Wen? |? Wild Xiao Chen
Recently, according to domestic media reports, since the beginning of December, auto companies have started to stop production one after another, and the tide of shutdown has a tendency to spread. In the last month of 22, most domestic mid-to high-end and above auto manufacturers are facing the risk of shutdown.
among them, the first company exposed to the shutdown storm caused by chip shortage is North and South Volkswagen. If there is a shortage of chips, ESP (Electronic Stability Program System) and ECU (Electronic Control Unit), that is, vehicle-mounted computers, will not be produced. From the information circulating in the market at present, it can be seen that the responses of the two companies to this storm are somewhat ambiguous.
with a wave of his hand, FAW-Volkswagen's official rhetoric is still stable: "At present, its Volkswagen brand, Audi brand and Jetta brand are still in normal production and have not been affected." However, under the serial call of multi-media outlets, it was said that the company is currently communicating with relevant suppliers. "(The actual situation) should not be so exaggerated."
The relevant person in charge of SAIC Volkswagen also said that the production of new cars has indeed been affected to some extent, but the company has not completely stopped production as rumored by the outside world.
In fact, if we think about it with our toes, we know that it is impossible for us to pry public relations people's mouths without burning eyebrows at present, but this answer is actually a disguised acquiescence. The chip shortage has already had a great impact on the automobile manufacturing industry, and this lack of supply capacity is by no means a single phenomenon. At present, many brands such as Dongfeng Honda, Changan Automobile and Chery Automobile have been affected, and the follow-up is likely to have a certain impact on global automobile manufacturers.
you have to leave, and there is nothing for you, except the yellow leaves blown off by the autumn wind and the cold.
-Ren Zhengfei
Ren Zhengfei's speech at Huawei's glory farewell party was very infectious, pushing the end of this branch brand's life to the highest light moment. He unplugged the ventilator tube of his beloved glory, lightly denounced the US's reckless behavior, and, under the pursuit of knowing Wang, sent away a ZTE, which ruined a kind of glory, but did not kill Huawei.
When the dust of this farce settled, Ren Zhengfei boldly chose the martyr to break his wrist. How important is glory to Huawei? In recent years, Huawei's mobile phone has been in the forefront of the international market and torn into the high-end finals. Glory has been positioned as a cost-effective position, and it has been nursing its teammates in the rear in the way of ensuring the quantity. Now it is undoubtedly an act of putting the righteousness above the family. In the context of the great era, Huawei has stepped out of this step.
It was not Meng Wanzhou who was handcuffed with electronic shackles, nor Trump's pursuit, but a small chip that made Ren Zhengfei cut off his arm with a knife.
Although it is different from the dilemma faced by major automobile groups today, Huawei is facing supply chain sanctions, while the North and South Volkswagen only have a short-term contradiction between supply and demand due to the epidemic. But in the final analysis, in this era, high-end chips seem to connect all the possibilities of the "future" and also hold the throat of the "future"-
Perhaps Ren Zhengfei will stare at this integrated circuit board in the middle of the night and think, in the face of this technology that is extremely scarce in China, the life and death of glory seems as small as dust, and human civilization is constantly being refreshed by the newly created civilization of mankind. Where should China's chip road point?
In March p>216, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program owned by Google, beat Li Shishi, the former world champion of Weiqi, 4:1, which was the first time that the program beat the top human player.
Weiqi originated in China, and there are 3 361 changes in the whole chessboard, which is said to have exceeded the total number of atoms in the known universe.
the first chip was born more than 6 years ago. Under the guidance of Moore's law, the number of transistors in the chip is exponentially multiplied.
In the end, AlphaGo beat Go with the powerful performance of TPU chip. As expected, only the index can beat the index, just as our linear income can never catch up with the housing prices in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
under the premise of the same price, the number of components on the integrated circuit will double in about 18-24 months, and the performance will also double.
