It is difficult to make cores. With the development of various industries, it is even more difficult to develop chips in different scenarios.
Not long ago, Zheku, a chip design subsidiary of OPPO, shut down. Two executives choked up several times at the last meeting, announcing that the company’s revenue fell far short of expectations due to the gloomy global economy and the mobile phone industry. The investment made the company unable to afford it, and eventually more than 3,000 people were disbanded on the spot. This news quickly swept the entire Internet, and also brought a touch of sadness to the semiconductor industry.
In fact, in recent years, with the evolution of the international competitive environment and the long-term cycle of the semiconductor industry, the chip industry is facing multi-dimensional challenges. A few days ago, CSDN conducted in-depth research from the perspective of developers and engineers, and recently released the "2023 China Chip Developer Survey Report", sharing the status quo of the chip industry in the perception of developers, and revealing the key problems in the development of domestic chips. It can bring some thoughts to practitioners, enterprises, and academic research in the semiconductor industry.
There is a serious shortage of chip talents, and the cultivation of soft and hard coordination capabilities needs to be paid attention to
For a long time, there has never been a smooth road from chip design to manufacturing. Behind this requires a lot of knowledge accumulation and development experience, but the domestic talent pool in this area is still relatively small, which limits the progress of chip research and development.
The data shows that there are large differences in developers' understanding of chips. Only 6% of developers can deeply understand technology and apply it in depth. Most of them are in the stage of understanding concepts, accounting for nearly 50%.
What developers know about chips
Behind it, to develop chips, relevant practitioners need to master a series of technologies, including but not limited to:
Logic Design: Learn about digital circuit design and logic gates. You need to be familiar with hardware description language (HDL) such as Verilog, VHDL, and logic design tool EDA (Electronic Design Automation).
Physical Design: Involves the physical placement and routing of chips.
Analog Design: Familiar with analog circuit design and analog integrated circuit (IC) design techniques. This includes an understanding of analog circuit elements, circuit simulation tools such as SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis), and analog circuit placement and routing.
Radio Frequency (RF) Design: Understand the principles of RF circuit design and RF transmission. This involves high-frequency circuits, microwave circuits, antenna design, etc.
Digital Signal Processing (DSP): Understand the theory and technology of digital signal processing, which is used to design chips for processing digital signals such as audio, image, and video.
Clock and timing design: master clock circuit design and timing analysis to ensure the timing consistency and correctness of each module in the chip.
Mixed-signal design: Familiarity with the integrated design of analog and digital circuits in order to develop mixed-signal chips such as data converters (ADC and DAC) or sensor interfaces.
Semiconductor process technology: understand the semiconductor manufacturing process and process flow, including photolithography, thin film deposition, ion implantation, etching, etc. This is important for understanding the chip manufacturing process and the impact on chip performance.
Chip Verification: Learn about chip verification techniques, including functional verification, timing verification, power verification, and physical verification. This includes the use of simulation tools, verification languages such as SystemVerilog, and hardware verification languages such as UVM.
Chip Packaging and Testing: Learn about chip packaging and testing techniques, including package type selection, pin layout, packaging materials, and test methods.
The above are just some key technologies in chip development, and they are also the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, chip developers need continuous learning to improve their technical level and competitiveness. The data shows that more than half of chip-related practitioners study for at least one hour a day.
The length of time developers spend on chip development
For the complex task of chip development, with the rapid development of the Internet of Things, 5G network, artificial intelligence and other fields, the demand for high-performance chips is increasing, and this demand far exceeds the number of existing chip engineers. 55.98% of the developers said that the most urgent need for their team is a chip architecture engineer. Followed by integrated circuit IC design / application engineers, semiconductor technology engineers.
The industry urgently needs chip engineers
In this regard, Bao Yungang, deputy director of the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, commented that there is a serious shortage of chip design talents, and the cultivation of software and hardware collaboration capabilities needs to be paid attention to. Among the developers surveyed, only 6% have a deep understanding of chip technology, that is, chip designers only account for about 1/16 of software developers (6% vs. 94%). Using the software industry as a comparison, the turnover of software-related products in 2021 will be about 3.6 trillion yuan (software product revenue 2.6583 billion yuan + embedded system software revenue 937.6 billion yuan), and the output value of the chip design industry is about 1/7 of the output value of the software development industry. The caliber of these statistics is not consistent, but it can also reflect the severe shortage of chip designers to a certain extent.
Fighting in small teams, AI has become one of the important scenarios for chip applications
Looking at the current scale of companies entering the domestic chip market, there is a certain trend of dispersion. 40.42% of the companies have fewer than 10 employees. These companies may be composed of independent chip designers or small teams, and may mainly focus on application development in a certain segment.
The size of the developer staff of the chip company
The data shows that the chips of current chip companies mainly serve the Internet of Things and communication systems and equipment. Among them, the Internet of Things accounts for the largest proportion and is much higher than other products/services, accounting for 31.07%, followed by communication systems and equipment, accounting for 20.63%.
Product/Service Areas Provided by Chip Companies
Artificial intelligence is booming, and more and more special-purpose chips are designed for the field of artificial intelligence. They are characterized by being highly optimized for specific computing tasks. The data shows that among domestic chip companies, 38.46% of the chips are equipped with artificial intelligence technology, which can provide more efficient computing power for artificial intelligence applications.
