After a bloody price war, the storage industry has become an oligopolistic market with three strong powers. China strives to break through the storage market and national security considerations. The original Ziguang and Wuhan Xinxin have developed from their respective attacks to integrated development. The other two groups of forces are also actively expanding their layout with the assistance of liandian and SMIC, and China's storage iron triangle has gradually taken shape.
Hynix finally failed to talk about authorization, and finally merged with Wuhan Xinxin, which has obtained the overall resources of China's storage, to further establish Yangtze River storage company. Zhao Weiguo, chairman of Ziguang, is also the chairman of Changjiang storage, Ding Wenwu, general manager of large fund, serves as the vice chairman, and Yang shining, former executive director of Wuhan Xinxin core, is responsible for NAND flash The former chairman of huayake, who was transferred to Ziguang, was the chief operating officer of Changjiang storage, and started to prepare for the establishment of DRAM.
The construction of Wuhan Xinxin storage base has been started at the end of March 2016. According to the information previously obtained by science and technology news, the new storage base will be divided into three phases, with a total planning area of about 1 million square meters. The first phase will be started in August and is expected to be completed in 2018, with a monthly production capacity of about 200000 pieces. However, the official target is that the total production capacity of the base will reach 300000 pieces / month by 2020 and 1 million pieces / month by 2030. The first step has signed a technical license with Spansion, a nor storage manufacturer, to start with 3D NAND flash. It is expected to be able to launch 32 layer stack 3D NAND flash in 2017 and 48 layer stack 3D NAND flash in 2018. In terms of DRAM progress, there is no sign of negotiating with Meguiar on technology authorization. It is also pointed out that Gao Qiquan is recruiting and recruiting talents related to DRAM in Taiwan through personal contacts, or preparing for the establishment of the factory.
In May, Fujian provincial government announced that Jinhua integration and liandian signed a technical cooperation agreement. Liandian accepted the entrustment of Jinhua to develop DRAM related process technology and produce niche DRAM. The team was led by Chen Zhengkun, former general manager of Meiguang in Taiwan and senior deputy general manager of liandian in July 12 At the same time, the company has set up a small pilot production line in Nanke, Taiwan. It is understood that 32 nanometers will be introduced in the initial stage, but the final goal is actually to produce below 25 nanometers, so as to avoid a big gap with other DRAM large factories. The preliminary production capacity is planned to be 60000 pieces per month. It is estimated that the technology development will be completed by the end of 2017, and the trial production will be conducted in September 2018 and in 2019 The production line was transferred to Fujian new factory before.
However, the DRAM power that Hefei is about to rise is dominated by gigadevice, a local nor flash manufacturer, and Wang Ningguo, former president of SMIC, after the former erbida president Yukio Sakamoto faded out of Hefei. Previously, it was reported in the market that Zhaoyi innovation will merge with ISSI, a DRAM factory in the United States jointly purchased by Wu Yuefeng and other Chinese funds, to become another DRAM / NAND flash The development of both storage manufacturers. However, there is no news about the construction of the plant.
In addition to the competition among the three factories becoming the focus, the team leader also has a long history. Wang Ningguo, who leads the Hefei team, and Yang shining, general manager of Changjiang storage, are also from SMIC international. The two groups of people have been fighting with SMIC for many years and even jumped onto the news page, but now they meet again; Gao Qiquan, the current chief operating officer of Changjiang storage, and Chen Zhengkun, senior deputy general manager of united power, have successively worked with Huaya group and Meguiar system. The competition between acquaintances in China's storage battle depends on who can lead the team to lead the team.
Global status of storage industry
memory, as the most important field in the IC field, had a sales volume of $79.2 billion in 2014, accounting for 23.6% of the total semiconductor market size. At present, due to its extremely high technical and capital barriers, this field has formed a very strong oligopoly in the world. Three or four manufacturers have monopolized more than 90% of the global market, but there is still a blank in this field in China. In recent years, memory products have benefited from the rapid penetration of mobile intelligent terminals, resulting in rapid growth of product demand. In the past three years, the compound growth rate was 18%, far higher than the overall 7% growth rate of the semiconductor industry, and became the main driving force for the growth of the entire semiconductor industry. The global memory market is expected to maintain rapid growth in the next few years. 1) The strong demand for mobile terminals such as personal computers and mobile phones has led to a substantial increase in DRAM output value. 2) Smart phones and SSD will be the biggest demand for NAND flash. 3) 3D NAND flash has become an important growth point of memory chips.
The global memory market is huge and has grown rapidly in recent years
Memory chips can be divided into volatile memory and non-volatile memory according to whether the stored data will be lost after power failure. DRAM and NAND flash are the representatives of these two kinds of memories respectively. Although there are many kinds of memory chips, DRAM and NAND flash have become the main components of memory chip industry from the perspective of output value composition. According to IDC's statistics, in 2013, the market size of memory chips was close to 69 billion US dollars, while DRAM and NAND flash accounted for about 60 billion US dollars, accounting for more than 85%.
According to IHS statistics, in the third quarter of 2015, Samsung DRAM had a global market share of 45.2%, SK Hynix had a share of 27.3%, the third largest manufacturer Meguiar had a share of 20.4%, and the total market share of the top three leading companies reached 93%. In the NAND flash market, in 2014, Samsung accounted for 36.5%, Toshiba 31.8%, Hynix 18.9%, and Meguiar 12.8%. The first four manufacturers almost monopolized the whole market.
Thanks to the rapid transfer of global electronic industry chain to China in the past few years, the demand for global memory products has also shifted rapidly to China. In 2014, the market scale of domestic memory products has exceeded $20 billion, and it will maintain a rapid growth in the next few years, and is expected to reach $43 billion in 2018.
For the memory industry, whether Wuhan Xinxin invested US $24 billion or Tongfang Guoxin invested 93.2 billion yuan to build a factory is only the first step in the long march. It is still a long way to go to develop the domestic memory industry. Wuhan new core's 24 billion US dollars and Tongfang Guoxin's 93.2 billion yuan, this investment amount looks very huge. However, compared with the capital expenditure of international memory giants, there is no significant gap. In 2015, Samsung's capital expenditure reached $15.1 billion. Hynix and Meguiar also have capital expenditure plans of $5.1 billion and $3.8 billion respectively this year.
At present, SMIC's 12 inch production capacity is 51000 tablets / month, hualiwei is about 20000 pieces / month, and Wuhan Xinxin is about 20000 pieces / month. This means that in the past 10 years since the initial construction of 12 inch wafer plants in China, a total capacity of 91000 pieces / month has been formed in China. Considering Samsung's production capacity of 100000 chips just put into operation last year, the domestic 12 inch wafer production capacity is 361000 pieces / month.
According to the large silicon wafer project announced by Shanghai Xinyang, the domestic demand for 12 inch silicon wafers will reach 1 million pieces / month in 2020, which is three times of the current domestic production capacity.
