On December 29th, at the 2022 China (Shenzhen) IC Summit, Wei Shaojun, academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, vice chairman of China Semiconductor Industry Association, chairman of IC Design Branch of China Semiconductor Industry Association, and chief technical engineer of nuclear high-tech national science and technology major projects, said that relying on China's huge market, a number of innovative semiconductor products and solutions will be launched, which will promote the construction of products and application standard systems with Chinese characteristics, effectively alleviate the embargo imposed by foreign countries on China and break the containment.
5G has been commercialized in China for three years. With the rapid development and increasing popularity of 5G, the concepts of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have been put into practical application in various industries. The next generation information technology is inseparable from the development of memory technology. New generation information technologies such as Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, intelligent car networking and metaverse are both data demanders and data producers. As the largest producer and consumer of electronic equipment, China is the largest terminal user of memory chips, but domestic memory chips currently account for a very small proportion, only less than 5%, and the domestic memory industry has huge room for growth.
As one of the well-known storage enterprises in China, how does Shenzhen Quanxing Technology view the opportunity of domestic substitution? In 2022, after the decline of consumer terminal markets such as PC and smart phone, the storage demand is sluggish. Which sub-sectors of storage demand will lead the growth in 2023? What flagship memory products have Quanxing Technology developed to meet new development opportunities? Huang Shaowa, Chairman of Shenzhen Quanxing Technology, gave the latest wonderful views and market analysis.
Market Capacity of Semiconductor Memory in China and Domestic Substitution Opportunities
According to the data of the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Association, the global semiconductor market is 555.9 billion US dollars in 2021, and it is estimated that the global semiconductor market will reach 613.5 billion US dollars in 2022. In 2021, the global semiconductor memory market will reach 153.8 billion US dollars, and it is estimated that the global semiconductor memory market will reach 155.5 billion US dollars in 2022.
In 2021, the scale of semiconductor memory in China reached 350.5 billion yuan (about 53.9 billion US dollars), accounting for one third of the global market. Huang Shaowa, chairman of Shenzhen Quanxing Technology, believes that China is the largest consumer electronics market in the world. With the large-scale development and application of new generation information technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, data center and new energy vehicles in China, China has also given birth to a strong demand for semiconductor memory. China's DRAM memory chip market accounts for about 34% of the world, and the current supply capacity only accounts for 3% of the world; NAND flash memory chip market accounts for about 37% of the world, and its supply capacity only accounts for 4% of the world. Domestic substitution has about 10 times the growth space, and the domestic substitution market has great potential.
Huang Shaowa said that the prototype of the upstream and downstream industrial chain of domestic memory has been seen, from upstream wafer design to midstream wafer manufacturing and downstream packaging test. From semiconductor IP, EDA, semiconductor materials, semiconductor equipment, wafer factories, materials and module factories, the domestic semiconductor storage industry system has been initially established.
What needs will increase in the storage industry in 2023?
Relevant persons in the storage industry said that the epidemic lasted for three years, and the whole society had a low rate of resumption of work and poor supply of raw materials; Exports are blocked, the economy is declining, and global communication is limited. In 2022, consumer electronics will continue to slump, and clearing inventory and promoting circulation have become the main tasks of storage industry manufacturers in the near future. Some manufacturers exchange price for quantity, and the price index of NAND Flash and DRAM has been falling continuously since April.
Huang Shaowa, chairman of Shenzhen Quanxing Technology, said: "In 2023, due to the liberalization of the epidemic policy and the cyclical inventory reduction of the industry, the consumer electronics market may continue to be weak in the first half of the year, and may improve slightly in the second half of the year, but the industrial regulations, car regulations, enterprise-level and domestic alternative storage markets will maintain a growth trend."
DDR5 was launched, and the response was enthusiastic! Bring opportunities for domestic memories to increase market share
In 2021, Quanxing Technology launched the DDR5 standard model of 4800MHz. In the fourth quarter of 2021, it was launched simultaneously with INTEL 12th generation CPU and motherboard, which triggered a wave of snapping up. In the third quarter of 2022, the company cooperated with AMD's AM5 platform to go public, and launched 5200MHz general strips and up to 6400MHz e-sports light strips.
QUANXING chip
What are the main challenges in developing DDR5 products? Huang Shaowa pointed out that how to make the storage module high-speed, stable, durable and good in heat dissipation is the main technical challenge. Quanxing's own testing software can screen out the best quality memory IC to ensure that the produced e-sports light bar has better efficiency and takes into account product stability; The company's own module patch production capacity also ensures the smooth production and quality of products.
From 2020, the global enterprise SSD expenditure has surpassed the traditional enterprise mechanical hard disk, and it is still accelerating. The driving force of this trend is the massive data and the increasing storage demand brought by the rise of AI and 5G technologies, which makes enterprise SSD widely used in data centers and enterprise storage in Internet, cloud computing, finance and telecommunications industries.
In terms of solid-state drives, Quanxing Technology launched M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4. Especially in enterprise-class solid-state drives, the products have high bandwidth, low latency, higher sequential read-write speed, unique intelligent algorithms and excellent and stable QoS.
Recently, Yole Development, a world-renowned research institution, released the latest report, saying that driven by electrification, smart cockpit and ADAS, automobiles are the fastest growing memory market segment, with a compound annual growth rate of 20% from 2021 to 2027. According to the statistics of overseas research institutions, the scale of China's automobile storage market is about 700 million US dollars in 2021, and it is estimated that it will reach 1.5 billion US dollars by 2023. On the one hand, the growth momentum comes from the growth of automobile shipments in China, on the other hand, it also benefits from the expansion of on-board memory and storage.
In view of the fact that domestic storage manufacturers want to enter the automobile storage market, Huang Shaowa believes that three major challenges need to be overcome: 1. High barriers to entry. There are a series of qualification thresholds in automotive electronics. To become a supplier of automobile manufacturers, it is necessary to complete a long process of qualification certification; 2. The test and verification period is long. The car factory is strict in testing and verifying the durability of products. Before becoming a supplier, the enterprise needs to provide samples to the car factory for testing and verification for up to half a year or even one year; 3. High requirements for stable supply. After becoming a supplier of automobile manufacturers, it is necessary to ensure stable product supply.
Huang Shaowa shared the latest progress of Quanxing Technology in vehicle memory products. She pointed out that car-level products mainly have very strict standards in the selection of raw materials, manufacturing process and testing. Quanxing Technology has launched embedded products such as car-level memory cards and SPI NAND. Among them, the car-level memory card has reached a strategic cooperation intention with a domestic first-line car factory, and is in the stage of final product verification.
In 2022, the revenue of Quanxing Technology is expected to reach 1 billion yuan. In 2023, with the release of production capacity of Quantian Intelligent Manufacturing Base under the company, scale effect will be formed. "In 2022, we have passed the verification of many major customers, and orders are gradually increasing. In addition, the company's product line is broadened and its products are high-end. It is estimated that the growth target in the storage market will exceed 50% next year." Huang Shaowa is full of confidence in the performance growth of Quanxing Technology in 2023.
Quanxing Technology Launches Medium and High-end Products to Seize the New Opportunity of Domestic Memory Growth-China.exportsemi.com
