Author｜Li Wenli
Editor｜Jiang Xinbai
Looking back at the global semiconductor industry in 2022, it will be the end of the waves caused by the fluttering of butterflies, and it will also be the beginning of a new round of cold weather.
We can clearly see that in 2022, when there are many challenges, the tension that once spread to all links of the industrial chain due to the “chip shortage tide” and the shortage of production capacity has gradually dissipated. But instead, as the relationship between supply and demand in the market changes, words such as saturated production capacity, falling chip prices, evaporating market value, cut orders, lowered revenue expectations, and layoffs once again come into people’s eyes.
Even the memory chip track, known as the “barometer” of the semiconductor industry, has ushered in a new round of cold waves. For example, in the second half of this year, storage market giants such as SK Hynix and Micron successively announced major cuts in capital expenditures in 2023. The time has come to tighten your belt.
But under the cold weather, we can also see a lot of exciting news in 2022, or the expansion of the business territory of mergers and acquisitions of major manufacturers, or the burst of new technologies that are constantly innovating and breaking through towards the goal of “More than Moore”. All have added a lot of color to the global semiconductor industry this year. Among them, for the Chinese semiconductor market, accelerating domestic substitution is still a constant theme.
So we turned the pointer of time and went back to the starting point of 2022. Apart from those sensitive and embarrassing events, we sorted out the top ten annual events in the semiconductor industry. Although these piles of piles will become footnotes in the history of the semiconductor industry, they may help us better understand the details, rethink the ups and downs of the industry this year, and look forward to a more distant future.
01. Nvidia officially announced the termination of the acquisition of Arm
On February 8, SoftBank Group and Nvidia officially announced that they agreed to terminate Nvidia’s agreement to acquire Arm from SoftBank because “significant regulatory challenges prevented the completion of the transaction.” According to the agreement, SoftBank will directly receive a “breakup fee” of US$1.25 billion. Meanwhile, SoftBank and Arm will be preparing to launch their IPOs by March 31, 2023. So far, this major merger and acquisition announced in 2020 has finally landed.
In response to this result, many netizens said that it was “predicted two years ago”. In fact, this merger has been opposed by giant players such as Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel. They believe that Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm will destroy the company’s independence and may raise prices, thereby limiting competitors’ use of Arm’s patents. hinder industry innovation. Not only that, regulators in the UK, US and EU have also been keeping a close eye on the deal.
Source: Pexels
For Nvidia, although the deal failed, it also received a 20-year long-term license from Arm. Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun said: “Although we cannot become a company, we will work closely together. It is expected that Arm will become the most important CPU architecture in the next decade.”
Arm was not acquired, and the company’s independence within the industry was preserved. However, for the domestic semiconductor industry, it is an inevitable trend to strengthen independent research and development to avoid the negative impact of upstream changes in the industry. The domestic semiconductor industry will invest in more independent innovative IP technology development.
02. AMD officially completed the acquisition of Xilinx
On February 14, AMD announced the completion of the acquisition of Xilinx in an all-stock transaction. According to the transaction value of the shares of both parties at the time of the transaction, the total amount of the acquisition reached 50 billion US dollars, which is currently the largest merger in the history of the global semiconductor industry.
After the acquisition, Victor Peng, CEO and president of Xilinx, will serve as president of AMD, responsible for Xilinx’s business and strategic growth planning. With the acquisition of Xilinx, the No. 1 brand of FPGA, AMD is also “recovering a city” in the competition with Intel and Nvidia, and has successfully been promoted to a “three-dwelling chip giant” integrating CPU, GPU, and FPGA layout. Prior to this, AMD’s CPU and GPU business had long been labeled as “the second in the millennium”.
Source: Pexels
According to Su Zifeng, president of AMD, Xilinx’s leading FPGA, adaptive system-on-chip, artificial intelligence engine and software expertise can bring AMD a stronger portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions, and help the company in A larger share of the foreseeable cloud computing, edge computing, and smart device market opportunities.
Compared with other general-purpose chips, FPGA is a strategic chip, and the development of FPGA is of great significance to the country’s strategy. AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx may not directly affect the start-up domestic FPGA industry. From Fudan Micro FPGA’s 28nm process to Xilinx’s 7nm process, there is still a gap in the technical capabilities of domestic FPGAs, but the progress of domestic FPGA replacement is progressing. Constant acceleration is something to look forward to.
03. Intel spent $5.4 billion to acquire Tower Semiconductor
On February 15, Intel and Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli foundry for analog semiconductor solutions, announced that Intel will acquire Tower Semiconductor for $53 per share in cash. The total value of Tower in this transaction is approximately $5.4 billion. .
