Do you know which of China's imports of goods each year is the most expensive? food? crude? Equipment? neither!
China spends far more money on products of a very small size than those of commodities, which are chips. From January to October 2016 alone, China spent a total of 1.2 trillion yuan on imported chips, which is twice the amount of crude oil imported. In 2017, China's chip market reached 100 billion US dollars, accounting for more than 50% of the global chip market.
Among them, the market size of memory chips reached 246.55 billion yuan, accounting for 23.7% of the domestic market. The proportion of these chips exceeds that of CPUs and mobile phone baseband chips. The Chinese storage chip industry is basically blank, with almost 100% reliant on imports.
Localization of flash memory particles has become urgently needed. In China's solid-state drive market, the problem caused by the shortage of flash granules is even more serious: sales of inexpensive, non-original branded SSDs have gradually begun to increase, while sales of original granules have been affected.
The past three years have been a golden period for the development of SSDs. Domestic SSD brands cannot compete with first-tier brands because of technical barriers and brand familiarity. However, today's major Flash manufacturers due to the force of 3D Flash technology, resulting in serious shortage of flash memory particles, the price is naturally rising, so consumers have to choose such bad solid-state hard disk due to price factors.
The current 3D Flash production capacity is still severe, and the yield is low, so the raw materials produced are very large. These raw materials are waste products for first-line brands, but they have become "treasures" in the hands of bad companies.
At present, there are as many as 100 SSD brands in China. Flash prices keep rising, and it is reasonable for consumers to choose cheap products more easily. However, it must be pointed out that consumers are not aware of the "dirtyness" in the purchase of cheap SSDs - cheap SSDs are now using a lot of black, that is, Downgrade particles, in addition to teardown.
Some self-proclaimed brands of domestic products are also selling SSDs of inferior quality, and trying to cover up the truth and prevent consumers from knowing. At the same time, re-directing the website platform of unclear truth spread the sales status of the channel extensively, improved the short-term sales to whitewash the success of the product and the brand, inducing more people to be deceived.
Without independent property rights, only by patching, falsifying, how far can such a domestic SSD brand go? We don't know. However, one thing is certain: Cheap, low-quality domestic SSDs further reduce consumers' trust in "domestic SSDs." This is a business model that can be used to make fish.
Flash Market Status: No domestic incidents
As mentioned above, major flash memory chip manufacturers are now stepping up production of 3D NAND, which is the commanding height of global flash chip makers. Micron, WD SanDisk, SK Hynix and even Intel have also joined 3D NAND. However, most of the original manufacturers experienced the painful period of production capacity and cost during the 2D NAND to 3D NAND switching phase. Samsung first put in 3D NAND, and the proportion of production exceeded the 35% by the end of 2016. Toshiba, Micron and SK Hynix accounted for the largest proportion. The ratio is less than 10%, resulting in delays in the market for 3D NAND.
2016 is a year of flash memory chip transition. Samsung Xi'an Plant/Fab 17/Fab 18, Toshiba Fab 2, Micron F10x and SK Hynix M14 will all enter the 3D NAND mass production stage in 2017. The original 3D NAND production capacity competition will be held. Is being carried out in an orderly manner.
2017 Flash original 3D NAND technology planning:
Samsung: With 64-layer V-NAND products, Samsung has already started sample testing and small-scale trial production. It is expected to start magnified scale of pilot production in Q1 2017. It is expected that the proportion of V-NAND production capacity will reach 45% in 2017 Q1.
Toshiba/WD SanDisk: In the second half of 2016, it announced that 3D technology will be upgraded to 64 layers, and it will have been produced in small quantities by the end of the year. In 2017, production will be switched to 64-layer 3D NAND production.
SK Hynix: We plan to upgrade to 72-storey 3D NAND volume production in 2017. Samples will be launched in Q1, and Q2 will start small-scale production.
Micron: 64-layer 3D NAND has been sampled in December 2016, and it will gradually enter volume production in 2017.
What is the demand for flash memory market?
Although the PC has continued to slump for many years, the strong growth in demand for flash memory chips from SSDs and smart phones has compensated for the sluggish demand from other hardware markets. This year, the capacity of smart phones will further increase. The upcoming iPhone 8 will consume a large amount of flash memory chips under the 256GB drive. It is estimated that 42% of flash memory chip production capacity will be used for smart phones, but mobile phone flash memory chips produced in China are still 100% dependent. import.
