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This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone After China's telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE were sanctioned by the United States, semiconductor chips have become a hot topic that has attracted the attention of the entire Chinese people. At present, China's high-end chip technology development is seriously lagging behind. In the gap between the rapid development of Filecoin and the severe shortage of chips, how should Chinese miners develop rapidly? How to increase profits and reduce risks? This article mainly discusses: the semiconductor dependence between mainland China and the United States, the current development status of semiconductors in mainland China, and how to break through? 1. Huawei triggered the Sino-US trade war, which indirectly led to a shortage of semiconductor supply in China Historically, the United States has launched nearly eight trade wars, which are essentially the result of the increasing trade frictions and excessive trade protectionism as trade globalization expands. The main means of trade wars is to build high tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers, causing global trade tensions and global economic downturns. This time, because of the trade deficit between China and the United States, the United States seems to have turned its attention to the technology field, especially Huawei. On March 22, 2018, US President Trump declared that "China steals US intellectual property and trade secrets" and restricted the export of high-tech products to China in various ways. At the same time, the United States imposed a 25% tariff on China in many industries such as semiconductors, hindered corporate exchanges and technological cooperation, and severely restricted the import and export of semiconductors and chips. On May 15, 2020 , the U.S. Department of Industry and Security announced new regulations requiring manufacturers to obtain an export license from the U.S. government when exporting semiconductor chips that use U.S. technology or design to Huawei, even if the manufacturers are produced outside the United States. This indicates that regardless of whether they are U.S. companies, as long as they use U.S. technology in their products, they will need a license when exporting to Huawei. For example, the United States will be able to prohibit TSMC from supplying HiSilicon Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Huawei. China and the U.S. semiconductor industry have a close relationship, Soochow Securities, 2020-02 In semiconductors, China and the United States are highly interdependent. The United States is the world's largest chip supplier, and China is the world's largest chip demander. The semiconductor industry and the entire system industry can be said to be an upstream and downstream relationship in the supply chain. Many Chinese companies are foundries for the United States, and the United States has core technologies for sales. The semiconductor conflict between China and the United States will greatly affect the development of the global high-tech enterprise market, especially the blockchain mining industry (mainstream projects such as BTC, ETH and Filecoin). So how will it affect the supply of semiconductors in China? How will it affect Filecoin mining? 2. The development of China's semiconductor industry giant: the United States is weaned, and the industry is underdeveloped and difficult to be independent 1) Dilemma: China's semiconductor industry, manufacturing and packaging and testing technology are difficult to be independent and are too dependent on American technology From the perspective of a mature industrial chain, the semiconductor industry can be divided into design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, and equipment and materials. Among them, the design link is technology-intensive, the manufacturing link is capital, labor and technology-intensive, and the packaging and testing link is labor-intensive. From the perspective of gross profit margin, design is higher than manufacturing, and manufacturing is higher than packaging and testing. At present, the semiconductor technology proficiency of mainland China is similar to that of Japan in the 1970s or Taiwan in the 1980s. It is in the early stage, mainly inclined to labor-intensive output such as OEM and packaging and testing. This stage tends to be asset-heavy, with large investment, little competitive advantage and small gross profit. In 2017, the annual import of integrated circuits in mainland China reached 260.1 billion US dollars, an increase of 14.6% over the previous year, far exceeding the 162.3 billion US dollars of crude oil. Mainland China can design and manufacture low-end chips, but the gap between high-end general-purpose chip design and developed countries is huge, and basically all rely on foreign countries. For example, high-end general-purpose chips such as CPU, DSP, FPGA, memory, analog, and power are still monopolized by foreign countries , and the market share of Chinese products is almost zero. Comparison of China's mainland integrated circuit and crude oil imports, Deloitte, 2019-04 2) Slow export of semiconductor industry: Difficulties in technological development and obstacles in sales and export The weaknesses of China's semiconductor industry are exposed under the trade war As the world's largest chip demander (in 2018, China's integrated circuits accounted for 30% of the world's total exports), the Chinese mainland has yet to establish a complete semiconductor industry chain. In line with the trend of global economicization, Chinese businesses have always adhered to the " take-it-as-it-is " approach in the semiconductor industry. This approach has encountered challenges with the emergence of anti-globalization trade conflicts. The industrial chain of related companies will be easily caught by others. China urgently needs to solve core technology problems, especially in the semiconductor field, which will be more conducive to the long-term development of future soft technology strength. China's policy guidance on integrated circuits, Founder Securities Research Institute, 2019
