JW Insights: More Chinese companies develop FPGA products, bringing golden opportunities for domestic interface IP companies
4-5 minutesJW Insights: More Chinese companies develop FPGA products, bringing golden opportunities for domestic interface IP companies
By Kate Yuan
More Chinese companies are accelerating the development of their own FPGA chips, creating new opportunities for interface IP companies as their upstream suppliers, according to a JW Insights article on September 27.
FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by the users. FPGAs are programmable with flexibility, high performance, and low energy consumption compared with CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. FPGAs have clear advantages in time-to-market and costs.
Although FPGA is a niche market compared with CPU and GPU, it is an important AI-related chip and plays an irreplaceable role in communications, data centers, and industrial applications. In recent years, the value of FPGA has become more and more prominent with the rise of AI computing, 5G communication, and heterogeneous computing.
According to market research firm Frost & Sullivan, the global market size of FPGAs is expected to grow from $6.86 billion in 2021 to $12.58 billion in 2025, with a CAGR of about 16.4%.
The Chinese market is on a rapid rise. Frost & Sullivan said China’s FPGA market has grown from about RMB6.55 billion ($905.87 million) in 2016 to about RMB15.03 billion ($2.08 billion) in 2020, with a CAGR of about 23.1%. With the acceleration of domestic substitution efforts, the Chinese market is expected to reach RMB33.22 billion ($4.59 billion) by 2025, with a 16.6% CAGR in 2020-2025. Currently the international FPGA suppliers occupy more than 80% of China’s market.
The good news is that many domestic FPGA companies have begun to enter some more specialized markets and have and shaped up. They include Anlogic Infotech (安路科技), Pango Microsystems (紫光同创), Fudan Microelectronics (复旦微), Chengdu Sino Microelectronics (成都华微), and Intelligence Silicon(智多晶).
Market Analysis believes that FPGAs have ushered in an excellent opportunity for domestic substitutes caused by geopolitical changes.
The IP industry, as a upstream part for the FPGA industry chain, attracts tremendous attention accordingly.
A mature IP module can help FPGA design companies focus more resources on building the core competitiveness of their products, rather than having to independently develop all the IPs required for a chip. This can not only improve product reliability, but also significantly reduce chip design costs and R&D cycles.
For FPGAs, processes, gate-level scale and SerDes IP speed are the core indicators of current product performance. Among them, SerDes IP technology is particularly critical to developing FPGAs.
IPnest said Synopsys, Cadence, and Rambus are in the first echelon of the world's leading IP companies list, all of which are from the US, and the highest speed of their SerDes PHY has reached 112Gbps.
However, the domestic interface IP industry is still in the catching-up stage, and very few domestic companies can provide mature interface IP for FPGAs.
In recent years with the support of the governmental policies and the joint efforts of the whole industry, many interface IP companies have emerged in China, including Kniulink (牛芯半导体), Innosilicon (芯动科技), Akrostar (芯耀辉), Actt (锐成芯微), and Naneng Micro (纳能微).
The 28Gbps SerDes IP launched by Kniulink is the first ultra-high-speed, high-specification SerDes IP product on the domestic 14/12nm process line. The 32Gbps SerDes IP is expected to be developed by the end of the year.
Although the domestic interface IP industry has achieved gratifying achievements in recent years, they still face huge challenges. How to find the real needs of domestic FPGA companies, and how to improve the compatibility of interface IP products are two major questions to answer.
As the FPGA market continues to expand, and the domestic substitution trend stays, there will be more demand for SerDes IP. Domestic IP suppliers represented by Kniulink may have more to celebrate.
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rf front-end are doing good too
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JW Insights: China's RF front-end chip companies are rising rapidly
2 minutesBy Li Panpan
China's RF front-end chip companies are rising rapidly, with an established competition pattern in the smartphone market. And they still need to work hard on technologies for filters, high-density packaging, and high-performance power amplifiers. These are the key points of a report on China’s RF frond-end chip sector by JW Insights analyst Zhao Yi. More summaries from the report.
The global smartphone market is sluggish in 2022, and the Chinese smartphone market is worse with a prolonged replacement cycle and insufficient purchasing power. In the next 2-3 years, China's smartphone sales may remain at 270-280 million units annually.
The China-produced front-end chips are used widely in both low-end and flagship Chinese smartphones. The global market share of China's RF front-end chip companies has reached more than 10%. If Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers are excluded, the localization rate of RF front-end devices in China has reached more than 25%.
The Chinese companies have occupied a large market in Phase2/Phase5N PA and discrete switch low-noise amplifiers. They are catching up in fields like LPAMiF/PAMiF and DiFEM/LFEM, and they still lag behind in LPAMiD /PAMiD and high-performance filters like TC-SAW and IHP-SAW.
With the continuous improvement of China’s PA module companies and technology breakthroughs in filter companies, it will be a trend for PA and filter companies to integrate in the future. It is expected that Chinese PAMiD will be gradually introduced in 2022, with a certain scale of shipments in 2023.
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doing good in lidar tech too.
what happened to velodyne? they used to be numba one lol
Chinese LiDAR startup Hesai Technology hits a major milestone of delivering 10,000 LiDAR in one month
3 minutes
Chinese LiDAR startup Hesai Technology hits a major milestone of delivering 10,000 LiDAR in one month
By Greg Gao
China’s leading LiDAR manufacturer Hesai Technology(禾赛科技) hit a monthly shipment record of over 10,000 units of its new hybrid solid-state LiDAR AT128, making it the world’s first vehicle-grade LiDAR company to achieve that milestone, the company announced on September 29.
Hesai’s AT128 is an automotive grade, hybrid solid-state LiDAR designed for OEM-installed series production vehicles. It has a 200-meter detection range at 10% reflection, and also integrates 128 laser channels together through ASIC technology, achieving a 1200 x 128 overall resolution and generating 1.53 million data points per second. AT128 accurately captures all objects in detail to see “far and clear”, providing outstanding perception capability for advanced driver assistance system(ADAS), according to the company.
Hesai AT128 has secured millions of orders from auto OEMs, including Li Auto(理想汽车), JIDU(集度), HiPhi(高合汽车), and Lotus(路特斯).
The global LiDAR market in 2020 was $1.766 billion, and the penetration of LiDARs in ADAS was 1.5 percent. It is estimated that by 2026, the market will expand to $5.718 billion, and the penetration will increase to 41%, statistics from semiconductor consultancy Yole Développement showed.
Market research firm Gartner predicts that the hybrid solid-state LiDAR solution for higher-level autonomous vehicles will also be replaced by solid-state LiDAR with better performance and easier integration capability. With the advent of mass production, the price of in-vehicle sensors, including LiDAR, has become more affordable. By 2027, the cost of sensors required for L3 and above autonomous driving ability will drop by about 12% compared to 2020, Gartner pointed out.
JW Insights believes that the automotive-grade LiDAR market for autonomous driving is still in its infancy, the suppliers are relatively scattered, and there is enormous growth potential in the future.
China’s booming EV industry brings unprecedented opportunities to local LiDAR manufacturers. With the first-mover advantages, Chinese LiDAR players, including Hesai(禾赛科技) and RoboSense(速腾聚创), Livox Technology(览沃科技), and tech giant such as Huawei are expected to become the top-tier vendors.
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