Domestic chip companies have given up research and development, what signal has been revealed to us?

Mondo Technology Updated on 2024-01-28

With the increasingly fierce competition between China and the United States in chips, many domestic netizens have also begun to pay attention to the relevant situation of the chip industry, and many domestic companies have invested in chip self-development.

Chips are an indispensable core in consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and computers, and many people will focus on chips, graphics cards, processors, etc. when buying mobile phones and computers, which are essentially different chips. In addition, chips are also very important in traditional fields such as medical care and home appliances, and can also be called the core of new energy vehicles, artificial intelligence and other industries.

It is not difficult to see that chips can already influence the development of many industries, and even become one of the cornerstones of modern technology. After experiencing the comprehensive supply cut off by the United States to Huawei, domestic manufacturers have realized that they must solve the problem of China's "lack of cores", and only in this way can they not continue to be "stuck" in the chip field.

The development of China's chip industry

China is the world's largest chip consumer market, and according to data released by China Customs, China spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to import chips. This not only leads to a large amount of capital outflow every year, but also leads to the slow development of the domestic chip industry.

After all, American and Western companies have a first-mover advantage, and their technical level in many fields such as chip design and chip manufacturing is ahead of China. In fact, if it is only necessary to buy, it is better to say, the most critical problem is that some advanced chips are not available to us even if we have money.

For example, the development of artificial intelligence requires a lot of training, it needs to have high computing power and high-performance AI chips as support, at present, the global artificial intelligence market generally believes that Nvidia's A100, H100 chips are among the best, many internationally renowned artificial intelligence companies are using these two chips, but under the influence of the US chip ban, Chinese manufacturers can not buy these two AI chips, can only buy performance castrated version of A800, H800 and other chips. Now, with the further expansion of the chip ban in the United States, even these two performance castrated chips can no longer be purchased.

Not to mention that most of the chips of Chinese companies included in the entity list, such as Huawei and SMIC, cannot be purchased, resulting in Huawei, the company with the most 5G patents in the world, unable to ship 5G mobile phones for a long time.

This series of events proves that if Chinese manufacturers do not master the core technology and do not realize the localization of chips, then they may be "stuck" by the United States and the West at any time.

As a result, China has included semiconductors in key development projects, taken out a lot of policy preferences and subsidies to promote the development of domestic chip companies, and set a goal of 70% chip localization by 2025.

All of a sudden, a large number of companies have poured into the chip track, but many companies are actually running for discounts and subsidies, and there is no idea of developing independent technology at all, either they are licensing technology from abroad, or they are directly buying foreign chips and reselling them back to China.

Previously, it was revealed that domestic manufacturers "OEM" after purchasing Intel's chips claimed to be independently developed, which attracted widespread attention in China.

However, there are also many domestic companies that really want to develop the chip semiconductor industry, such as Huawei, SMIC, Hua Hong Semiconductor, Shanghai Microelectronics, China Microelectronics and other Chinese semiconductor companies, which are developing very rapidly in chip design, chip foundry, and semiconductor equipment, and many companies have entered the top ten ranks in the world.

China's chip production capacity and process technology have also entered a stage of rapid development, and many remarkable achievements have been made.

Domestic chip companies have given up R&D

In general, the development of China's chip industry is very rapid, and it has continuously broken through many core technologies, and now has a lot of influence and market share in the international market. According to relevant data, from 2019 to 2022, a total of 5,700 chip companies in China have been cancelled or revoked.

What is even more unexpected is that Zheku, a chip R&D subsidiary of OPPO, a chip design company that can rank among the top ten in China, previously announced its dissolution and terminated chip R&D. You must know that Zheku's Mariana chip is the world's first chip to complete 4nm tape-out, and it is already on the verge of entering the market.

This basically means that OPPO's chip research and development is falling before the dawn after the news came out, which has also attracted widespread attention at home and abroad, and many people are curious why OPPO chose to give up chip self-development at this point in time. OPPO's public statement is that it is caused by the instability of the mobile phone market and the chip market.

Some people in the industry speculate that this may be because of some internal problems within Zheku, such as technical problems of R&D personnel, or the declaration of funds.

Postscript:

If China's chip industry wants to develop, what is needed is not a large number of enterprises pouring into it, which will only lead to the dispersion of resources and talents.

List of high-quality authors

Related Pages