The integrated circuit industry focuses on mobile chips, and domestic technology upgrade opportunities outweigh challenges

Recently, the Institute of Telecommunications of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released four white papers on the mobile Internet and communication equipment industries in Beijing. Xu Zhiyuan, director of the Information Network Department of the Institute of Telecommunications Research Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said in the release of the "White Paper on Mobile Internet" that mobile chips have become the focus of the integrated circuit industry and the entire information and communication industry. The opportunities for upgrading the mobile chip technology industry in China are greater than the challenges.

According to the "Mobile Internet White Paper", with the continuous growth of the smart terminal market and the shrinking of PCs, mobile Internet has become a key driving force for the development of the integrated circuit industry. Mobile chips dominate the growth of the integrated circuit market, drive manufacturing technology advancement, and transform the industry scale and development model.

"In 2013, mobile chip demand surpassed PC for the first time, and this trend will continue to deepen in the future." Xu Zhiyuan said that the market value of chip design company Qualcomm once surpassed PC giant Intel, becoming the new generation of hegemony, and the market value of TSMC, the chip foundry company. Being close to Intel is a stark manifestation of this trend.

From the perspective of the industrial composition of integrated circuits, integrated circuit manufacturing is the core of industrial development. Affected by the rapid development of the intelligent terminal market, the pace of upgrading the mobile chip technology has accelerated, and has been promoted through industrial division of labor and deepening cooperation. For example, in 2012 to 2013, the mobile chip process was mainly 28nm process, and by 2014 it has already advanced to 20nm.

The mobile chip is composed of various chips such as baseband, radio frequency, application processor, GPS, Bluetooth, audio and video processing, and sensors. At present, the mobile chip initially presents the application processing chip (AP) and the communication baseband chip (BB) as the development focus, the technology is rapidly upgraded, and the development trend of penetration into other fields is accelerated.

In terms of communication chips (baseband chips and radio frequency chips), with the commercialization of LTE, long-term coexistence of multiple networks such as 2G/3G/LTE has made multimode multi-frequency become the focus of communication chip development. At present, Qualcomm is currently leading the market, but with the commercialization of LTE chips such as MTK, HiSilicon, Spreadtrum, and Lianxin Technology, Qualcomm's monopoly in the LTE multi-mode multi-frequency original market will turn in mid-2014.

In terms of application processing chips, the technology upgrade presents dual paths, namely “multi-core multiplexing” and “single-core upgrade”, and the two paths show the development trend of overlapping and fusion. For example, many companies such as MTK and Qualcomm intensively released multi-core 64-bit chips in early 2014. In the development direction of mobile chips, the multi-function integrated single chip has developed rapidly due to the advantages of cost performance and power consumption control. The multi-function integrated single chip accounts for more than 50% of global mobile phone shipments, and China is close to 90%, and has gradually achieved a comprehensive breakthrough in the middle and high-end market.

At present, mobile chips are still accelerating penetration into more areas, including wearable devices, smart TVs and so on. The white paper pointed out that China has initially achieved a breakthrough from “coreless” to “core” and laid a good foundation for continuing to upgrade to “strong core”. Faced with the historical opportunity of the development of mobile chips, China should take the opportunity of mobile chips to promote the innovation and upgrading of the integrated circuit industry. The opportunity for upgrading the mobile chip technology industry in China is greater than the challenge.