Chao News client reporter Liu Jian correspondent Wang Yiyang.
The Yangtze River Delta is one of the regions with the most active economic development, the highest degree of openness and the strongest innovation ability in China, with 4% of the country's land area, creating nearly a quarter of the country's total economic output.
This year marks the 5th anniversary of the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta as a national strategy.
** At the symposium on in-depth promotion of the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, the general secretary emphasized that the Yangtze River Delta region should strengthen cross-regional coordination of scientific and technological innovation and industrial innovation, vigorously promote scientific and technological innovation, and strengthen the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation and industrial innovation.
Chips are an important area of collaborative innovation in the Yangtze River Delta, and what new trends does it present?What role will Zhejiang play?
Recently, in Qiantang, Zhejiang Manufacturing Region, several summit forums focusing on the integrated circuit industry have been held. Through these summit forums, we have seen the latest trend of the "core" track in the Yangtze River Delta.
Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai have a new trend in the chip industry.
Chips are the core of electronic products and the foundation of cutting-edge applications such as artificial intelligence, 6G, and the Internet of Things. Last year, the global semiconductor market exceeded $570 billion, and China was the largest consumer of chips.
Throughout the chip industry chain, design, manufacturing, packaging and testing are the three core links. In recent years, with the vigorous development of smart phones, China's chip design level has made the fastest progress, and in this field, Huawei HiSilicon once ranked among the top in the world.
Compared with design, chip manufacturing is a shortcoming, and the limitations of key materials and equipment, the lack of advanced processes, and the insufficient output of mature processes are the main problems encountered at present. The high-profile lithography machine is one of the representatives of key equipment. Represented by SMIC, Shanghai Microelectronics and other enterprises, Shanghai stands on the front line of making up for shortcomings.
The advanced manufacturing process determines the performance of a chip, and what advanced packaging and testing needs to do is to combine multiple chips together to achieve the effect of "1+1>2". In this link, the gap between China and the world's advanced level is the smallest, which makes up for the backwardness of advanced manufacturing processes to a certain extent. For example, JCET, which came to Qiantang to participate in the conference, has become the world's leading chip packaging and testing company.
These three links have their own technical barriers, and even the United States, the birthplace of the integrated circuit industry, cannot complete chip production independently. Previously, the United States once focused on the design field with higher profit margins, but in recent years, it has "changed its mind" and vigorously introduced TSMC factories to enhance chip manufacturing capacity and enhance the resilience of the industrial chain.
It can be seen that having a complete industrial chain is the unanimous dream of many countries. What is the development level of the chip industry chain in the Yangtze River Delta?Data show that last year, the Yangtze River Delta integrated circuit industry accounted for 60% of the country's scale, around the core of Shanghai, Zhejiang also took advantage of the trend to drive on the "fast lane".
In this industry with complex processes and clear division of labor, finding the right positioning is the key. Observing the enterprises participating in these forums in Qiantang, it is not difficult to find that the innovation ecology of the integrated circuit industry in the Yangtze River Delta, which is "looking at Shanghai for manufacturing, Jiangsu for packaging and testing, and Zhejiang for characteristics", is accelerating its formation.
According to the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Integrated Circuit Industry in Zhejiang Province", Zhejiang will build an "industrial cluster with international influence led by high-end chip design and characteristic process wafer manufacturing".
Last year, the sales of integrated circuit industry in Zhejiang Province exceeded 200 billion yuan, of which materials and design accounted for the "majority", accounting for 41 percent of sales40% vs. 3033%。
Experts at the meeting said frankly that China's independent industrial chain of integrated circuits is taking shape, and some local innovations in the Yangtze River Delta have become increasingly mature, and there is still a long way to go to benchmark the international advanced level.
All localities are actively solving problems. At the seminar on the integrated circuit industry in Qiantang District, Xu Jin, deputy mayor of Qiantang District, positioned that the "Qiantang Core" will focus on the development of the three cores of chip design, semiconductor equipment and semiconductor materials, enhance the development of characteristic wafer manufacturing and advanced packaging and testing, and aim at the "deep water area" of innovation.
Focusing on this direction, the Qiantang Xingu Industrial Platform has gathered 112 upstream and downstream enterprises of integrated circuits since its establishment three years ago.
"Hangzhou Chip" from design to manufacturing.
Hangzhou, which is moving towards the "first city of digital economy", is considered to be a "soft, hard, hard and weak" partial student, which is vividly reflected in the field of chips, and the design occupies the absolute "C position".
According to the report of Zhejiang Semiconductor Industry Association, 99% of the design enterprises in the province are distributed in the Hangzhou Bay region represented by Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo and Jiaxing, of which more than 85% of the design enterprises and more than 95% of the design business income are concentrated in Hangzhou.
Hangzhou C*Chip, one of the earliest chip design companies in China, will have the world's largest market share of digital TV set-top box chips in 2021.
Under the leadership of these veteran chip design companies, three-quarters of the chip companies in Hangzhou are in the field of design. Since the beginning of this year, Hangzhou's integrated circuit design sales have reached 619500 million yuan, ranking fourth in the country, second only to Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen.
