TCL Huaxing also realized that the value of data has not been fully utilized and utilized, and some aspects of data are still missing key.
In 2017, TCL Huaxing began to lay out the construction of factory AP (access points), and tens of thousands of IoT points solved the communication and coordination of people, machines, materials, laws and rings in real time. The data collected by the Internet of Things is analyzed and modeled through the big data platform, which provides data support for intelligent AI (artificial intelligence) applications such as virtual measurement and equipment monitoring objects. TCL Huaxing has independently developed and built a BI (Business Intelligence) internal management system, as the "central brain", it processes 100 G-level production data every day, and through the summarization, analysis and management of data, the production, yield, inventory, quality, sales and other aspects of the information accurately and centrally visualized on the 24 screens of the war room. "Data collection and knowledge form a wisdom action" has gradually become an important path for TCL Huaxing's decision formation.
In an interview, Li Dongsheng particularly emphasized the importance of intelligent manufacturing in improving TCL Huaxing's management capabilities. He believes that automation can improve quality, improve accuracy, improve efficiency, and intelligence can further improve efficiency and quality. Through the introduction of automation and intelligent equipment, TCL Huaxing replaces people with automation and intelligence, with higher production efficiency and better product quality, while reducing labor costs, improving efficiency and efficiency.
From manufacturing to "intelligent manufacturing", where is the confidence of Chinese enterprises?
Chinese enterprises have the courage to embrace the broader sea of stars, which is inseparable from industrial capabilities, especially the improvement of manufacturing capabilities.
In the past decade, China's industrial ecology has accelerated the pace of transformation and upgrading, and entered a concentrated outbreak period of breakthroughs in efficiency, products and technological advantages. But all of this is inseparable from the manufacturing process. Solid products such as panels are ultimately manufactured. This involves excellent precision manufacturing capabilities and advanced process levels. These capabilities are gradually cultivated in the practice of "self-built teams and independent lines", and cannot be simply copied.
TCL Huaxing has established a deep foundation in precision manufacturing and other aspects, Li Dongsheng said: "Although the requirements for precision manufacturing capabilities of integrated circuits are higher than semiconductor displays, one is to make transistors on silicon wafers, one is to make transistors on glass substrates; one is 7 nanometers, one is 2000 nanometers... But the basic principles are common, including professional equipment and professional terminology are the same, such as the use of lithography machines, photoresists, all need to expose etching, etc., but the process accuracy is different, the equipment requirements are different. ”
It is based on TCL Huaxing's high-end manufacturing and precision manufacturing capabilities that Li Dongsheng dares to continue to march into semiconductor photovoltaics, semiconductor materials and integrated circuits from the field of semiconductor display. Because these are high-tech, asset-heavy, long-cycle industries, they all require extremely high cost control, efficiency improvement capabilities, and high-tech manufacturing and process levels.
The book "Everything Is Born: TCL Dares to Be 40 Years" commented: "In the era of achievement and manufacturing power, scale winning is the usual path. In the era of becoming a manufacturing power, to break through innovation in key technologies and materials, ability is the key. Systematic improvement of competitiveness is key. This is also the key to Huaxing's success. ”
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