Gotower Semiconductor has technical advantages in radio frequency (RF), power supply, silicon germanium (SiGe), industrial sensors, etc., and has patent layouts in image sensors, memory, CMOS and other related fields. In terms of market, Tower Semiconductor mainly serves the mobile, automotive and power markets, provides cross-regional foundry business, and can provide services for fabless companies and IDM companies, including more than 2 million primary wafers per year. Round (waferstarts) capacity.
Source: Pexels
According to Intel officials, the acquisition is intended to advance Intel’s IDM2.0 strategy to further expand its manufacturing capacity, global layout and technology portfolio to better meet industry needs. With the addition of High Tower Semiconductor, Intel will be able to gain a greater advantage in the foundry market with a market size of nearly 100 billion US dollars.
To a certain extent, Intel bears the heavy responsibility of leading the US semiconductor industry chain back to its homeland, but Intel, which does not want to lose sight of the other, obviously does not want to give up the big cake in Asia. As an Israeli foundry, Tower’s long-term overseas foundry business may be a good choice for Intel to continue to strengthen its global layout.
The industry believes that the foundation of Gaota’s business in China is also valued by Intel. The growth potential of China’s semiconductor industry has attracted domestic and foreign companies to enter the market. Intel’s comprehensive development in foundry chips with different architectures and different specifications itself means As the imbalance in the chip field is intensifying, in terms of the layout of the industrial chain, Chinese companies will have greater opportunities to achieve mergers and acquisitions. However, as the barriers to entry increase, the giants’ financial and technological advantages will seize more opportunities, and perhaps the time left for Chinese companies is relatively tight.
04. Giants have joined the Universal Chip Interconnect (UCle) Alliance
On March 3, ten industry giants including Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, TSMC, Samsung, ASE, Google Cloud, Meta, and Microsoft jointly established the Chiplet Standards Alliance and officially launched the universal Chiplet high-speed interconnection standard “Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express”. (Universal Chip Interconnect, referred to as UCle). The alliance aims to define an open, interoperable standard for the core particle ecosystem.
Previously, domestic companies such as VeriSilicon, Xinyaohui, Xinhe Semiconductor, Innosilicon, Xinyunling, Changxin Storage, Changdian, Chaomo Technology, Singularity Moore, Niuxin Semiconductor, and OPPO have successively announced to join UCIe Alliance. In early August, Alibaba and Nvidia were elected as members of the board of directors.
In the era when Moore’s Law is gradually slowing down and chip manufacturing technology is approaching the physical limit, Chiplet has been considered by the industry as an important way to continue Moore’s Law. Chiplet technology can combine complex chips of different process nodes and materials in a more flexible way to form a system chip. While greatly reducing design and production costs, it further breaks through various challenges faced by traditional SoCs.
The role of UCle is to provide a unified standard for various Chiplet processes and interfaces of different chip players, so that different Chiplet chips can be “stitched” together to better realize interconnection. At present, the UCIe Alliance is the first to uniformly use Intel’s mature PCle and CXL (Compute Express Link) Internet bus standards, namely “UCle1.0”.
The emergence of UCle will bring domestic semiconductor companies, especially start-ups, a solid technical foundation and standardized interfaces. Domestic start-ups can flexibly build chip modules on the basis of UCle, and accelerate the landing of their own design products. In the future, the domestic semiconductor industry will It is bound to achieve more breakthroughs in chip design with the support of Chiplet technology.
05. Russia “cuts off supply” of neon gas, domestic electronic gas accelerates localization
On June 10, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade announced that it will restrict the export of inert gases such as neon, krypton, and xenon before the end of 2022, and their exports must be licensed by the Russian government. After the news came out, the prices of rare gases such as neon gas, krypton gas, and xenon gas all rose sharply, and the price of high-purity neon gas rose by more than ten times. A-share specialty gas concept stocks also rose sharply.
In fact, in 2015, the semiconductor industry has already experienced a round of skyrocketing rare gases, so the industry is generally prepared for the shortage of rare gases and rising costs. Leading companies such as Intel, ASML, TSMC, and Micron all claim to have multiple sources of neon gas supply.
In contrast to the domestic market, domestic suppliers of neon gas are also growing rapidly. In the process of domestic substitution of rare gases, domestic players including Huate Gases, Nanda Optoelectronics, Kaimet Gas, Haohua Technology, and Heyuan Gases have all accelerated the new layout and expansion of special gases. This “supply cut-off” crisis of rare gases may also be an important opportunity for the domestic semiconductor supply chain to accelerate domestic autonomy and improve and enhance the security of the supply chain.
06. AMD releases the world’s first Chiplet gaming GPU
On November 4, AMD launched a new generation of flagship GPU RX 7000 series, including RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, using the RDNA 3 architecture. Among them, the RDNA 3 architecture adopts Chiplets (small chip) design, which can increase the performance per watt by 54% compared with the previous generation, and has a built-in AI acceleration unit, which improves the performance by 2.7 times.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said that RDNA3 is the world’s first “Chiplet” gaming GPU. Chiplet technology can increase production capacity and yield at the same time by reducing the area of a single computing chip, thereby reducing the cost of silicon wafers.
