At present, there are IDM manufacturers in IGBT field, and the circuits designed by chips have analog chips, but digital chips rarely do the whole industry chain. Everyone focuses on their own links and cooperates with each other.
This is because IGBT and analog chips have high technical and financial barriers, but long life cycles. However, the development of digital chips follows Moore's law. Not only R&D needs a lot of money, but also wafer foundry needs a lot of money to buy equipment, and the iteration is very fast.
When you have configured this generation of products, the next generation of products will come out again, and you have to continue to catch up. This is the hardest part of digital chips.
To put it simply, the working principle of digital chip is to express 1 0 or yes or no of logic judgment by controlling the on and off of the current flowing through the transistor, so digital circuit is also called switch circuit or logic circuit.
Its composition is mainly transistors working in the switching state, so the size of the digital chip is determined by the number of transistors in it. Moore's law also says that the number of transistors doubles every 18 months, so the number of transistors plays a decisive role in the performance of digital chips.
Digital chips include seven categories, namely, logic circuits, general-purpose processors, memories, single-chip system SoC, microcontroller MCU, customized circuit ASIC and programmable logic devices. We will analyze the main categories one by one in the future.
Simple logic circuits are usually composed of gate circuits, which are basically composed of AND gates or NAND gates. These circuit families are also called combinational logic circuits.
A large number of logic circuit chips can deal with very complicated control and operation problems theoretically through different arrangements and combinations.
But now the chip is highly integrated, and many self-contained logic circuits can be integrated inside the chip. One chip can realize complex functions, so no one wants to use a large number of small chips to realize a large system.
Therefore, at present, logic circuit chips are only used in small electronic products, and in the connection circuits between general large chips of large systems.
General processor generally refers to CPU chips used for server and desktop computing, including GPU, DSP, APU, etc.
It is a digital circuit chip with the largest scale and the most complex structure. It consists of large-scale logic circuits, including complete data and information processing systems such as control, storage, operation, input and output. This time, let's analyze the subdivision of CPU first.
0 1 What is CPU?
CPU, also called central processing unit, is the operation and control center of computer, and its main function is to complete the execution of computer instructions and data processing. Therefore, CPU, memory and input and output devices are considered as the three core components of a computer.
The control unit is the control center of the CPU. When an instruction is issued, the control unit is responsible for sending the data in the memory to the arithmetic unit and storing the calculation result back in the memory.
The arithmetic unit is responsible for executing the commands of the control unit and performing arithmetic and logical operations.
The storage unit is the temporary storage location of data in the CPU, where the data to be processed or completed is stored. Compared with memory, registers can reduce the time for CPU to access data, and also reduce the times for CPU to access memory, which is helpful to improve the working speed of CPU.
According to the word length of processing information, CPU can be divided into four-bit, eight-bit, sixteen-bit, thirty-two-bit and sixty-four-bit microprocessors. The follow-up is still expanding.
Thanks to the development of applications such as 5G, wearable devices and cloud services, CPU, as a part of integrated circuits, is still growing steadily in the global integrated circuit market.
China is the largest integrated circuit market in the world, and its growth rate is also the fastest in the world. During the nine years from 20 12 to 2020, the compound growth rate of integrated circuit industry market scale reached 16.8 1%.
In the import and export market of integrated circuits, there is a big deficit in China, and the deficit is still expanding, and the domestic substitution space is broad.
The downstream market of CPU covers servers, desktops, mobile PCs, smart phones and emerging application fields such as Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, automotive electronics and smart wear.
At present, the development of desktop and mobile PC is flat, servers benefit from the cloud trend, and smartphones benefit from the wave of 5G replacement and usher in a wave of cyclical opportunities. The medium and long-term development of the industry depends on those emerging fields, but the emerging fields are not entirely incremental markets for CPU, such as new energy vehicles.
At present, the global sales of new energy vehicles continue to grow, and the three major aspects of automobiles (electrification, intelligence and * * *) are unstoppable. The proportion of electronic cost to the total cost is gradually increasing, and there is a lot of room for development. In 20021year, the global automobile chip market is expected to reach 44 billion US dollars.
According to application scenarios, on-board computing chips can be divided into intelligent cockpit chips, automatic driving chips and body control chips.
Because a single CPU can no longer meet the computing power requirements of smart cars, the SoC scheme of heterogeneous integration of CPU and general-purpose or special-purpose chips such as GPU, FPGA and ASIC has become the main track for computing power competition among major AI chip manufacturers.
Not only smart cars, but also traditional CPU can't meet the market requirements in the fields of Internet of Things and artificial intelligence.
With the increasing demand for flexibility of Internet of Things devices, chips are developing in the direction of low power consumption and high performance, and MCU and SoC stand out.
AI chips commonly used in artificial intelligence are usually chips that have been specially accelerated for artificial intelligence algorithms, such as GPU, FPGA, ASIC, neuromimetic chips and so on.
