Since 2020, the emergence of the new crown epidemic has deeply affected the pace of industries in many countries. Nevertheless, technological innovation is still moving forward, 5G is on schedule, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving are steadily advancing...
The development of these technological events is inseparable from the MCU industry. Since 2020, there have been some major changes in the MUC industry. For example, Arm, which provides IP cores to many MCU companies, was acquired by Nvidia, the sound of MCU shortages and price increases continued from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, and the number of MCUs with RISC-V cores began to increase up...
To this end, industry insiders have counted the six major events that have occurred in the MCU industry since 2020:
1、The rising tide of MCU out-of-stock prices continued from the beginning of the year to the end of the year
In December 2020, many MCU manufacturers announced price increases. ST officially issued a price increase notice a few days ago. Starting January 1, 2021, the price of all products will increase; Japanese MCU manufacturer Renesas Electronics also issued a price increase notice not long ago, and the delivery time has been extended to 4 months. above.
There may be several reasons for the MCU out-of-stock price increase:
First, the time period from wafer to chip shipment is about half a year. It actually takes a long time for a chip to be designed, manufactured, packaged, tested, and then shipped. Even if the time for design and trial production is not counted, for a mature chip using mature technology, it usually takes about half a year from the beginning of wafer manufacturing, to packaging and testing, and then to shipment. The original chip factory arranges the production capacity in advance according to the order schedule. If the stock is too much, the sales are blocked and the original factory will be greatly harmed.
The second is that the chip factory has reduced wafer stocking. At the beginning of this year, the new crown epidemic broke out and all walks of life were affected for a while. Many factories shut down, trade was also blocked, many companies laid off employees, reduced expenditures and reduced expenditures. In the first half of the year, everyone had expectations for the future. Generally not optimistic. After the original factory saw this situation, when planning in the first half of the year, they all chose to reduce the stocking of wafers. It is said that some original factories have reduced the stocking by more than 1/3.
Third, foundries generally give their production lines to low-profit products such as MOSFETs during the off-season, but once the peak season comes, they generally give way to high-profit ICs. In the second half of the year, both domestic and overseas are peak seasons. Therefore, many products such as MOSFETs and low-profit MCUs are more difficult to obtain production capacity.
It is precisely because of the superposition of these multiple factors that the semiconductor market has begun to have tight production capacity and supply shortages. Coupled with the impact of the price increase of wafer foundries and packaging plants, chip makers have also had to increase chip prices.
2. NVIDIA acquires Arm for US$40 billion
On September 14, NVIDIA and SoftBank announced a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire British chips from SoftBank and its Vision Fund for US$40 billion. Design subsidiary Arm.
According to the agreement, Nvidia will pay SoftBank Group US$12 billion in cash and US$21.5 billion worth of NVIDIA shares, including the US$2 billion that was paid immediately when the contract was signed.
The two parties stated in a joint statement that if Arm's future performance reaches a specific target, SoftBank may also receive an additional $5 billion in cash or stock. After the acquisition, Nvidia will also issue $1.5 billion in equity to Arm employees.
If Nvidia succeeds in acquiring Arm, this will be one of the largest M&A transactions this year, and it may also be the largest semiconductor transaction in history.
The acquisition of Arm will change Nvidia’s current over-reliance on GPU products. Through this acquisition, Nvidia will obtain more mobile CPU/GPU IP, which will greatly enrich its product line and allow Nvidia to enter mobile processors. At the same time, it is expected to extend its advantages on the graphics card side to the mobile side.
3. the increase of RISC-V architecture MCU
In October, Japanese MCU manufacturer Renesas Electronics announced the launch of technical IP cooperation with Andes Technology, a supplier of RISC-V architecture embedded CPU cores and related SoC development environments. Renesas chose AndesCore 32-bit RISC-V CPU core IP to apply to its brand-new dedicated standard products, and will begin to provide customers with samples in the second half of 2021.
4. the demand for automotive MCUs grows
On December 4, there were media reports that the semiconductor industry's capacity shortage problem was transmitted to the automotive industry. Due to the lack of automotive chips, the two modules, ESP (Electronic Stability Program System) and ECU (Electronic Control Unit), SAIC-Volkswagen and FAW-Volkswagen will face suspension of production risk.