In the past two years, due to the exposure of the semiconductor industry's chain weakness, many local governments have entered the semiconductor field. However, quite a number of local governments are not familiar with the industry's rules, and underestimate the challenges of funds (for example, the investment in a 28nm process integrated circuit production line is about US$5 billion, and the 20nm process production line is as high as US$10 billion, etc.), talent and technology, etc., which actually disperses or even wastes resources, which is not conducive to the development of the industry. Therefore, the development of the semiconductor industry requires a top-level design and long-term planning. While respecting the industry's rules, it is also necessary to consider having a complete supply chain and talent introduction. Semiconductor Barrier Battle, IDC, 2019-02 From 2017 to 2018 , China's global PC and mobile phone shipments showed negative growth. In 2018, the number of mobile phones and PCs increased gradually compared with the same period in 2017, which is contrary to the rapid expansion in recent years. The essence of this is the strong regulation of semiconductor technology behind it, which controls semiconductors to adjust product quality and then control the sales market. 3) Semiconductor import restrictions: strangling the throat of the introduction of "exogenous technology" and creating a trap The reasons for the slow import of semiconductors into China in 2020 may include: decline in terminal demand, obstruction of cross-border trade and exchanges, negative growth in the semiconductor industry; and the impact of the epidemic in Japan and South Korea on China's semiconductor industry chain. In addition, the United States' strict control and suppression of Huawei and mainland China's semiconductors has always been the sword of Damocles. In the second half of last year, the domestic semiconductor industry faced production capacity constraints. At the same time, the rapidly growing Huawei was able to seize the development trend of 5G. Similarly, Huawei's perfect domestic supply chain also affected the nerves of the domestic industry. On February 10, AOS pointed out that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating it, accusing it of violating U.S. federal export controls on Huawei and demanding that it stop delivering semiconductor products to Huawei during the investigation. On February 29, the US-led Wassenaar Arrangement underwent a new round of revisions, adding two export control items related to the semiconductor field, mainly involving computational lithography software and 12-inch wafer technology, targeting China's semiconductor industry. Huawei, China, the United States, interconnected, 2020-05 In early March, the US Congress put further pressure on the UK, trying to persuade it to change its decision to allow Huawei to build part of the UK's 5G network. While U.S. policy toward Huawei may be unresolved, China’s move toward the high-tech “5G” era with its semiconductor industry has been hampered by numerous obstacles. At present, the weak link of China's electronics industry is the semiconductor industry, which is extremely dependent on imports. In order to get rid of the dilemma of being controlled by foreign countries, China's semiconductor industry has experienced two development models: industrial mergers and acquisitions and endogenous growth. Central Asia Semiconductor M&A Event, Deloitte, 2019-04 Industry mergers and acquisitions. After 2014, China's semiconductor industry has set off a wave of mergers and acquisitions, which has greatly supplemented and improved the industrial chain, absorbed foreign exogenous technologies, and thus made up for domestic technological shortcomings. Endogenous growth. At present, China has been able to catch up with the world's advanced level in some sub-sectors such as smart card chips, communication chips, and mobile smart terminal chip design. For example, in 2016, Cambricon launched the Deep Neural Network Processor-1A (Cambricon-1A), which is the world's first commercial deep learning dedicated processor. The company went public on July 20, 2020. So will the abnormal development of China's semiconductor industry affect Filecoin? 3. Filecoin mining, an opportunity in the new Web3.0 era, is limited by insufficient semiconductor supply Filecoin mining machines have many accessories, mainly including CPU, hard disk, GPU, memory, motherboard, network card, display card, board connector, radiator, etc. Among them, GPU and CPU are the most critical semiconductor links in Filecoin mining. While ensuring the security of the entire network, they also increase the computing requirements of time-space proof and replication proof. The following are the usage links. Hardware usage of Proof of Replication and Proof of Spacetime, Filecoin Mining Guide, 2020-07 From the above, we can see that, ignoring the technical differences in operation and maintenance, in Filecoin replication proof and space-time proof, CPU and GPU play a major role, especially the role of CPU. In the official testing phase, AMD 3960X/3970X is also used as an important CPU accessory. Taking AMD's Ripper-level CPU as an example, does the sales volume in the market meet market demand? CPU orders and production supply are seriously insufficient, AMD's reddit account, 2020-01 The statistics released by AMD's reddit account cover the entire 3000 product line from July 2019 to January 2020. We found that the mainstream processors 3600-3800x and 3900/3950x, etc., the 3000 series, have increased sales every month, and the orders are increasing every month, which does not really meet the real market in the United States. Although AMD has spent nearly 7 months to increase supply to meet US demand, the supply is far from enough. On the contrary, with Sino-US relations so tense, will China's AMD chip supply be guaranteed to be smooth? The author did not find the real supply data. Even if there is supply in mainland China, it will be at a large premium. 2017-2018 AMD chip price trend, PC Part, 20 19 In this case, the price increase of semiconductor chips will directly affect the increase in Filecoin mining costs, and then affect the investment return cycle. So in the medium and long term, under the constraints of Sino-US relations, the mining cost can only become more and more expensive? 4. Independently developed FPGA may be a new breakthrough Looking back at the history of Bitcoin mining, we can see that it has been upgraded from CPU, GPU, FPGA to ASIC chips. At the same time, Hongjun, the original IPFS zone, once proposed that the main development bottleneck of CPU and GPU is the multi-core reef problem of Dennard scaling law and Moore's law, which led to the end of their development . Single-core performance has been difficult to expand further, and chip research has begun to turn to the multi-core era. For Filecoin, the determination of the algorithm is crucial, and only when the algorithm is determined can the cost be diluted by the scale effect. In fact, the core decision factor for whether to use a dedicated chip such as ASIC or a programmable general-purpose hardware such as FPGA is the total cost of ownership. Only when ASIC chips need to be mass-produced can these R&D costs be diluted . While ASIC chips have not been mass-produced , FPGA chips are likely to be the next Filecoin mining method that is first touched. FPGA will promote Filecoin to go further. At the same time, we are also committed to research in this area. The future is promising and we are ready to go. Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law. Tip: Investment is risky, so be cautious when entering the market. This article is not intended as investment and financial advice. |
