Explore the development of analog master chip

In recent years, the business growth rate of tower semi in China ranked first. Qin Lei said that the business in China has been a pivotal position for the company.

Although domestic analog chip manufacturers have made great progress, there is still a big gap with foreign manufacturers. At present, the analog chip market is about US $100 billion, accounting for 22% of the global semiconductor market. China's annual demand for Analog IC exceeds 200 billion yuan, accounting for 60% of the global analog IC market, but the domestic rate is less than 15%.

Qin Lei told jiwei.com that the development of analog chips in China mainly faces two major pain points: the lack of product performance and the lack of high-end talents.

"As far as end users are concerned, their choice of analog chips is still a product performance index. At present, there is still a certain gap between the performance of domestic products and the high-end products of international manufacturers. For example, for RF PA products, it is important to compare the efficiency, output power, linearity and other indicators. " Qin Lei said, "the gap in product performance is due to the lack of high-end talents. It is not that there are no talents in China, but there are not too many high-end talents with many years of experience. To do high-end digital chip R & D requires hundreds of R & D engineers, but designing analog chips often requires two or three experienced high-end talents. "

It is worth mentioning that some domestic analog chip manufacturers began to choose the IDM mode to debug their own process according to the product requirements, so that the combination of design and process is closer, and the disadvantage of design parameters can be made up by the process.

In this regard, Qin Lei said that IDM model does have certain advantages, but now the more successful model of analog chip is fabless. Recently, domestic analog chip listed companies or quasi listed companies are almost fabless enterprises. The division of design and manufacturing is one of the trends in the international semiconductor industry, which can help product companies get rid of the huge investment of wafer production plants and the financial pressure of later plant operation. Of course, compared with digital chip companies, analog chip companies need to maintain closer technical ties with foundry.

In view of the OEM needs of analog chip design companies, Qin Lei pointed out that tower semi not only emphasizes the process platform, but also takes the market demand as the guidance, and derives the process optimization for specific application products. Therefore, although it is impossible to customize and adjust the process for all customers, based on many years of cooperation with global leading analog chip fabless enterprises in various product fields, tower semi can also provide customers with professional analog chip OEM capability in line with market demand with standardized process.

Qin Lei also said that the product R & D cycle in the analog chip field is very important, and the professional design enablement capability of tower semi can help analog chip design companies quickly launch products, which will help domestic manufacturers enhance product competitiveness and seize market share. Because the simulation of analog chip is more difficult than that of digital chip, the high accuracy of tower semi simulation model and the comprehensiveness of PDK files have been highly recognized by all users, which has played a strong role in the successful trial production of new products. This is also crucial for the breakthrough of domestic analog chip in the market.

"Generally speaking, 70% of the success of digital chips lies in design, and 30% in the help of process platform. For analog chips, the contribution of process platform is much higher than 30%. " "Although OEM manufacturers like towersemi can help to a certain extent, domestic analog chip manufacturers still need to strengthen themselves in many ways if they want to quickly narrow the gap with large international manufacturers," Qin said

Qin Lei stressed that the R & D capability of the company is the key factor to strengthen domestic manufacturers. Analog chip companies must continue to invest in R & D, and try to make the product line complete, instead of relying on one or two products to win the world. At the same time, we should really improve the product performance. The second major factor of reinforcement is deep cooperation with large system manufacturers. First of all, the product performance must be recognized by the system manufacturer, rather than just stay in the demo test results. Large system manufacturers can put forward higher requirements for products from the user end, which can help analog chip companies define new products and quickly improve the comprehensive performance of a product line. In addition, chip companies can continue to get stable orders.