The proportion of chips equipped with artificial intelligence technology
C/C++ and Verilog are the most commonly used programming languages by developers
At the level of chip development tools, chip developers have a high diversity in the choice of development languages, and the two most commonly used languages are C/C++ and Verilog. C/C++ is a common general-purpose programming language that can be used for high-level applications and low-level system programming. According to data, nearly 50% of developers are using them to write code; while Verilog is a hardware description language. It is mainly used for modeling and simulation of digital circuits, and the developers who use it account for 12.94%.
Commonly used development languages in chip development
There are various EDA tools used in chip development, and the EDA tools commonly used by chip developers are diverse and scattered.
The data shows that Protel is the most widely used tool, accounting for 26.11%; followed by AlTIum Designer, accounting for 18.10%; developers can choose the most suitable tool for chip design, simulation and test.
EDA tools commonly used by developers
Challenges of domestic chip development: design, low power consumption and patents
In modern technology, chips are one of the infrastructures, and chip parameters are also the topic that developers are most concerned about. The first is computing power, which measures the processing speed of the chip. 67.06% of the developers said they care about the computing power parameters of the chip; the second is power consumption, which is also one of the important indicators for measuring the chip, and 42.63% of the developers are also concerned about it.
Chip parameters that developers care about
Domestic chips face many challenges and difficulties in the development, the following are some main aspects:
Design capability: Chip design is a complex and arduous task that requires superb technology and superb design capabilities. 39.91% of the developers said that it is difficult to reduce the cost of chip design with the current domestic design capabilities. The second is low power consumption design. 35.36% of developers said that it is very difficult to achieve low power consumption.
Patent protection: Chip manufacturing involves a large number of patented technologies. In the development of domestic chips, patent evasion is required.
The most difficult problem in the development process of domestic chips
In terms of chip design, developers are most worried about EDA design tools. The complexity of modern chips is very high. A chip may contain billions of transistors and millions of lines. Therefore, better tools are needed to help in the design process. Engineers deal with such a huge design space.
The most difficult problem in the process of domestic chip design
Chip manufacturing is different from the software development process. It cannot be iterated in small steps like software development, and the cost of the entire manufacturing process is relatively high.
56.62% of developers believe that in chip manufacturing, it is easy for the product application market to deviate from the assumption, resulting in waste of R&D investment and production costs. The second is that during the chip development process, some design specifications cannot be realized, and half of the developers are concerned about this.
Difficulties in the chip manufacturing process
A good chip product not only requires excellent performance and stability of hardware, but also needs a complete software stack and thoughtful support and service. Only in this way can we truly win the favor and trust of developers and consumers. In these software stacks, developers are most concerned about the chip's support for the operating system, followed by the chip version and compatibility.
What developers are interested in about the chip software stack
Bao Yungang believes that more than 41% of developers are most concerned about the chip's support for the operating system. It can be seen that excellent chip design talents not only understand the chip architecture, but also need to understand the software stack knowledge such as the operating system. However, such talents are even more scarce in China, because many integrated circuit colleges do not offer software courses such as operating systems. To solve the problem of shortage of talents, the current concept and plan of talent training need to be changed, and more attention needs to be paid to the cultivation of software and hardware synergy.
The future of open source chips
With the maturity of open source chip technology, its market share will gradually increase. Open source chip platforms such as RISC-V have been widely used in various applications. As an emerging technology, its future development prospects are very broad. 76.77% of developers are optimistic about the development of open source chips, which are expected to achieve large-scale applications and will usher in explosive growth in the next few years.
Developers' views on the development trend of open source chips
On the whole, Bao Yungang concluded that the demand for chips in emerging fields is growing rapidly, and the future of open source chips can be expected.
On the one hand, the report shows that current chips mainly serve the Internet of Things (31%) and communication systems and equipment (21%). Among the companies surveyed, 38% of the chips developed are equipped with artificial intelligence technology, which also reflects the current vigorous development of the field of artificial intelligence. The combination of the two data can roughly reflect that many IoT scenarios also have artificial intelligence needs.
On the other hand, among the chip companies surveyed, 40% of the companies have less than 10 employees, and 26% of the companies have 10-100 employees. Combined with the report data of Professor Wei Shaojun on the overall development of China's chip design industry at the ICCAD conference in December 2022, it shows that there are even more than 2,700 (84%) chip design companies in the country with fewer than 100 people.
In short, the vast majority of domestic chip design companies have small personnel, and they mainly focus on chip development in a certain segment. The existence of these companies is due to the chip fragmentation requirements brought about by emerging fields such as the Internet of Things, and open source chips represented by RISC-V allow companies to customize chips more conveniently, which is an effective way to deal with fragmentation requirements and also helps to achieve Enterprises are very concerned about the need to reduce the cost of chip design.
The above is the content of the "2023 China Chip Developer Survey Report". After that, we will launch a complete electronic version of the report, covering the seven dimensions of developer status, open source, database, AIOT, operating system, cloud computing, and chip, so stay tuned.
