Ten years of trees, behind the prosperity of China's semiconductor industry chain

“Ten Years of Trees”, since the State Council released the No. 18 document in 2000, China’s semiconductor industry has established a large tree that supports the foundation of China’s electronics industry. The plan to double the output value of integrated circuits in the 11th Five-Year Plan has been completed ahead of schedule. The plan is expected to double again, and this is based on the growing integrity and maturity of the entire semiconductor industry chain in mainland China. This has also created a number of listed companies and brought about the prosperity of chip design companies. Describe the overall development of the industry as a whole and unveil the secret behind the prosperity of the chip industry.

EDA manufacturers continue to innovate to meet demand The fierce competition between chip companies actually promotes their demand for EDA products. Without the help of the latter, it is difficult for chip design companies to gain market competitiveness. Lin Rongjian, vice president of sales for Asia-Pacific at SpringSoft, believes: "For the reuse of design, and the use of third-party IP, the introduction of more advanced design concepts and methodologies has been more positive than ever before, especially for verification teams and their verification methods. More attention has been given.” Because of the widespread use of reuse and IP, chip design work is more integrated, and system verification is becoming more important because of the wide range of different functional modules. On the other hand, due to the increase in the scale of design and the increase in the degree of integration, the difficulty and challenge of verification have also increased. Therefore, most mainstream chip design companies already use advanced verification methods such as System Verilog Testbench and UVM/VMM. At the same time, more verification teams are independent of the design team and even exceed the design team size. The work of the entire IC team has been divided into: core IP design and verification, system integration, and system verification.

Correspondingly, the EDA tool for each design link will fully consider the impact on the core competitiveness, and also have higher requirements for the EDA vendor's service and technical support. For example, many design companies had previously satisfied the entire EDA design process, because the maintenance costs are low and the chip design can be completed. However, in recent years, more chip design companies, including mainstream domestic design companies, have begun to use different EDA processes from different manufacturers, because this can ensure better design efficiency, and even achieve the performance of the mainstream full set of processes can not be achieved. The implementation of such a design process not only requires the IC design company to be equipped with a more professional CAD team, but also puts forward more complicated requirements for the compatibility of EDA tools.

Liu Guojun, general manager of Cadence China, believes that the workload of software development in the development of the chip already exceeds the hardware itself. In addition to the chip design itself, it also needs to be a reference design. The trend of the integrity of the program and system is particularly evident in China, because many domestic machines The design capabilities of the manufacturers are still relatively weak, and some complete solutions are needed. This puts high demands on EDA's hardware and software concurrent design capabilities and system-level design capabilities. If you can optimize the chip to 1% according to the system requirements, there will be a 50% increase in hardware power consumption. The efficiency of this design is maximized.

In order to meet the design needs of chip design companies, EDA vendors have also made every effort to adjust their own products and services. Mentor Graphics President and CEO Wally Rhines revealed that his company's product strategy: Mentor Graphics's product focus is first on low power, such as Vista, allowing engineers to evaluate power and performance before selecting an architecture The trade-off relationship. UPF provides an industry-standard format that can optimize power consumption at the RTL level. Mentor Graphics Olympus' advanced routing technology provides a number of means to optimize power consumption at the physical layout level.

Replacing RTL with ESL became the design's "Golden Source." This strategy has driven the rapid development of ESL design tools over the past decade (12% market compound growth rate). Mentor Graphics has an overwhelming advantage in ESL integration and Catapult C has a market share of over 50%. Mentor Graphics Vista is a System C-based tool that can do architectural design and virtual prototyping. These tools have all contributed to the development of ESL.

Calibre is the industry's actual industry standard for physical verification. To date, Calibre is the only verification platform with a proven 20-nm specification file. The demand for multi-corner multi-mode optimization for 28-nanometer and 20-nanometer designs has been increasing, and Olympus of Mentor Graphics has benefited from it. Mentor Graphics' embedded software business is one of the company's fastest growing businesses. "Embedded Sorcery System Analyzer" won the Best Exhibition Award at this year's Embedded Systems Conference. In embedded software, open source and Linux are the driving forces, and Mentor Graphics is the leading manufacturer.

Cadence’s core product strategy is silicon implementation, which is the entire process from logic to production. They have more than a dozen 20-nanometer chip examples in the world, and the first 40-nanometer chip in China is the TD mobile phone chip that Spreadtrum has released in the Great Hall of the People. At the same time, in order to enhance the technical strength in this area, they recently acquired two companies. The purpose is to improve the development efficiency of the chip design company, especially the increasingly heavy software development, system optimization and system verification, to solve the contradiction between customer development cycle and system complexity and reliability.

Design service providers have become tandems in the industry chain. For many domestic chip companies, EDA tools alone are not enough, and service providers need to be designed to help design. Moreover, the role of design service providers in the industry chain has begun to slowly change over the past few years. According to Yang Zhanyi, senior director of SOC Semiconductor's SOC Division, "The current trend of the chip is to move toward a higher degree of integration of hardware and software, and there must be a certain degree of market segmentation in terms of functionality, power consumption or price. Positioning can only occupy a place, which means that a successful chip requires high technology, peripheral serial ports, and overall functions. After that, it is still necessary to consider factors such as the cooperation of partners in the entire industry chain. These are not general small and medium-sized IC designs. The company can be completed independently, so the role of design services has moved from the previous turnkey service to the overall solution provider today, and then it will enter the role of the future IC industry chain integrator."

The function of the design service provider is more and more important. Especially in China, a lot of machine manufacturers do not have chip design and development capabilities, but they can get the national “nuclear high base” chip project. This time, they need to outsource these projects. Give design service providers a chance to help them develop. This kind of project has to account for half of the business in many design service providers. This is also considered to be China's characteristic business.