Source: AMD
With the slowdown of Moore’s Law, Chiplet, a technology that combines the advantages of design flexibility, low cost and fast process, is being favored by the industry. AMD’s application this time is equivalent to verifying the feasibility of this technology in the popular consumer electronics field of games. With the launch of the GPU RX 7000 series, Chiplet technology is expected to be applied in more consumer electronics fields.
The launch of the first chiplet product is an effective reference example for the research and development of domestic chiplet chips. Based on the huge potential of chiplets in high computing power fields such as GPU and FPGA, domestic IP suppliers with chip design capabilities will usher in a bright moment.
07. BYD Semiconductor terminated its IPO
On the evening of November 15, BYD announced the termination of the split listing of its holding subsidiary BYD Semiconductor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “BYD Semiconductor”). The main task is to increase production capacity, and the spin-off and listing work will be started at an appropriate time in the future. This is the fourth time that BYD has terminated the IPO of a semiconductor company.
As a subsidiary of BYD Incubation, the investors behind BYD Semiconductor can be described as luxurious. In May 2020, the company’s A round of financing attracted investors including Sequoia China, CICC Capital, SDIC Innovation, and Himalaya Capital. The current round of financing reached 1.9 billion yuan. In June of the same year, BYD Semiconductor completed the A+ round of financing and won another 800 million yuan in financing. The investors included dozens of investment institutions such as Xiaomi Group, CMB International, Lenovo Group, and SMIC. The post-investment valuation has exceeded tens of billions.
Source: BYD Semiconductor official website
The termination of BYD Semiconductor’s listing this time revealed at least two pieces of information. First, BYD Semiconductor is not short of money, and sufficient cash flow is sufficient to support the expansion of BYD Semiconductor’s wafer fab; second, there is sufficient demand in the market, and slow One step and you will miss the market opportunity.
Perhaps for other semiconductor companies, the listing is to raise money and expand production; but for BYD, sorry, the listing has delayed its making money.
The twists and turns of the listing of Yadi Semiconductor also highlighted the growth trend of the domestic new energy automobile industry. With the increase in demand, China’s automotive semiconductor manufacturers are continuing to expand production, enhancing the production capacity and supply capacity of automotive-grade semiconductors and independent controllability The ability will be the focus of the development of the domestic automotive electronics industry.
08. Apple’s M1 chip design director resigned and returned to Intel to be responsible for all client SoCs
On January 7, Jeff Wilcox (Jeff Wilcox), chief designer of Apple Apple Silicon, T2 security processor, and M1 chip design director, announced that he had left Apple and rejoined Intel to be responsible for all Intel SoC architecture designs.
Intel used to be an important supplier of Apple. Wilcox served as the main component architect at Intel for nearly 10 years in the 1990s, and served as Intel’s chief engineer again from 2010 to 2013. During this period, he developed SoC and system architecture for T2 coprocessor for Apple Mac.
Today, Wilcox will return to his old club. Given that Intel’s transition to SoC architecture is very close to ARM’s Big.Little architecture, hiring Wilcox means that Intel is more actively promoting technological transformation.
For Apple, the benefits brought by its own chips have verified the success of this strategy, and when Apple launched the M1 chip in 2020, Apple stated that it would complete the migration of its Mac series products within two years. The departure of talent at critical moments may have a significant impact on the subsequent development of this transformation.
Source: Apple’s official website
Self-developed chips are becoming an important trend in the second half of consumer electronics competition. Following last year’s release of the self-developed NPU chip for the field of “computing imaging” – Mariana MariSilicon X, OPPO released the self-developed Bluetooth audio chip Mariana this year. MariSilicon Y. This year, vivo fully upgraded the imaging chip V2 to help mobile phones break through the constraints of computing power. And Xiaomi has also applied a brand-new imaging chip The Paper C1, the battery management chip The Paper G1 and the charging chip The Paper P1 this year.
Apple has left the chip director, but it will not stop the road of self-developed chips. For domestic mobile phone manufacturers, whether it is the “jigsaw” self-research road of Xiaomi and OPPO, or vivo’s vertical development aimed at image deep cultivation This is just the beginning of the road of self-development of domestic mobile phone chips. Mobile phone brands such as Red Devils and OnePlus are also entering this route. The strength of self-development of domestic mobile phone chips is improving. To meet the technology merger and acquisition needs of large factories to build self-developed ecology.
09. “Godfather of China’s Semiconductor Industry” Zhang Rujing joined Jita Semiconductor
On May 17, Zhang Rujing took up his new post again, resigned from Qingdao Xinen Semiconductor, and joined Shanghai Jita Semiconductor as an executive director. As a pioneer in China’s semiconductor industry, Zhang Rujing successively founded three companies: SMIC, Xinsheng Semiconductor, and Xinen Semiconductor. It is the first 300nm large silicon wafer company in China and the first semiconductor company in CIDM mode.