In the journey of the Yangtze River Delta to advance integrated circuits, not only design, but also chip manufacturing as a new breakthrough.
In Qiantang, in 2001, Hangzhou Silanwei established its own chip manufacturing base in Xiasha at that time, which was the first chip manufacturing production line invested and built by private capital in China. Today, in the field of integrated circuit manufacturing, the proportion of Qiantang has accounted for 25 of the province1%。
Among them, the "big silicon wafer", an important material for chips, is a golden business card of Qiantang. Unicorn enterprise Zhongxin Wafer has two mature 12-inch large silicon wafer production lines, the company's deputy general manager Sun Shunhua introduced, the larger the size of the silicon wafer, the higher the production efficiency, 12-inch large silicon wafers are currently the mainstream choice of advanced chips, Zhongxin Wafer's two 12-inch production lines with an annual output of up to 2.4 million pieces.
Why can chip manufacturing develop in Qiantang?A strong industrial heritage is one of the important reasons. Take raw materials as an example, many people jokingly say that "chips are made of sand", but from the "sand" to refine the silicon element, to the purity of 9999% monocrystalline silicon, a strong chemical foundation is essential. It just so happens that in the eastern part of Qiantang, there is a state-level high-tech zone - Linjiang Hi-Tech Park.
In addition, retaining talent is also crucial for the chip industry. Data show that there is still a talent gap of 300,000 in China's integrated circuit industry. In this regard, Qiantang District has also specially formulated the "Integrated Circuit Industry Talent Evaluation Policy" to allow enterprises to identify independent talents.
Recently, many employees of Zhongxin Wafer have applied for talent co-ownership housing according to this policy, and the down payment ratio can be as low as 9%.
"Design to drive manufacturing", is the "Hangzhou integrated circuit industry development plan" to break the problem-breaking path, take off the "partial" hat, Qiantang has a foundation, more mission.
The future of "China Chip" is in.
In the view of Gao Dawei, director of the Institute of Advanced Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Technology of Zhejiang University, the combination of artificial intelligence is the future of China's chip industry.
Among the chips with various functions, there are a number of AI "professional households". For example, when training large AI models such as ChatGPT, NVIDIA's GPU is the industry's first choice. In the second quarter of this year, in the explosion of AI chips, Nvidia won more than $11 billion in chip design revenue, an increase of 68% over the first quarter, replacing Qualcomm as the "boss" of the global chip design industry.
It is said that human beings have entered the era of artificial intelligence, and chips are actually the same. Advanced chips can bring powerful computing power to support the development of AI, and in turn, AI can feed back chip production.
At the Intelligent Perception High-Quality Development Conference held in Qiantang, Gao Dawei introduced a new study in Nature - using artificial intelligence large models to help engineers develop chip etching processes.
The results show that in order to achieve the etching goal, junior engineers need to perform 190 experiments, senior engineers need to conduct 105 experiments, and the combination of senior engineers + AI only takes 52 experiments. "Half the time also means half the cost. With the help of AI, the era of relying only on the experience of the master may be gone forever. Gao Dawei said.
Making good use of AI is a good opportunity to narrow the gap between China's "chip" and the international advanced level. At the conference, many companies shared their explorations. Zheng Yongjun, chairman of Hangzhou Guangli Microelectronics Co., Ltd., introduced that they use AI to detect whether the wafer is qualified, which can achieve an accuracy rate of 98%, not only that, but AI can further analyze the reasons for the failure of the wafer, and even find out which equipment is wrong.
In addition, colleges and universities in the Yangtze River Delta are also making efforts. The Institute of Advanced Integrated Circuit Manufacturing Technology of Zhejiang University presented their virtual manufacturing blueprint, proposing to achieve digital first in the whole process of "process-design-trial production". Gao Dawei said that their short-term goal is to save 20 percent of time and costs, and in his opinion, this figure has the opportunity to reach 50 percent in the future.
Of course, AI is not omnipotent, a healthy ecology is the source of the chip industry, not only to strengthen the division of labor and integration of enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta region, but also to actively carry out international cooperation in technology, talent, capital and other aspects.
On October 17, local time, the U.S. Department of Commerce upgraded the export ban on AI chips to China. Interestingly, just a day after the ban was issued, ASML released its latest financial report: 46% of the 6.7 billion euros in sales in the third quarter of 2023 came from Chinese mainland. It is not difficult to understand that the attitude of the global chip giants is completely different from that of the United States.
At the recent CIIE, global chip giants such as Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and ASML were unveiled, and many companies mentioned the opportunities in the Chinese market, especially the growth space of new energy vehicles. Two months after the ban on AI chips, the U.S. rhetoric changed again, with Commerce Secretary Raimondo saying it would allow Nvidia to give China a limited amount of AI chips.
Obviously, the global semiconductor integrated circuit industry has always been growing in a cyclical state, and China's chip development is long and difficult, and it is believed that with the construction of a new pattern of integrated development of the integrated circuit industry in the Yangtze River Delta, it is also full of hope and opportunities.
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