Although FAW-Volkswagen responded on December 5, saying that the production of new cars was indeed affected to a certain extent, but it did not completely stop production as rumors outside. From the response, it can be seen that the shortage of automotive-grade chips does exist.
Vehicle-level chips can be divided into MCU, memory chips, power devices (IGBT and MOSFET), ISP, power management chips, radio frequency devices, sensors (CIS, acceleration sensors, etc.), GPU/ASIC/FPGA/AI chips, etc.
In 2020, the global automotive-grade chip market is expected to be 300 billion yuan, accounting for about 10% of the global semiconductor market. According to estimates, in the future, the value of car-grade chip bicycles will increase from 2,800 yuan to 12,000 yuan.
For example, in terms of MCU, traditional cars use more than 70 MCU chips per car on average, and each smart car is expected to use more than 300 MCU chips. The demand for automotive-grade MCUs will increase significantly.
5. The trend of combining AI and MCU is becoming more and more obvious
In August 2020, NXP (NXP) released the eIQ machine learning (ML) software to support the Glow neural network (NN) compiler, bringing the industry's first implementation for NXP's i.MX RT crossover MCU Provide a higher performance neural network compiler application with a lower memory footprint. The Glow compiler was developed by Facebook and can integrate target-specific optimizations.
NXP uses this ability to use a neural network operator library suitable for Arm Cortex-M cores and Cadence Tensilica HiFi 4 DSP to maximize i.MX The reasoning performance of RT685 and i.MX RT1050 and RT1060. In addition, this feature has been integrated into NXP's eIQ machine learning software development environment and is provided free of charge in NXP's MCUXpresso SDK.
ST launched the STM32Cube.AI toolkit in 2019, which can interoperate with popular deep learning libraries, convert and apply any artificial neural network to STM32 microcontrollers (MCUs). The Cube.AI tool is an AI expansion package of CubeMX, which can be downloaded in CubeMX or separately.
The neural network model frameworks supported by STM32Cube.AI include Lasagne, Keras, Caffe, ConvNetJs, Tensorflow Lite, and frameworks that can be exported to ONNX standards (PyTorch™, Microsoft® Cognitive Toolkit, MATLAB® and more).
6.the way to attack wireless MCU
As a complement to the STM32 RF connectivity product portfolio, the STM32WL system-on-chip integrates a general-purpose microcontroller and sub-GHz wireless control unit on the same chip. It is the world's first wireless microcontroller that integrates a LoRa transceiver on an SoC chip . Previously, LoRa wireless solutions on the market were either discrete microcontrollers and transceivers, or the two components used the same package, but used different die, that is, system-in-package. STM32WL empowers IoT applications by achieving simpler, more flexible, higher integration and more energy-efficient designs.
In October of this year, the STM32WB wireless MCU product line added a new one. The low-cost version of STM32WB55, STM32WB35/30, will push the price/performance ratio to the extreme.
In terms of cost, compared to STM32WB55/50, STM32WB35 has a lower cost. STM32WB30 is the lowest cost ST Bluetooth + 802.15.4 solution.
In terms of peripherals, compared with STM32WB55, STM32WB35 has no LCD;
In terms of radio frequency, STM32WB55 supports dynamic multi-protocol, STM32WB35/50/30 only supports a certain protocol; in terms of packaging, STM32WB55 has the most package types, STM32WB35/50/30 only has QFN48, and is compatible with STM32WB55 QFN48 pin 2 pin.
In July of this year, NXP announced that MCUXpresso supports its Wi-Fi®/Bluetooth® combination solution and i.MX RT MCU crossover processor, which greatly simplifies product development. With this new integration capability, NXP has expanded the connectivity capabilities of the EdgeVerse™ edge computing and security platform.
By pre-integrating driver support in MCUXpresso SDK, NXP provides developers with a flexible and extensible platform to help accelerate compliance, significantly shorten time to market, and simplify the deployment of Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combinations . These new platforms make it possible for MCU, Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combination devices to join forces to help developers flexibly meet the performance and power consumption requirements of IoT, industrial, automotive, and communication infrastructure applications.
From these events in the MCU industry, we can see that the outlook for MCU is very good.