—— Moore's Law by Gordon Moore, founder of Intel
In p>197, Intel began to build its own chip manufacturing factory, at which time the entry threshold for the chip industry was not high, and a garage team could become a pioneer in the industry. In this day and age, taking apart a Nikon lens can be regarded as a mask aligner, and the chip design does not need EDA (Electronic Design Automation) and is purely hand-drawn. However, the artificial power was quickly surpassed by the spell of Moore's Law. Behind the exponential growth of the number of transistors in the chip, the extreme requirements for mask aligner and the difficult problems in the field of full EDA made the chip manufacturing become a big trouble that both burned money and brains, which was difficult for ordinary companies to bear.
in p>1984, the Dutch ASML company was founded, and today, it is still the only king of mask aligner in the world. If you want to manufacture ultra-precision chip products (7nm? EUV, 5nm chip products), you must pass the ASML company, and it is not too much to say that it is the political review Committee of chip technology. Let's put it this way, it's no exaggeration why TSMC can become a leading semiconductor enterprise. The biggest reason is precisely because it has the most EUV mask aligner in the world.
from p>1986 to 1988, Synopsys/Cadence was established successively, focusing on EDA tools. In the later decades, under the capital washing of big waves, the control right of EDA basic patents was owned by three American companies (including Mentor? Graphics Mingdao International, acquired by Siemens in Germany in 216), has thus become a heavy hammer weapon that understands Wang's holding and hinders Huawei's chip research and development.
Even the industry giant Intel, in front of the physical clock, you can only be a freak. Cheng also lost Xiao He and Xiao He, and Moore's Law brain powder Intel became the tears of the times in self-stumbling. During the decades when Moore's Law was hurtling at the speed of light, the global chip industry was torn into a huge industry spanning chip design, manufacturing, packaging, storage screen, EDA and mask aligner, and the prototype of the chip pattern was set.
Let's go back to the discussion on the current situation of chip development in China. We can simply understand the existence of the chip as a kind of physical software development, so we need subsequent manufacturing and sealing in the process of designing the code. It seems that the manufacturing and sealing of the basic technology is the core reason that has trapped Huawei and even clamped down the development of China chips so far.
Generally speaking, the chip is divided into several links, such as early chip design, mask aligner, etching machine, and later sealing and testing.
Xiaomi's Lei Jun once said that he would sell chips at the price of sand in the future. Let chip manufacturing also be marked Made? in? China's label must be the dream of every technology entrepreneur, but there is also an important knowledge point in this sentence, that is, the 1. raw material of the chip is industrial silicon extracted from sand.
At present, 78% of industrial silicon is produced and sold in China due to the low technical content. However, when it comes to high-concentration purification of industrial silicon, the players in this field have changed immediately. With developed countries as bookmakers, China can't even squeeze in the position of leisure home, but this is only the first field that China is constrained by in the chip industry.
On the basis of chip research and development, the level of China etching machine has indeed reached the world-class level, but as the most critical link in the highest-grade chip, mask aligner is the big hand that holds the lifeline of China's chip development.
It's not that mask aligner can't be built in the inland areas, but the technology is really a big step behind. This year, Shanghai Microelectronics just broke through the 28nm technology (currently the strongest technology in the world is 3nm), and ASML immediately sold its outdated equipment technology at a malicious price, thus doing a devastating blow to China's science and technology innovation.
On the other hand, in 218, China originally ordered an extreme ultraviolet EUV mask aligner from ASML, but two years later, the Dutch side delayed the delivery. Of course, this was mainly because the United States got in the way and took the lead in setting up the Wassenaar Agreement, which strictly blocked China's high-end technology and made it difficult to issue export licenses, so it was difficult for ASML to deliver the goods. There are wolves in the front and tigers in the back. You can't make it or buy it. The road to mask aligner, China is long and difficult.
It seems that the participation is very high, but the failure of each core technology link may be an important reason why China has not been able to fully enter the semiconductor field so far. It's like people are running a marathon, and you distribute water at each station. Can you say that you are involved in the competition? It is really a bit difficult.
However, China is not without its merits in chip technology, and it even shows extraordinary talent in the later research and development. In the first quarter of 22, Huawei Hisilicon stubbornly squeezed into the top ten in the revenue list of chip companies under the crazy attack of the American team, and its revenue soared by 54% year-on-year, making it the list, which is also the first time for China regional enterprises to reach the top of this list dominated by developed countries. Here, the light of domestic chips can be put on the public screen.
Of course, the most typical story is that Huawei has developed 5G technology on the basis of chips, which directly threatens the status of communication technology in the United States. From Wang's crazy encirclement and suppression of Huawei, it can be seen that Chinese research technology is really not simple, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is at the top level in the world.
China manufacturers have always been the best at packaging. From the data point of view, in the list of global chip packaging companies, almost all the seats in the top ten are taken by Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province, China, except Eickel, which ranks second. The packaging industry in China can represent the top level in the world. In terms of LCD (liquid crystal display), Huawei P4? Pro's OLED screen introduces BOE products, which reduces the potential risk of screen power failure by supporting local manufacturers. After all, Samsung has not done less (cutting off key components of HTC).
