Cause: from December 22 to 23, 2021, China integrated circuit design industry annual conference (iccad2021) was held in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Many leading integrated circuit design enterprises at home and abroad had in-depth exchanges on industrial trends and product dynamics. This report aims to sort out the trend of EDA industry and the latest products of relevant enterprises.
Moore’s law is gradually slowing down, and the integrated circuit industry begins to pay attention to improving the performance and functional complexity of electronic systems from more dimensions. In the past, the change curve of mainstream chip integration and cost basically followed the guidance of Moore’s law. However, as the wafer manufacturing process approached the physical limit, it was difficult to meet the goal of doubling chip integration and system scale in two years by shrinking the transistor process size alone. Although the PPA improvement range of each link of silicon wafer, transistor, chip, system hardware and software is limited within the limited development time, the PPA improvement space at the connection of different links is huge. Therefore, integrated circuit manufacturers began to pay more attention to all links at the system level, and make Moore’s law curve return to the exponential growth track by improving the system energy efficiency ratio, which involves the application of a number of technologies and methods.
Core particle, 2.5d/3d and heterogeneous packaging technology promote the further improvement of chip integration. The characteristic of core particle is to disperse the large-size multi-core design to individual small bare chips, and then make a chip by packaging technology in the way of 3D three-dimensional stack, which can not only bring higher silicon utilization and higher output, but also realize integrated isomerization and integrated heterogeneity, so as to achieve the best performance and maximum flexibility. 2.5d/3d and heterogeneous packaging technology can realize the interconnection of die to die. Compared with traditional packaging methods, it can further reduce the interconnection distance of devices, but the improvement of complexity also poses greater challenges to design methods and simulation methods, and EDA is very important to support advanced packaging.
DTCO can help IC related enterprises realize rapid process development and iteration of chip design process. DTCO refers to design process collaborative optimization. Because the development of advanced process nodes takes a long time and is difficult, in order to speed up the development of process nodes, wafer factories need to work more closely with IC design enterprises to realize faster process development and iteration of chip design process; Integrated circuit design enterprises need to intervene in the process platform development stage earlier to assist the wafer factory to adjust and optimize the device design and process platform development. At present, EDA companies represented by Synopsys, cadence and synon electronics have launched EDA processes and solutions based on DTCO methodology.
AI and cloud computing enabled IC design is the general trend. With the increasing complexity of IC design, the application of AI and cloud computing in EDA field will gradually deepen. 1> With the help of AI algorithm, EDA tools can help customers achieve the optimal PPA goal, greatly improve the efficiency of chip design verification, and help chip design enterprises improve product R & D efficiency. At present, Synopsys, cadence and other overseas EDA giants have corresponding AI design tools or solutions. 2> In IC design, cloud can smooth the resource grabbing problem caused by multi project parallelism, reduce the purchase cost of EDA, and then improve the overall efficiency of R & D. at present, Microsoft cloud, Moore elite and other manufacturers have provided IC Design Enterprises with a variety of IC cloud design solutions.
Investment proposal and investment object
At present, overseas EDA giants have actively deployed in many technical fields such as 2.5d/3d and core heterogeneous packaging, DTCO, AI and cloud. Some leading EDA manufacturers in China have gradually begun to explore relevant directions and launched corresponding products and solutions. In the future, EDA tools are expected to support the integrated circuit industry in more links. EDA companies with complete and strong product matrix and following the industrial development trend are expected to obtain greater opportunities. It is recommended to pay attention to general Lun Electronics (688206, not rated), Huada Jiutian (in the process of IPO), guangliwei (in the process of IPO), core vision, core Huazhang, core and semiconductor, Guowei Sier core, etc.
Risk statement
Domestic substitution is less than expected, R & D progress is less than expected, and industrial policy support is less than expected.
