From the “Four Party Alliance of Chips”, which seeks to control chip production capacity and raw material supply in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, China to restrict the rapid development of semiconductor chips in Chinese Mainland, to the 2022 Chip and Science Act, which involves more than 280 billion dollars and attempts to use “barrier clauses” to force global semiconductors to “de sinicize”, After realizing that the rise of China’s semiconductor industry is shaking the leading position of the existing semiconductor industry giants in Europe and the United States, the Western politicians led by Biden began to spare no effort to crack down on China’s semiconductor industry after considering the new regulations of the United States Department of Commerce on export control, which is regarded as the “strongest semiconductor technology control”, and the recent new agreement on restricting the export of chip technology to China reached by the United States, Japan and the Netherlands. But are they really likely to succeed?
It is said that “customers are the God”. In the current semiconductor industry chain, China is the well-deserved “God” – as a global electronics manufacturing center that manufactures more than 80% of mobile phones, more than 90% of laptops, more than 80% of televisions, handheld game consoles, and about 40% of automobiles, it can basically be called “the destination of chips”: according to the data of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (WSTS), In 2022, the global integrated circuit market size will be about $600 billion, while China will import 538.4 billion integrated circuits in 2022 with a self-sufficiency rate of nearly 30%, with a value of up to $415.6 billion. In combination, almost all chips will eventually complete the conversion from chips to products on the land of China. That is why, in 2022, after the United States increases its restrictions on chips to China, China’s chip imports fell by 14.4%, but this only 14.4% nearly destroyed the entire semiconductor industry chain in Europe and the United States. The earnings of Intel, the chip giant, fell by 28% year-on-year in the fourth quarter, and the net profit of AMD in the fourth quarter fell by 98% year-on-year. All the equipment and materials from the IC factory, the packaging factory, the wafer factory to the upstream were subjected to the indiscriminate attack of the “chip cold wave”. It is really necessary to implement the chip ban thoroughly, I’m afraid we can’t wait for China to run out of chips. The current group of chip giants will end up in bankruptcy and liquidation one by one.
What’s more, if we want to break through the limitation of chips in the United States, we can only passively wait for them to “commit suicide”. In the past ten years, we have completed the journey of 60 years in the West. Although we have just reached the level of Intel in 2014, we still have 9 years of “long time” to catch up, but in fact, China has already completed the “curve overtaking” of chip technology, even more than once: by the end of 2022, Yin Huaxiang, Wu Zhenhua, the research team of the Integrated Circuit Pilot Technology Research and Development Center of the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Zhou Peng, Researcher Bao Wenzhong and Researcher Wan Jing of the School of Information Science and Engineering of Fudan University have successively made breakthroughs in CFET technology through different directions. This technology enables us to plug multilayer transistors on the same chip, making the chip performance directly“ × 2”； On January 5, 2023, Changdian Technology, an old domestic semiconductor enterprise, announced its XDFOI ™ Chiplet high-density multi-dimensional heterogeneous integration series process has entered the stable mass production stage as planned, and has realized the shipment of 4nm node multi-chip system integrated packaging products. This technology is that we can divide a large integrated chip into different modules, build them separately, and then splice the small chips like building blocks, finally achieving the same effect as the large chips, greatly reducing the difficulty of chip breakthrough; In 2022, the Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in breaking through the technical barriers of 3nm photonic chips. The first domestic multi-material and cross-size photonic chip production line has also completed the preparation work on the eve of the 2023 Lunar New Year, and is expected to be put into mass production this year. It can be said that with the self-developed “nondestructive probe electrical measurement platform”, we have completed the breakthrough of the blockade of “lithography machine”, and the just released As early as January 2022, the first fully independently developed quantum chip in China, which has been put into production, has brought China’s semiconductor industry to the level of “science fiction”. The remarkable quantum computer 550 series in “Wandering Earth 2” and the self-conscious artificial intelligence MOSS after iteration are no longer unrealistic scientific fantasies
Last August, President Biden of the United States formally signed the Chip and Science Act to support the development of the semiconductor manufacturing industry in the United States while fully limiting the rising Chinese semiconductor industry. Now, it is also drawing on the intention of Japan and the Netherlands to form a comprehensive containment of China’s semiconductor industry. The “neck” of the domestic chip industry is getting tighter and tighter. Some people shout that the domestic chip is dead, and some people pessimistically think that the cold winter of China’s semiconductor industry has arrived. But even though the cold wind is cold, there are still indomitable innovators who have perseverance and perseverance to keep on going on this most difficult road.
The sword has been sharpened, and the plum blossom has come from bitter cold. At the moment, the western semiconductor industry giants are still shivering in the “chip cold wave”, but China has ushered in a comprehensive breakthrough from CFET technology, chiplet technology to carbon-based chips, photonic chips, and quantum chips. I believe that we can win, and I believe that we will win!