Looking at it all the way, we can find that the domestic chip industry is completely on the edge of a precipice, with a strong level of technology research and development, but extremely contradictory lack of core technical barriers, which is tantamount to a three-year-old child holding gold to cross the market.
Sure enough, before everyone rushed to the finals, the organizer, the United States, suddenly banned the China team from inviting foreign aid. This is not the first time, and ZTE, a lean generation, also fell because of the same sanctions.
The problem of China's lack of independent EDA and mask aligner has been infinitely magnified, and the mourning of glory comes from this. However, Huawei's performance of selling glory is more like a kind of behavior of eating and drinking. Chip is the core engine in the 5G era. It is the knowledge of every country in the world that it will not dominate in the future unless it breaks through the chip.
People who do Internet and smart cars know this, otherwise Li Bin wouldn't have poached Xiaomi's chip leader. It is even reported that Weilai Automobile is developing a computing chip for its autonomous driving, and the chip is the future of technology, and there is no such thing.
Ren Zhengfei realized more strongly that developing chips and scientific research technology is the only way to avoid the stranglehold of autocratic monopoly, so Huawei turned to the automobile industry.
In fact, we don't need to delve into the deep meaning behind Huawei's three-year failure to build a car. Does it really want to build a complete supply chain ecosystem for China's automobile industry to eliminate the helplessness and powerlessness it once encountered, or does it want to share the size of the automobile market, which is nearly five times larger than the mobile phone industry? At present, the automobile industry is at the cusp of electrification transformation. In the future, if China Automobile wants to compete with Tesla, Huawei must win. Whether as a supplier or an OEM, this is not the most worth discussing.
looking at the overall pattern of China's automobile industry, we should not take a new brand or an emergency list out and treat it as a scourge. Valuable new things should not be intruders or shredders, but should be collaborators and guardians to embrace the automobile economy with greater strength.
Fortunately, we can already see this pattern of tolerance for others from these China entrepreneurs. When the United States cut off Huawei's supply, and TSMC and SMIC announced the suspension of supply chain cooperation, BYD was the first to help Huawei make chips. Wang Chuanfu said that BYD could make whatever Huawei needed.
Zhang Zhongmou, the founder of TSMC, once said that the mainland could not make a chip with the efforts of the whole country. Wang Chuanfu, an IT madman, was furious: the chip was not made by god, but by man.
In p>29, Wang Chuanfu won the Ningbo Zhongwei Semiconductor Company, which is 1394 kilometers away from BYD's Shenzhen headquarters. The Ningbo government spent 3 billion yuan but failed to help the wall. During that time, the market was not optimistic about the voice everywhere, and even the wind was everywhere, and the "BYD crisis" suddenly came out.
Many senior auto analysts said that "in the next five or six years, it is totally reasonable for BYD to give up the electric vehicle project." Subsequently, there were successive media reports that BYD's Ningbo factory suffered huge losses, and BYD's share price plummeted all the way, from the highest 88 yuan Hong Kong dollar to 64 yuan Hong Kong dollar.
This bottomless pit is dark, but Wang Chuanfu's composure seems to have a calming power. Although the holes filled in for semiconductor projects every month can be called astronomical figures today, it seems that both Wang Chuanfu and BYD's employees have automatically shielded the voices of doubt from the outside world. After ten years of independent research and development, BYD's silicon-grade IGBT chips are now more advanced than the mainstream car chips.
Not long ago, Huawei Hisilicon signed a cooperation agreement with BYD, handed over the highly confidential Kirin chip technical documents to BYD, and started the collaborative road of OEM cooperation. Huawei is a leader in the communication industry, holding a number of patents, and has also achieved good results in the field of smart chips.
BYD is the leader of new energy enterprises in China, and now it is laying out the field of automobile chips. Both of them can almost represent the highest level of intelligence and electrification in China at present. Whether it is Huawei, which has been violently sanctioned by the United States, or BYD, which is secretly competing with Tesla, the collaborative and innovative spirit displayed by China entrepreneurs with patterns is the true demeanor.
At last, Ren Zhengfei made an Ending: "Building bridges, roads and houses can cost money, but this chip can't cost money. It has to hit mathematicians, physicists and chemists. China has to make steady efforts to change in mathematics, physics, chemistry, neurology and brain science, so that we can stand up in this world."
Although its road is far, its glory is dead, but its mission is in the future. See you in the Jianghu.
This article comes from the author of Chejia, car home, and does not represent car home's standpoint.