The advent of the TD-LTE era will open a new battlefield among semiconductor manufacturers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China is about to issue the TD-LTE licenses of China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom. It has been seen that the three major telecommunications companies are all striving to purchase equipment. Among them, China Mobile is the most active.
Baseband chip vendors help China Mobile's TD-LTE offensive
In order to avoid repeating the 3G era due to the lack of TD-SCDMA chip solutions that have hindered development, China Mobile has actively attracted mobile phone baseband chip vendors to join the TD-LTE camp. At present, Qualcomm, Marvell, MediaTek, Spreadtrum and Lianxin have all released related solutions and introduced mass production successively, becoming a strong backing for China Mobile to sprint into the 4G market.
Figure 1 Xu Yifei, a researcher at the Shanghai subsidiary of Tuoji Industry Research Institute, said that to avoid falling into the dilemma of unstable chip supply in the 3G era, China Mobile is fully deploying the TD-LTE chip market.
Xu Yifei, a researcher at the Shanghai subsidiary of Tuoji Industry Research Institute (Figure 1), said that in the 3G era, due to the fact that international IC design manufacturers did not pay much attention to the research and development of TD-SCDMA chips at the beginning, China Mobile ’s limited supply of 3G chips resulted in insufficient mobile phone types. Rich and lost customers. In order to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the TD-LTE era, China Mobile has attracted chip makers such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, Marvell, ZTE, Lianxin, Spreadtrum, etc. to ensure that TD-LTE chips are delivered without any risk, and is expected to reproduce 2G in the TD-LTE market. The prestige of the times.
It is worth mentioning that among the above-mentioned manufacturers cooperating with China Mobile, except Qualcomm and MediaTek have used 28-nanometer process nodes to mass-produce multi-frequency multi-mode LTE chips, Spreadtrum, Marvell, Lianxin and other manufacturers will also follow up. In order to reduce the power consumption of the chip with a high-dielectric metal gate (HKMG) process, Zhan Xun and Marvell expect mass production to be in the fourth quarter of this year, while Lianxin is scheduled to catch up in the first quarter of next year.
In addition to actively establishing a TD-LTE chip supply relationship with major chip manufacturers, China Mobile has also conducted large-scale centralized procurement of terminal products, and the first two centralized procurement tenders ended in November last year and July this year, focusing on MiFi , Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) and other Netcom products. The industry estimates that before the Chinese government issues a license, the company will start another wave of terminal centralized procurement, and in 2014, China Mobile's centralized procurement will shift from Netcom equipment to mobile phones.
According to the TD Industry Alliance research report, the number of commercial TD-LTE smartphones will increase significantly in 2013. As of June this year, a total of fifteen manufacturers worldwide have released 29 TD-LTE smartphones. It is expected that in the third quarter of this year, there will be another 11 TD-LTE mobile phones listed in mainland China, and another six in Japan. In addition to smart phones, other TD-LTE terminal products, including data cards, CPE, MiFi, and tablet computers, have cumulatively shipped more than 4 million units, and the overall TD-LTE market output value is rapidly climbing.
It is understood that the Chinese mainland government has clearly set a target of reaching 450 million 3G / LTE users in mainland China in 2015, and will increase to 1.2 billion by 2020, so it is very likely that it will be issued simultaneously in October this year. Three TD-LTE licenses were given to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
Optimistic about the huge business opportunities brought about by the release of TD-LTE, China Mobile has fully launched its strategic layout, launched a large-scale bidding for telecommunications equipment, and plans to reach the first phase of more than 200,000 base stations in 2013, covering 100 nationwide The city's construction target and investment amount exceed RMB 20 billion. It is expected that another 200,000 base stations will be built in 2014, and it is clearly proposed that the large-scale commercialization of TD-LTE network will be in 2015.
With the large-scale purchase of TD-LTE equipment by telecommunications companies, the demand for low- and mid-range smart devices has also rapidly increased, and has driven the shipment of key components of mobile phones to rise synchronously. The biggest beneficiary of this wave of business opportunities.
The trend of low-end mobile phones hits CMOS PA
CMOS PA is taking advantage of the size and cost advantages in the mid-to-low-priced mobile phone market, and the market share is expected to increase to 15%? 20%, and GaAs PA manufacturers will further launch the Fab-lite strategy to further consolidate their opponents' offensive, in order to consolidate the market share of high-end mobile phones and mid-to-low-priced mobile phones at the same time.
Xu Hanzhou, a researcher at the Semiconductor Research Center of the Tuoji Industry Research Institute, said that the business opportunity for smartphones to replace feature phones is about to erupt in emerging markets and become the growth driver for global smartphone shipments. In this market, component prices will be the decisive key factor. Under the trend of low component prices, CMOS PA manufacturers are expected to hold the dual advantages of price and size in the mid-to-low-priced mobile phone market. The market for CMOS PA is expected to increase to 15% in 2016? 20%.
