Analog IC: If the process can not keep up with the pace of follow-up situation will gradually decline

With the recent analog IC designer Linear Technology's claim to achieve a profit margin of more than 75%, surpassing Apple and Microsoft, known as the "most profitable company," the industry's attention to analog ICs has once again increased. Although China's analog IC industry has made great progress in recent years, the gap between the overall level and foreign countries is still large.

In today's era of high-cost integrated circuits, there is not enough space for scale and gross margin, which means that companies' reinvestment capacity is insufficient. "China's analog IC started late and is still in the stage of following and imitating." Xing Qingle, marketing engineer of China Resources Shanghua Technology Co., Ltd. said in an interview with Huaqiang Electronics. Linear Technology has made great efforts in the areas of markets, products, customers, and teams. It has achieved today's high profits and achieved sustainable development for 30 consecutive years.

From the perspective of improving design capabilities, the progress of the design industry in recent years is not obvious. It is still time for breakthroughs in the mainstream product lineup to increase product definition capabilities. The situation in the manufacturing industry is different. Compared with foreign countries, there have been some stagnation in the past two years. The main performance is that the pace of technological progress is not fast. At present, it has only progressed to 40nm. The gap with foreign countries has been different from the original one by 1.5 generations and expanded to 2 generations.

On the one hand, with the shrinking of the feature size of the process, most large IDM manufacturers will gradually withdraw from this field, adopting the development of non-manufactured semiconductor enterprise models, and releasing massive demand for foundry; on the other hand, the cost of new production lines will increase substantially. The huge investment cost and the shortage of foundry production capacity will gradually increase. Because as the process goes to 20nm, first, the types of IC products will be reduced, platform products will increasingly play a leading role, and the bulk of products will not be available. The survival of the industry will meet challenges. Second, the design costs will increase dramatically. Large-scale design The company will migrate its products to foundries that are willing to cut prices, thereby further reducing the development space of non-mainstream foundries.

Over the past 10 years, China's design companies have relied more on process and EDA tools to achieve the progress of their products. The process nodes used are far ahead of the performance requirements of the developed chips. Some companies that once had a glorious past, due to lack of basic capabilities, leading to a decline in product core competitiveness, corporate profits have also declined.

In the past two years, South Korea’s Samsung and the US’s GlobalFoundries have all tried to expand their production. The annual investment has continued to rise. On the other hand, if Chinese companies fail to keep up with the pace of technological advancement, subsequent situations will gradually decline.