The industry predicts that 28 nm will be a new starting point for 100% domestic chips, and domestic 14 nm chips are expected to achieve mass production this year and next year, respectively. The domestic 14nm chip can achieve mass production at the end of next year, and the domestic chip has ushered in the best moment. "We agree with the industry's prediction, and despite the technical difficulties, we have seen hope."
The development of 14nm chips has overcome many technical problems: key equipment such as etching machines and film deposition have been realized from scratch and applied in large production lines in batches; 14 nm process research and development breakthrough; Post-channel package integration technology to achieve mass production; Hundreds of key materials such as polishes and sputtering targets have passed the assessment of large production lines and entered mass sales. These achievements basically covered the whole industrial chain system of China's integrated circuit, reversing the passive situation of the previous introduction of a full set of process technology.
The rapid development of 14nm and even 28nm chip localization means that we adopt a return strategy, meet the general chip needs with mature processes, do not blindly pursue high process, pay more attention to design, package optimization, and exchange time for semiconductor applications and the whole industry chain independent space.
In addition, in his view, after the mass production of 14nm chips, the subsequent expansion of production capacity also needs to do a good job of financial support, including the required equipment such as lithography machines, cleaning equipment, polishing instruments, which is not only expensive, but also requires a lot of water and electricity in the use process; Secondly, we need to do a good job in the integration of raw materials, components and other suppliers, and do a good job of customer introduction in advance to ensure that production capacity is fully utilized.
14nm has become the most valuable process in the market today
The production line of 14-12nm is very key in the current semiconductor, and the 14nm process and above can meet the needs of 70% of the current semiconductor manufacturing process, and the 12nm process is used in the positioning of mid-end 5G chips. In addition, 14nm can basically meet the needs of the process required by China's domestic desktop CPU.
For the world's large chip manufacturers, 28nm chip technology has been very mature, and the production capacity has been some excess. At the other end, the process technology below 10nm is very cutting-edge, and the industry players are only left with TSMC, Samsung and Intel at the top of the pyramid. In the middle of the two, 14nm has clearly become the backbone, becoming the main process for the vast majority of high-end chips.
Statistics show that in the first half of 2019, the entire semiconductor sales market size is about $200 billion, of which 65% of chips use 14nm process processes, only about 10% of chips use 7nm, and about 25% use 10nm and 12nm. It can be seen that 14nm has become the most widely used and most market-valuable process process at present, and has great development potential in AI chips, high-end processors and automotive and other fields, the main applications include high-end consumer electronics, high-speed computing, low-order power amplifiers and fundamental frequency, AI, automotive and so on.
The integrated circuit industry is one of the global frontier industries with ultra-intensive capital, ultra-frequent replacement and extremely cutting-edge talents, and it is difficult to achieve high technical difficulty, high trial and error cost and difficult to troubleshoot. From the development history of integrated circuit industry in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries and regions, the latecomer countries and regions are not to catch up overnight, they need to have the determination of independent development, the perseverance of hard work, the confidence of catching up and succeeding, and more importantly, they must have strong and sustained capital, iterative and evolving technology, qualified talents, and the market of production and application linkage. Only by gathering capital, technology, talents and market forces can we achieve successful catch-up development.
With the advent of 5G and AIoT era, especially in the smart city, automatic driving, security and Internet of Things and other fields of products increasingly rich, chips are gradually focused on the optimization of special scenarios, special chips are about to usher in a "hundred flowers" species outbreak era, a wide range of AIoT scenarios will also let 14nm process chips have a huge market space.
