Development status of China's memory chip industry

          Development status of China's memory chip industry

Just as steel and oil are the "food" of the industrial era, chip is the most important "food" for the development of communications industry. Without chips, devices such as personal computers, smartphones, digital consumer products, communication base stations and optical communications will not function properly.

1.What is a memory chip？

As one of the three major categories of integrated circuits, memory chips are widely used in the fields of memory, consumer electronics, intelligent terminals and solid-state storage hard disks. Their sales account for more than 25% of the whole chip industry, reflecting the level of semiconductor development in a country or region. It comes with data, and memory chips are needed where data is available. Besides, with the development of emerging industries such as big data and Internet of things, the storage industry is closely related to information security.

Memory chips can be divided into volatile memory and non-volatile memory according to whether the data stored after power failure will be lost. DRAM and NAND Flash are the representatives of these two types of memory respectively. Although there are many kinds of memory chips, DRAM and NAND Flash have become the main components of the memory chip industry in terms of output value.

In May 2018, memory chips still topped the global semiconductor revenue mix at 32%, according to SIA. With the demand of downstream application, memory chip has become the main force of integrated circuit industry and the main driving force of semiconductor industry development.

Global semiconductor revenue structure in May 2018 (unit: %)

2. Current situation of China's memory chip industry

In 2017, the market pattern of integrated circuit products in China ranked the top three: memory chips accounted for 30%, specialized integrated circuits accounted for 28% and analog integrated circuits accounted for 17%. As a global manufacturing base for electronics, China has long been the largest market for memory products

Proportion of China's integrated circuit product sales breakdown structure in 2017 (unit: %)

As the largest consumer of integrated circuits in China, the market share of its own enterprises is very low, with huge consumption and low self-sufficiency rate. As of the first half of 2018, the import volume of integrated circuits in China has reached 146.712 billion us dollars.

Thanks to the rapid development of domestic smart phones, China has become the world's largest supplier of memory chips, and mainly purchases foreign memory chips. In 2014, China purchased about 20 percent of the world's memory chips, with a purchase amount of up to $10 billion. In 2015, China purchased about 30 percent of the global memory chip market.

Global DRAM, NAND memory chips are basically monopolized by the us, Japan and South Korea, and samsung, SK hynix, micron, Toshiba and other giants have made a lot of money. Subject to the financial and technical defects, China's domestic chip manufacturers are still small in number, small in scale and backward in products.