In the SSD consumer market and enterprise market, the demand for flash memory chips is also gradually expanding. It is expected that the storage density of SSDs will continue to increase to 69 billion GB equivalent in 2017, an increase of 57% from 2016, and the opportunity to replace embedded products into NAND Flash's largest application market is also a challenge for Flash's original and major module manufacturers and OEM manufacturers, and market competition will be upgraded again.
With the expansion of the 3D NAND volume production scale by Flash's original manufacturer, big data and core applications continue to grow rapidly. It is believed that 2017 is a year in which the storage industry has grown rapidly.
3 Chinese flash memory chip layout
China's flash memory chip layout
Let's take a look at some of China's emerging storage vendors. In an earlier report by Brian Matas, vice president of IC Insights, we saw that there are now three major competitors in China's storage industry:
In July 2016, Ziguang Group acquired Wuhan Xinxin and established a joint venture named Changjiang Storage. The 12-inch wafer fab will focus on the production of 3D NAND Flash. As for the specific volume production time, it has not yet been disclosed.
The Hefei SKT project is expected to build a DRMA FAB by the end of 2017.
The Fujian Jinhua project is preparing to build DRAM Fab, which is expected to be produced in the third quarter of 2018.
In the above three projects, Hefei's SKT project has ceased operation. This company, established by Elpida's former CEO Yukio Sakamoto, has tried to recruit 1,000 storage-related engineers from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea to make up for the lack of experienced storage development engineers in China. Sakamoto wanted to find 180 from Japan. An engineer who could move to work in China, but this proposal was opposed by the Hefei local government.
Although SKT's promise exceeds the normal phenomenon of the semiconductor industry, it also gives Chinese semiconductor people some new directions. A way to win over the engineers to keep their Fab running.
On the equipment side, Changjiang Storage stated that the semiconductor equipment they currently use is the same as Samsung’s at the Xi’an plant (Samsung's Xi’an factory only manufactures 32 layers of NAND Flash, and the 64-layer NAND Flash is manufactured in Korea. ).
But although Changjiang Storage can buy the same equipment, they lack the experienced people to operate these devices. The author believes that the first thing to do for the Yangtze River storage is to use the company from Samsung Xi'an to dig a corner fab to operate workers. Afterwards, some advanced engineers can be dug from Samsung and SK Hynix. Look at some of the relevant technical information from Micron and Toshiba. This is one of the ways in which Violet solves the problem.
In the 1990s, Samsung spent a lot of money to recruit DRAM engineers from Japan. At that time, those engineers could keep working during the day and could serve Samsung at night or on the weekend. Through these part-time jobs, engineers can get a high salary. In this way, Samsung gradually developed its DRAM industry.
And more than two decades later, South Korea has been treated by Japan. Although China is not as crazy as South Korea at first, there is no way to organize Changjiang Storage to recruit engineers from Xi'an Samsung.
China's frenzied construction risks
From the current indications, the problem of insufficient 3D NAND capacity will be eased by 2018. The madness of semiconductor storage in the Yangtze River for nearly 2 years may lead to a new risk: excess capacity. Last year, Matas of IC Insights wrote that Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, Intel, Toshiba/Sendi, and Changjiang Storage are the companies that are currently chasing 3D NAND Flash. There are also some Chinese manufacturers that may join the war situation.
Although the industry believes that there will be important changes in the industry in the next five years and that it will bring about strong storage requirements, if China's storage layout can proceed smoothly, it will eventually face the risk of overcapacity. Some people pointed out that we should have a kind of attitude towards these Chinese investments. Should we really thank them for their efforts to break Samsung’s monopoly and give us more choices, or should we criticize them for this behavior?
One expert Hai pointed out that China would like to cut into the semiconductor industry chain through storage, which may be a wrong choice. Because the amount of investment in the above investment is really too great. Each generation of technology costs billions of dollars. This is a great adventure for China.
The pressure to invest in countless money in an area of ​​unknown results is predictable. Finally, back to the title, how far is the domestic flash memory chip road? According to the progress of Ziguang Group's layout and construction, China will mass-produce 3D NAND flash memory in 2018. Please wait patiently.
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