Integrated circuits can also be called chips or semiconductors. They are the core hardware in products such as computers, tablet computers, and mobile phones. They are also important components in the field of Electronic information and an important foundation for national information security. Therefore, they are considered to be the “heart” of industrial production. . my country is a big consumer of chips. In the Internet era, chips are of great significance to national economic development and information security.
Integrated circuits grow and develop
The integrated circuit industry, as the core of the new generation of information technology industry, is not only a strategic industry supporting economic and social development and safeguarding national security, but also a basic and leading industry in my country.
With the widespread use of emerging terminal products, integrated circuits have also become the core of the development of all walks of life, and applications in national strategic emerging industries and key fields such as automobiles, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud computing, 5G, and mobile Internet of Things are inseparable Open the integrated circuit. Although my country’s integrated circuits started relatively late, with the strong support of national policies, the integrated circuit industry has achieved many achievements in recent years, and has achieved leapfrog development from scratch.
At present, my country has become the country with the fastest growth rate of the global integrated circuit industry, the largest market demand and the most active national trade. According to relevant data, in 2018, China’s integrated circuit field sales revenue was 653.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.7%. China’s IC market is still increasing in global share. At present, the global artificial intelligence is developing rapidly, the integrated circuit industry is constantly innovating, and the international development trend is becoming more and more prominent.
From the perspective of regional development, the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions have obvious advantages in developing the integrated circuit industry. From the perspective of industrial scale, in 2017, the integrated sales design sales of the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta were 66.169 billion yuan and 64.037 billion yuan respectively, the Beijing-Tianjin-Bohai Rim region ranked third, and the central and western regions were small in scale. , but the development speed also showed a rapid development.
With strong capital flow and technical support, at present, many domestic enterprises have begun to lay out the integrated circuit industry. Recently, the “core attack” strategy in the Yangtze River Delta region has also taken a key step. The first core equipment developed by a group company in Shanghai will enter the trial production stage, and will continue to provide key chips for 5G, Internet of Things, smart cards and other equipment.
New Opportunities in the IC Market
In an interview with the semiconductor Industry Observer and other media, Chen Liwu said excitedly: “There are so many opportunities now, and it is a good time to work in semiconductors. If I were 20 years younger, working 48 hours a day would not be enough.” And the opportunity he speaks of is in a new era of technology driven by applications such as artificial intelligence.
As we all know, in the past ten years, driven by smartphones, both integrated circuit chip suppliers and terminal brand owners have undergone earth-shaking changes, and the semiconductor industry has also achieved tremendous growth in the past ten years. But in recent years, the new trend of terminals led by artificial intelligence will become a new driving force for the development of the entire industry chain.
At the opening speech of CDNLive 2018, Chen Liwu pointed out that artificial intelligence, 5G, edge computing, data centers and autonomous driving will become the next important drivers of semiconductor development.
In recent years, artificial intelligence has achieved rapid development in the past few years due to the improvement of the accuracy of deep learning algorithms. Whether it is a traditional chip factory, an Internet company, or an emerging enterprise, they have all made heavy bets in the field of artificial intelligence. These companies have started a new round of competition around the software, hardware and services of artificial intelligence. , but also led to the growth of investment in the artificial intelligence industry. According to Chen Liwu, the VC funds invested in the field of artificial intelligence have grown rapidly in the past few years, and last year it exceeded 12 billion US dollars. This is bound to drive the development of hardware, including chips.
When dismantling the industrial chain of artificial intelligence, training and inference are the two most important components. The so-called training is based on most of the data, through a large number of operations, let the neural network model “learn”, and inference is to let the trained neural network model infer various conclusions from new data. In this process, cloud training chips and end-side inference chips are required, which is an opportunity for the semiconductor industry.
But we can see that the current cloud training chip market is basically monopolized by NVIDIA’s GPU, and other companies, including Google, Microsoft or Amazon, are only targeted for optimization in this market. In the end-side chip, there are now a lot of opportunities. Traditional and emerging chip companies are also fighting in this market. Especially in China, this market has almost entered the stage of hand-to-hand combat. In Chen Liwu’s view, how to achieve low power consumption is a key point for these terminal AI chips to break through.
Other opportunities, whether it is edge computing, 5G, autonomous driving and data centers, are self-evident. The most important thing is that these terminals do not have a single role, but together create opportunities for the semiconductor industry around the three fields of computing, data and communication. Among the many opportunities, Chen Liwu is particularly optimistic about emerging breakthrough technologies such as silicon light, quantum computing, neuromorphic computing and nanotubes, which he believes will be the drivers of future growth.
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