Of course, the most important customer of the design service provider is the chip design company. In the past few years, their requirements for design services have also risen. According to Yang Zhanyi of this core, the requirements of the chip company are mainly reflected in the following three points:

(1) Richness of IP: One of the main reasons that the chip design company completes the product through the design of service providers is the demand for IP, especially in the current high-speed serial ports and high-precision analog modules. This demand is a matter of process, from 0.18um to 40nm. Therefore, design service providers must cooperate with third-party IP providers and foundries to meet customer requirements for IP.

(2) Solution Integrity: In addition to IP, the design and development of the entire IC from the front-end to the back-end must satisfy the customer's timeliness and correctness. For example, a SoC, IP is only a part of the periphery, the customer selects and obtains the CPU, uses the development board to develop the software in parallel, the integrity and yield of the signal in the advanced technology chip, the stringency and test method of the later stage to the tape, etc. And so on, all test whether the design service provider has this complete solution and actual successful case. This is the problem of the entire process, not a single link.

(3) Competitiveness of prices: The competition in the market price of chips is well known. To obtain a certain market share in a very short life span, the final decision factor is price. With a large market share, there will be greater bargaining power, entering a virtuous circle, and vice versa. Therefore, the IC market generally only holds the top three. Whoever can provide lower costs will have the biggest condition for attracting chip design companies.

The above three points enable the design service provider to become the tandem of the entire industry chain. It needs to provide various types of IP, provide technical solutions and support for the entire design process, and also cooperate with foundries to help customers successfully stream the film. Throughout the entire process, Collaboration and interaction with upstream and downstream are the most important.

For example, one of its technology providers is Open Silicon of the United States. Its team is from Intel. Therefore, the core design process can be said to have inherited Intel, mature and rigorous processes to make up for customer deficiencies in the design and production. In the current case of many from 0.18um to 40nm, there is a very high success rate. In terms of wafer fab support, SMIC invested in Can core in 2010, and thus Can core has become an exclusive design service partner of SMIC. The core is not only financially backed, it has more room for advanced technology, and has more close and efficient support in the post-design period. In terms of IP acquisition, in addition to the large IP library of SMIC, which can meet most of the needs of customers, they also signed strategic alliances with tier-1 IP vendors such as Synopsys and ARM to allow customers to select high-speed serial ports with different technologies. IP, central processing cores, and so on, have better and more choices.

Increasing demand for IP As the ARM licensing model prevails, the use of various types of standard IP in chip design is increasing. The extensive use of these IPs has brought great convenience to the development of SoC, especially in the Chinese market. This demand is very strong. According to industry sources, the Chinese market accounts for 25% of the IP market of Synopsys. Share, which is far higher than the share of its EDA tool. This makes the IP business a market for EDA vendors to compete with each other, and Cadence also invested heavily in IP purchases. According to CERAN marketing manager Eran, the demand trends of local design companies in recent years are mainly 1. Complete IP solutions, including processor cores, complete systems using standard bus protocols (including DMA, peripherals and interfaces), and complete software solutions. . 2, pay more attention to communication and multimedia processing functions. Of course, the traditional IP vendors still dominate, and ARM is the market leader. They signed a strategic cooperation authorization agreement with Cancan this year for a full range of product lines, which greatly expanded their service targets and service methods. At the same time, it is ready to establish its own R&D center in Zhangjiang to provide better technical services for the Chinese market.

The foundry's emphasis on service foundries is the last step in chip design. All the designed chips must be successfully streamlined before they can be mass-produced. The foundry's production processes and technical services are also very important to chip design companies. The ultimate power consumption and cost of a chip. Speaking of the demand from domestic design companies for fabs, Feng Hua, vice president of sales and marketing at Hua Hong NEC, said: “Since the general scale is small, R&D capabilities and design experience are lacking, domestic design companies are more in need of a breakthrough in traditional foundries. The industrial model can not only provide traditional manufacturing services, but also need to provide design platform services including process platform selection, cell library/IP/PDK, and one-stop full-service including DFM, yield improvement, and package testing." Speaking of the Chinese foundry, the foundry can not fail to mention SMIC. Its scale can be ranked in the top four in the world, and it is the first in China to provide a 40-nanometer manufacturing process. SMIC continues to provide MPWs and other services to domestic design companies, universities and research institutions for many years. For important strategic partners, there is a full-time team responsible for providing comprehensive technical support. In addition, there are many distinctive design services, such as providing design checks for ESD protection. Current IP partners have expanded to dozens of IP suppliers worldwide, including mainstream vendors such as ARM and Synopsys, and many domestic and foreign IP design service companies. For all third-party IP design projects under development, SMIC internally also has a strict quality supervision process to help IC design companies to get a good first pass. In order to better support and coordinate the development of SMIC and design service companies, an ASIC management team has recently been established to track and assist business development related to design services.

Compared with SMIC, Hua Hong NEC and China Resources Shanghua are more skilled in analog chip and memory chip technologies in terms of their production processes. In recent years, domestic analog chip design companies have developed rapidly, triggering huge demand for analog chip foundry processes. Compared with digital ICs, the most important feature of analog devices requiring OEMs is the poor standardization, resulting in low portability. The products produced by each factory are different. This requires a closer technical cooperation between the design company and Foundry. The design company needs to provide a customized process technology platform and device structure on behalf of the factory to enhance the differentiated and innovative advantages of its products. With years of successful cooperation with key strategic customers, the analog/power management chips have grown to become one of Hua Hong NEC's unique process platforms. Last year, the business achieved a rapid growth rate of 50% year-on-year.