Local IC Design Sustainable Development

After a decade of rapid development, China's IC design industry has become an important pillar in the IC industry. But at present, some design companies have also encountered bottlenecks that are difficult to break through. For example, some companies were once all-embracing, but they gradually returned to normal. The reason is that these companies can only focus on one or two products but can not continue to expand their product range; there are some companies lack the original chip, biased plagiarism, so only had Pursue price competition in sales. What are the causes of these phenomena?

The power of capital and ideas Much Kang Kang, a senior expert in the semiconductor industry, believes that the reasons why the Chinese design industry is currently failing are complex and complicated. The success of foreign design industry, from the beginning of the mechanism is mainly based on VC (risk investment), after the company's sale or listing mechanism to profit. This is very important. There are benefits to attract large numbers of people to fight. China's stock market has many non-market factors and stipulates that a listed company cannot have many people holding shares, so it is fundamentally not easy to attract a large number of outstanding talents.

In addition, although many people in China Design Corporation are also “sea returnees”, the soil in China may not be acceptable. Because it is easy to get projects/funds from the government, some designers are impetuous, and they spend their energy trying to get relationships and projects.

Constrained by China's traditional cultural concepts, "it would rather be a chicken head than a phoenix tail", resulting in the company being a bit bigger and internal divisions. Therefore, there is some resistance for the company to become bigger and stronger.

Therefore, China's IC design industry must not only develop rapidly, but also be practical. Progress must move forward step by step, step by step.

At the same time, this industry requires a large number of outstanding people. In the long run, China’s education system must also be reformed, not only focusing on knowledge, but also encouraging innovation and cultivating correct values ​​of life.

Achievable strategies and technology accumulation "An important condition for maintaining sustainable development is to be able to formulate operational, sustainable market technology roadmaps, such as Intel's Tick-Tock roadmap." National IC Design Shenzhen Industrialization Base Zhou Shengming, director of Shenzhen Integrated Circuit Design and Industrialization Base Management Center, said, “Some companies do not have a clear development path that includes technology and markets. This is the issue of business philosophy; while some companies can formulate clear and complete development routes, but Due to the lack of technical strength, the problem of technology accumulation is involved, which is also one of the most important problems that local IC companies are facing at present. Companies need to be invincible in fierce market competition. First of all, we must be able to clearly grasp the context of market and technological development, formulate a scientific development line that suits our company, and correct it in a timely manner. We must always proceed along the correct path."

The current status of China's IC industry is called "three threes": it consumes about one-third of the world's ICs, domestic ICs only account for 3%, and proprietary intellectual property ICs only account for 0.3%. It can be seen that we are very lacking in core technology. The focus on technology accumulation is a key to business success. Without the backing of strong technical strength, any technology company is not qualified to talk about survival and development.

Focusing on the industrial chain cooperation, as far as domestic MCUs were concerned, as early as 1995, Xu Juyan, the academician under the leadership of the domestic MCU research and development team led the task of the ninth five-year research mission. At that time, the goal was to do 10 million pieces, and the untold hardships were finally completed. Why is the Chinese-made SCM so difficult?” Professor Fudan Zhang of Fudan University talked about the development of China’s SCM [1]. “The area covered by our IT (information technology) community has more closed features: self-design and production. , own production, but also to their own development, to apply their own, to sell their own, how can such a model survive? Domestic CPU or IC, be sure manufacturers are manufacturers, must have a large number of Tripartite Designers cannot have a large number of products without this Designer. If the IC does not follow this path, it is this kind of ecological environment, which is difficult to sustainably develop."

There seems to be a paradox here. Professor Wang Longjiang, a professor at Hebei University and a chief engineer at Beijing Lanyang Technology Development Co., Ltd., believes that companies in the future must develop from chips to systems and complete machines. The idea can be successful. Because the ultimate electronic product (application) is king, it is the key to the success of the chip company. For example, Apple Inc. of the United States is now doing its own CPU, operating system and complete machine. Jobs began to do only the whole machine and system software. After the success, it was found that there was no core chip that couldn't be the boss, so he gave up only the whole machine and system software, developed upstream, and designed his own core chip. Therefore, great success has been achieved. In China's chip companies, there is such a phenomenon, "The characteristics of the people are still only one side of their own, do not understand the system software to do the chip, do not understand the chip system software. Software and hardware are separate. This is not enough, Because the chip is worthless now, only the entire system and application will have market value," said Wang Longjiang.

The author understands that people who make chips must have the concept of the entire industry chain. However, in China, assuming that all chip companies cross the border [2] and establish a long industrial chain on their own, it does not seem to be realistic, and therefore it needs to rely on partners and external ecological chains. For some powerful machine companies, extending the chip upstream from the whole machine is a way to differentiate the whole machine.