Founded in 2017, Jita Semiconductor is one of the earliest domestic manufacturers engaged in automotive electronic chips and IGBT chips. Its BCD, IGBT/FRD, SGT/MOSFET, TVS, SiC devices and other chips have been widely used in automotive electronics , industrial control, power management, intelligent terminal, rail transit, smart grid and other fields.
Some people in the industry believe that Jita Semiconductor has a bigger plate than Xinen Semiconductor. Looking at Zhang Rujing’s three entrepreneurships, it has undoubtedly accelerated the breakthrough and rapid development of China’s semiconductor localization. Faced with the current situation of lack of cores in domestic automobiles, Zhang Rujing chose to join Jita, which also makes people expect that he will make greater contributions in the field of automotive electronics. For automotive semiconductor start-ups, the emergence of industry benchmarks not only enhances their confidence in entering the market, but also injects vitality into the integration and improvement of the automotive semiconductor industry chain. Start-ups may benefit from this in terms of technological development and business expansion.
10. Jiang Shangyi joined Foxconn
On November 22, Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai Technology Group, announced that Jiang Shangyi will serve as the newly established position of semiconductor strategy officer and report directly to Liu Yangwei, chairman and CEO of Foxconn.
As the core figure who promoted TSMC to develop into the world’s largest chip foundry manufacturer, Jiang Shangyi has always been regarded as one of the important technology promoters for Taiwan’s semiconductors from the micron era to the nanometer era. After leaving TSMC, he has experienced a lot of ups and downs in the domestic semiconductor industry, but he still insists on promoting the progress and development of the domestic semiconductor industry.
For Foxconn, the harvest of “Jiang Dad” shows its ambition not to be only an OEM. Previously, Foxconn has been expanding into new areas, including the electric vehicle manufacturing industry and the semiconductor industry. In the field of chips, Foxconn’s layout includes chip equipment, design, manufacturing, packaging and testing and other links.
Foxconn’s frequent investment in mainland China may have promoted the development of the mainland’s semiconductor industry to a certain extent, but the semiconductor chain currently built by Foxconn has already taken shape, and the full link capability from upstream to downstream will also form a relatively large impact on other domestic semiconductor manufacturers. competitive pressure.
Source: Foxconn official website
This year, the mergers and acquisitions of semiconductor giants have attracted countless eyeballs. As an effective means of semiconductor industry integration, giants are accelerating expansion and consolidating their business territory through mergers and acquisitions, trying to enrich more puzzles beyond the original business, so as to better play their core competition in the cold wave of the market cycle. force.
But for domestic semiconductor players, foreign giants are accelerating the pace of mergers and acquisitions, and to a certain extent, they are also constantly raising the barriers that domestic players need to overcome, including technology, market and ecological barriers. In other words, what giants swallow is not just a company, some technologies, some market segments, but even potential opportunities for domestic players. The giant camp is also accelerating the change of position, trying to seize the high ground “C position”. For some enterprises, it will be more difficult to survive in the cracks.
On the other hand, in the process of developing new technologies such as Chiplet, players have deeply realized that the development potential of self-involved ecology is limited, and they can no longer fall into the logic of “domestic instead of domestic” as before. Be more open and inclusive. From this, we can also clearly see that domestic and foreign giants are more active in forming alliances than before, and give priority to formulating game standards and rules while “holding together”. Prioritize making the cake bigger, and then compete for your own cake, so that the entire new technology and new market competition will be more benign and sustainable.
A crisis can destroy a company, but it can also create a new giant. We turned our attention back to the domestic market. In the face of the increasingly complex international environment, domestic players who have experienced supply chain besieged many times have learned to better predict the negative impact of supply chain changes, and to do so in advance. Be prepared to leave a way for yourself in multiple supply chain links. This is not only the key to the formation of anti-risk capabilities in the domestic semiconductor industry, but also an important opportunity to promote the localization of the entire semiconductor chain.
The competition of semiconductors is not only the competition of technology, but also the competition of talents. For an enterprise, having a core industry talent will undoubtedly give them the confidence to fight through the fierce market competition. It can be said that the changes in the core figures of semiconductors will to a certain extent foreshadow the changes in the future market players, especially in the current fields of automotive electronics, CPU and analog chips.
We may be able to see that in today’s dark and turbulent semiconductor cold wave cycle, the effect of positive changes is more obvious and the impact is more profound. In this special period, how to hold the position and fight the last battle before dawn and hold the ticket to the next window period requires not only an indomitable heart, but also calm thinking and energy storage Sharp, so that we can better seize our own stage in the future market.
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