Although CPU is not as good as AI chip in deep learning algorithm, it has advantages in large-scale reasoning. In addition, the CPU advantage field has a broad market space and rich application scenarios. It is still imperative for domestic science and technology enterprises to continue to develop domestic CPU.
At present, the main market share of CPU is still in the hands of overseas enterprises. With the progress of domestic technology, domestic CPU is getting better and better, the policy continues to increase, and the certainty of domestic substitution is high.
02 CPU chip architecture
Chip architecture is also called instruction set architecture, which is simply the execution flow of the chip. Chips with different instruction set architectures have different execution steps.
At present, CPU instruction set architecture is mainly divided into two categories: complex instruction set (CISC) and reduced instruction set (RISC).
Complex instruction sets support more instructions, and each operation has its own complete instructions. Because only a few instructions will be reused, the instruction set is reduced to simplify, and it is not necessary to have complete instructions for every operation.
Complex instruction set is more suitable for computer CPU with complex operation, and simplified instruction set is more suitable for mobile phone CPU with low operation requirements and low power consumption.
Different architectures are generated on the basis of these two instruction sets, that is, a series of complete designs and arrangements of control units, arithmetic units, storage units and other components in CPU are realized on the basis of instruction sets.
03 X86 architecture
The architecture of CISC is mainly X86 architecture. At present, Intel and AMD are two leading companies.
Intel and Windows formed a "Wintel" alliance, which defeated the power alliance of Apple, IBM and Motorola and monopolized the desktop market for more than 20 years. Up to now, X86 architecture processors are mainly used in servers, desktops and mobile PCs, and Intel still occupies most of the market.
Later, with the advent of AMD's second-generation Epyc processor "Rome", the market share of AMD server CPU increased from 1% to 8% in just two years. Then the third generation Epyc processor "Milan" was released, and its server market share is expected to reach 15%.
Due to the high cost performance of AMD server chips and the addition of TSMC's 7nm process technology, more and more data centers began to purchase AMD products.
The reason why X86 architecture covers such a wide range is not only its early start, high performance and good compatibility, but also its perfect ecology. At present, more than 65% software developers in the world provide services for X86. You have to design an architecture yourself, and no one will use it without ecology.
At present, X86 architecture still has a broad market in China, especially in the field of servers, which accounts for almost all server sales. Other servers with non-X86 architecture account for a small proportion, mainly with ARM architecture.
In addition to the duopoly of Intel and AMD, there are several X86 chip manufacturers in China, such as Megachip, Guang Hai and MPRC. At present, the substitution of X86 architecture in China is not obvious, and the market share of Megacore in 20 19 years is only 0. 1%.
04 ARM architecture
The architecture of RISC includes ARM, MIPS, Power PC, Alpha, RISC–v, etc.
At present, more than 90% of smartphones adopt ARM architecture, MIPS is widely used in embedded devices, and with the improvement of performance and the integration of technologies, RISC architecture is constantly infiltrating into X86 application fields.
Because of its low cost, low power consumption, small size and high performance, ARM architecture is very suitable for the field of mobile communication, and occupies an absolute dominant position in the fields of smart phones, modems, in-vehicle information equipment, wearable devices and so on.
At present, ARM architecture is the most widely used and mature architecture among non-X86 architectures, with a market share of 43.2%.
ARM's complete product line includes microcontroller, microprocessor, ring processor, implementation software, cell library, embedded memory, high-speed connection products, peripherals and development tools.
At present, the main ARM manufacturers at home and abroad are ARM, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung Electronics, Tengfei, Huawei Kunpeng and Communication TRUM.
The world's major semiconductor manufacturers buy their own ARM microprocessor cores from ARM, and add appropriate peripheral circuits according to their different application fields, thus forming their own ARM microprocessor chips to enter the market.
MediaTek is the world's largest supplier of ARM mobile phone chips. In recent years, Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and other industry giants have used ARM architecture to gradually realize the full ecological chain based on ARM.
As of 202 1Q 1, MediaTek and Qualcomm are the most important suppliers of mobile phone CPU, with market share of 35% and 29% respectively, increasing by 1 1% and -2% respectively.
Apple's market share is 65,438+07%, while Samsung's market share has dropped to 9%. Due to the escalation of US sanctions, Huawei Hisilicon's market share dropped rapidly to 5%.
On the server side, non-X86 current participants include Huawei, Tengfei, Qualcomm and Amazon.
Huawei Kunpeng server is an important participant in ARM server. Huawei said that Kunpeng's shipments have accounted for 50% of the market share, and it is expected to give play to its advantages in the mobile market in the future and seize more shares in the server market by using cloud collaboration.
In the desktop PC market, ARM is gradually being applied by more enterprises. In 20 1 1 year, Microsoft began to adopt ARM's Windows system, and ARM began to enter the traditional advantage field of X86. Now Apple's MacOS and the new version of Windows both adopt ARM architecture.