Xu Hanzhou further took Qualcomm's RF 360 solution (Figure 2) supporting Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as an example, which used Envelope Power Tracking technology to improve the efficiency of CMOS PA and 0.18 micron (μm) CMOS The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process optimizes additional power efficiency (PAE), which not only reduces the footprint by more than half compared to traditional PAs, but also reduces the radio frequency (RF) power consumption by as much as 30%.
Figure 2 Qualcomm RF 360 solution
However, although CMOS PA has the advantages of size and price, its efficiency is still lower than that of GaAs PA. Therefore, high-end smart phones that require high standby time will still mainly use GaAs solutions, and GaAs PA manufacturers will also be in the design of GaAs PA. Packet power tracking technology is added to highlight the differences in device characteristics from CMOS PA. It is understood that Samsung Galaxy Note 3 uses GaAs PA solution with packet power tracker.
Xu Hanzhou believes that in addition to the use of packet power tracking technology to enhance the penetration of products in the high-end mobile phone market, GaAs PA companies will also accelerate the development of multi-frequency multi-mode power amplifiers (MMPA). As for the mid-to-low price mobile phone market, GaAs PA manufacturers may simultaneously develop CMOS PA technology and move towards a light wafer foundry model, narrowing the price gap with CMOS PA.
Xu Hanzhou pointed out that GaAs PA manufacturers use the vertical division of labor model to hand over large and low-cost markets to professional GaAs wafer foundries, which will avoid excessive capital expenditures in the establishment of wafer fab capacity. The model will be The main strategy of most GaAs PA vendors. As long as Taiwan GaAs wafer foundries keep up with the pace of process development and prudently expand production, they will seize an important industrial position under this trend.
According to the latest research report of the Tuoji Industry Research Institute, smartphones with more than US $ 450 in 2012 accounted for 55% of total shipments. However, with the rapid growth of low- and medium-priced mobile phone shipments driven by emerging markets, their proportion in 2013 will be Only 47% is left, and only 40% is left in 2014, and the proportion of shipments under $ 300 will increase significantly to 32%, and changes in mobile phone prices will bring the inevitable development of local component manufacturers in mainland China. On the occasion, a new force that cannot be ignored by international semiconductor manufacturers is rapidly emerging.
Chinese chip maker gains momentum
Due to the late start of the market in mainland China, most local component manufacturers mostly use low-cost strategies to seize the business opportunities of low- and mid-priced mobile phones. However, at the same time, mainland Chinese chip manufacturers such as HiSilicon, Rui Dike, and Yunying Valley have been The baseband chip, processor, display and other fields have broken through the technology shackles, and have sent battle posts to international chip makers in order to accelerate the cannibalization of the low-cost mobile phone market in mainland China.
Xu Yifei said that the low-cost mobile phone market in mainland China is very sensitive to cost, so it attracts local IC designers with strong cost control capabilities to invest heavily in this market. Most of these manufacturers first open up their territory with low-cost strategies and have a certain market. After the occupation, the next-generation technology will be used to expand the cost-effective smartphone market.
Xu Yifei gave an example. At the end of 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Mainland China government was about to issue a TD-LTE license. Although Qualcomm still dominates the integration of application processors (AP) and baseband chips, if you observe the bidding results of China Mobile, you will find HiSilicon The proportion of products purchased has also gradually increased. It is understood that the current HiSilicon latest technology can already make a five-mode ten-band solution, in the future will likely gradually enter the Qualcomm market from the low-cost mobile phone market. Not only HiSilicon but also Reidico are rising rapidly. Ruidi is good at hardware design and integration technology, and has always been a market bargain hunter. In the second half of this year, Ruidi has officially entered the smartphone processor market. The latest products have been launched, and the industry expects Ruidi's ultra-low price The processor solution will push smartphone prices to a new low.
In fact, in addition to grabbing multi-core processors, Xiaomi, Newman, Zhuopu, TCL and other low-cost mobile phone brands in mainland China have also begun to use the 5 million pixel front lens, 13 million pixel rear lens and Full high-definition (FHD) screen highlights the product's cost-effective features. In view of this, a batch of monitors has been mass produced by Yunyinggu, a Shenzhen manufacturer in mainland China, in the second half of this year, using algorithms to increase panel brightness and remove redundant colors, allowing amorphous silicon (a-Si) panels to be directly resolution by WVGA Upgrade to HD or FHD display effects, while maintaining the color saturation of color pictures.
As for the smartphone lens market, two manufacturers, Gekewei and Spyco, are good at each. The former uses back-illuminated (BSI) technology and the latter uses front-illuminated (FSI) technology, which has been launched this year. The 5 million pixel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor used in low-cost smartphones is packaged in a COB (Chip On Board) mode. The unit price is about 1.4? 1.6 US dollars. It is expected to be a big attack in 2014 Ultra-low-cost smartphone market.
Obviously, with the concerted efforts of IC designers and foundries in the semiconductor market in mainland China, the output value will jump significantly, becoming a huge new force that international chip makers cannot ignore, and how will international semiconductor manufacturers target the middle of the TD-LTE era Low-cost mobile phone business opportunities to change operating strategies will become an important key to the company's profit.
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