Homogenization is not a necessary path to differentiation Shenzhen CHOW Ming-hsin analyzed the reasons for homogenization: Differentiated competition is usually done with things that others have not done. This involves an innovative problem, and innovation requires deep technology. Accumulation as a basis. China's semiconductor industry started relatively late, and there is a big gap between enterprises on the basis of technology and foreign advanced countries, and it is very lacking in innovation capability. Therefore, for the sake of reducing technical risks, many companies choose some technology products with higher market maturity for R&D, which leads to the problem of product homogenization.

However, homogeneity is not necessarily the only path to differentiation. The key lies in the innovation ability of enterprises and society. If we do not increase scientific research investment and actively innovate, it will be difficult to get rid of homogenized low-level competition. Only through active innovation and pioneering ideas can we achieve product differentiation and be in a favorable position in competition.

Han Xiaomei, director of market science and technology, also thinks: “Differentiation is one of the ways to obtain higher profits. Everyone wants to make differentiated products. However, differentiation is not an overnight process. It is a spirit of accumulation and innovation. Has been working in the mobile phone industry for many years, Apple wants to enter the field how to do? Only rely on the use of touch screen mobile phones to attract attention. "Shangqi Technology announced in August that the acquisition of the Motorola Hangzhou chip design department, one of the reasons is to provide more Comprehensive set-top box solution.

Building a Technology Platform Pan Song, deputy general manager of Shanghai Haier IC Co., believes that technological innovation is very important in innovation, but compared with it, demand innovation is more important.

At the technical level, why do some companies only have to focus on one or two products and cannot expand the product range? It is because the system engineering platform is not well established and the core competitiveness is still missing. Because most Chinese companies rely on returnees and rely on engineers to produce a few products, they do not have a platform. This is very troublesome. Therefore, there is no potential for development.

The system platform includes personnel training or technical continuation and accumulation, as well as the expansion of the entire product. Innovation and system engineering have not been established and problems will arise. "Comparatively, the strength of R&D of Shanghai Haier IC Co., Ltd. should still be relatively strong, because 90% of its employees are R&D engineers. The R&D investment of the company is probably several million US dollars per year," said Pan Song.

The system engineering platform includes several aspects: first, where to locate, and who is the target customer; second, how to define the product, how to achieve rapid market, whether the technology research and development platform can achieve rapid product listing; again, supply chain delivery guarantee; , Reliability Management System.

The exploration of application innovation Zhao Yuanfu, general manager of the 772th Institute of the Ninth Institute of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and general manager of Beijing Times Minxin Technology Co., Ltd., discussed its application of CPU. Zhao Yuanfu analyzed that any CPU or R&D team of 5 to 10 people can work for a year or a half or up to two years, and he can definitely come up with a CPU. However, whether the CPU can be used is another matter. Therefore, after the domestic CPU is developed, we must pay attention to whether we can get a series of applications - although some applications are still not very large, may still be in the bud, but it does not matter, because only rely on applications can really make domestic CPU mature.

The practice of Times Citizen's core is: First, the dual-line development and gradual integration of military CPUs and civilian CPUs is determined. The direction of civilian use is market-oriented and based on industry. The successful development of the CPU may only complete one-fifth or even one-tenth the amount of work. If the CPU really wants to use it, its software workload is enormous and must be integrated with the system software, software analysis tools, and application software. In order to truly establish the CPU's ecological environment. "This is also the biggest problem encountered in the promotion and application process of China's CPU." Nowadays, Timecore has applied SPARC and ARM core chips to satellite navigation and multimedia processing, using 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs (microcontrollers, micro Controller) to do medical electronics and instrumentation control. In addition, Times Mind tries to do an electronic design contest to promote its CPU.

“The domestic CPU and the name of independent innovation are very nice and inspiring, but now we can see that many of China’s ICs are imitations of foreign countries because the biggest advantage of imitation is that people in the market have already finished the process for you. At present, China’s IC design company There is not so much power to spread the market, so in the end how can we promote domestic independent innovation CPU and even some corresponding products, is still a very worthwhile issue to explore.”

The era of people's core is located in some of the more special industries, this kind of special industry application software is not the same as the current general-purpose CPU as anyone is doing application software. Just as Suzhou Core Technology Co., Ltd.'s C*Core has sold more than 50 million [3] for information security, digital TV/set-top box and mobile storage, it has almost no software redevelopment.

Long-term investment + do our best Dr. Li Liyou, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Spreadtrum Communications (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. summarizes the experience of exhibition news in three points [5]: First, long-term investment. “The problem with doing business in mainland China, especially high-tech companies, is that the society is too eager for quick success. It took two years to do 40nm design and invest tens of millions of dollars. Not many high-tech companies in mainland China are willing or able to Do it."

The second point is the close cooperation between the upstream and downstream industries. Such a defined product is suitable for market demand.

Third, try to make your own things the best in the world. Spreadtrum made the world’s first 40nm TD-SCDMA chip in January this year, and disclosed that all products from ultra-low-end, low-end, high-end, feature machine to smart machine, WCDMA, and LTE will all be 40nm single chips. "Around the summer of next year, Spreadtrum's products will surpass their rivals from 2.5G to LTE, and no one will fall behind."