In addition, ARM has great development potential in the fields of Internet of Things and automobiles. ARM provides solutions in the fields of public utilities, smart cities and asset management.
05 MIPS and other architectures
MIPS, Alpha, Power and other architectures are not mainstream applications in the market, but they are still used in specific fields.
MIPS architecture is a simple, optimized and highly scalable RISC architecture, which can provide the highest performance per square millimeter and the lowest energy consumption in today's SoC design. It has been sold in the mobile and embedded industries for nearly 30 years, and its current market share is 9%.
MIPS multithreaded CPU has been widely used in LTE modems in different fields and many mobile devices.
The main MIPS chip manufacturers at home and abroad are MIPS Company, Ikanos, Loongson Zhongke and Beijing Zheng Jun. However, after MIPS changed hands twice, the new company has turned to RISC-V.
Godson and Shenwei are permanently authorized by MIPS and Alpha respectively, and can develop independent instruction sets. Enterprises in China have become a single force in the research and development of applied products and the global ecological construction of this framework, and its application is also an area that the country attaches great importance to safety.
The share of Power architecture in the relevant market is only about 1%, but it has always played a very important role in the field of high-performance computing, and some of its technical characteristics can even compete with Intel, but the market participants are basically only IBM.
06 RISC-V architecture
RISC-V is the most promising new architecture in the industry at present, and it has the best chance to overtake in corners. It is completely open source, simple in structure, easy to transplant, suitable for various devices, complete in tool chain and high in operation efficiency.
At present, the acceptance of this architecture is gradually increasing, and it is expected to become the third mainstream instruction set architecture after X86 and ARM architectures.
Since RISC-V Foundation is a non-profit membership organization, RISC-V itself is free. Since the establishment of the 20 15 RISC-V Foundation, the RISC-V ecosystem has experienced explosive growth, and the membership growth rate will reach 133% in 2020.
The rise of the Internet of Things has provided new growth potential for the upstream industrial chain. Because RISC-V has the characteristics of open source, it meets the requirements of more flexible and diverse Internet of Things.
Moreover, since the Sino-US trade war, due to the restriction of the United States, there is a risk that China enterprises cannot upgrade their structures. With the gradual acceptance of RISC-V, it is feasible for China chip manufacturers to achieve independence through RISC-V architecture.
Semico Research predicts that by 2025, the market will consume 62.4 billion RISC-V CPU cores, with a compound annual growth rate of 65,438+08-2025. Among them, the industrial field will be far ahead with more than 654.38+067 billion cores.
Tractica, a market research company, also predicts that the IP and software tools market of RISC- V will be $52 million in 20 18 and will grow to $1000 billion in 2025.
At present, RISC-V has not developed for a long time, has not yet formed a monopoly, and the related ecology is still developing.
In the short term, ARM architecture will still occupy the mid-to high-end market, and RISC-V is mainly used in some fragmented emerging markets, such as the light terminal scene of the Internet of Things.
These scenarios need low power consumption and low cost, but often the program does not need major changes, and the dependence on the software ecology is not high, and the shipment volume is large, which is in line with the staged development goals of RISC-V.
RISC-V allows any manufacturer to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software, thus attracting a large number of technology companies to enter the market.
More than 100 technology companies such as Green Wave, IBM, NXP, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Huawei, Jingxin Technology, Xinyuan, Lessing Technology, Ali Pingtou Ge, Zhongtianwei, Red Hat and Tesla joined its camp.
Self-controllable degree of domestic CPU
Domestic CPU has experienced nearly 20 years of development, and also produced a number of powerful enterprises, such as the aforementioned Zhongke Loongson, Tianjin Tengfei, Guang Hai Information, Shanghai Shenwei and Shanghai Zhao Xin.
Shenwei and Godson have the highest degree of self-control. Shanghai Shenwei is mainly engaged in the research and development of Alpha architecture. At present, it is the CPU manufacturer with the highest innovation credibility in China, and it is basically completely autonomous and controllable. Mainly used in party and government offices, military affairs, supercomputing and other fields.
Followed by domestic manufacturers of ARM architecture represented by Tengfei and Huawei Kunpeng (Hayes). ARM architecture needs authorization from ARM company, and there are three levels of authorization: usage level authorization, kernel level authorization and architecture/instruction set level authorization.
Among them, the instruction set has the highest authorization level, so enterprises can transform the ARM instruction set and design their own processors. At present, Hisilicon and Tengfei have been permanently authorized by ARMV8.
If they develop their own instruction set based on V8 authorization, their innovation credibility will be significantly improved, and even if they are not authorized by new architectures such as V9V 10 in the future, they can still maintain their advanced nature.
Finally, X86 vendors, such as Guang Hai and Megacore, are only authorized at the kernel level, so it is difficult to expand the instruction set to form an independent and controllable instruction set in the future.