The head companies of home appliance companies have all entered the chip race track.
Recently, Midea said on the interactive platform that Midea entered the chip field in the second half of 2018 and began mass production in 2021. The main chip type to be put into production is MCU control chips, with an annual output of about 10 million.
According to a reporter from Kechuangban Daily, in addition to MCU control chips, Midea's future also plans to cover chips in the field of home appliances, such as power chips, power chips, and IoT chips, with a target of shipping 80 million chips in 2022.
Then, on the afternoon of January 11, Hisense also released China's first fully self-developed 8K AI image quality chip, filling the gap in the domestic ultra-high definition picture quality chip. At present, the chip has been used in the whole machine, and is expected to cover many series of display products, including Hisense and Toshiba this year.
At present, in addition to Midea, Hisense, Gree, TCL, Haier and other home appliance enterprises have been in the chip field layout. According to Leopard data, China's smart home market has reached 435.4 billion yuan in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound rate of 15.8% in the next five years. Some data show that the domestic home appliance industry chip market is about 50 billion yuan, and the localization matching rate is only 5%.
This means that, due to the huge gap in the home appliance chip market, home appliance enterprises also have the hidden danger that the chip is "stuck in the neck".
Although the layout and achievements of a number of enterprises such as Midea and Hisense in chip industrialization have made more consumer electronics enterprises and manufacturers see a broad space for independent chip research and development, home appliance enterprises still have a long way to go in the chip field.
Midea, Hisense self-developed chips to alleviate the "chip shortage" of smart homes?
Prior to this, in order to expand the research and development of high-end household appliances, Midea established a long-term cooperative relationship with domestic chip R & D leader Xipeng Weiwei, and even set up a "electronic technology joint laboratory" to carry out customized R & D and production. In the field of variable frequency air conditioners, Midea has also formed a stable cooperation with the domestic chip manufacturing leader Shilan Wei.
However, with the setback of Huawei's chip supply chain, many companies are beginning to realize the importance of developing their own chips. Some people in the industry commented that the continuous strengthening of chip control in the United States is a "sword hanging over its head", and the home appliance industry still has to make plans early.
According to Tianyan data, Midea, through its subsidiary Midea Innovation Investment Co., Ltd. invested in Shanghai Meiren Semiconductor Co., Ltd. in December 2018, focusing on the development, design and sales of semiconductor chips.
It is reported that Shanghai Meiren Semiconductor Co., Ltd. mainly covers four product lines of home appliance chips, including MCU, power chips, power chips and IoT chips, and is committed to providing whole-house intelligent solutions based on the Internet of things.
In 2019, Midea's loT company, which focuses on the research and development and application of smart home appliances, released the customized intelligent chip HolaCon, for home appliances and the high-performance and low-cost intelligent connection module equipped with HolaCon chip, and said that it had been fully applied to the full range of smart home appliances in the United States.
According to reports, based on the chip can protect the key information and data in home services, on the one hand protect the data security of smart home appliances, on the other hand, support partners to enter the intelligent ecology of the United States.
Since then, in order to lay out the smart home field, Midea spent 200 million yuan to participate in the strategic placement of unicorns of AI chips during the Cambrian period, and signed cooperation agreements with Cambrian on smart home appliances, intelligent robots and other fields.
Since 2021, Midea has continued to develop its own technology for smart home chips and established Meiken Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. its business scope includes integrated circuit chip and product manufacturing, integrated circuit chip and product sales, semiconductor discrete device manufacturing and so on.
IPM module and MCU chip are very important chip components of household appliances. Up to now, Midea has achieved mass production on the variable frequency drive IPM module in the field of air conditioners, refrigerators and washing machines, and the output value has exceeded 100 million yuan. Now Midea has announced that the MCU control chip will be mass produced, which will not only meet its own business needs, but also help to serve the needs of the domestic market.
Similarly, on January 11, Hisense Video released China's first fully self-developed 8K AI image quality chip, which is also the fifth generation of Hisense's picture quality chip. Earlier, at the annual consumer electronics technology exhibition CES, Hisense ULED 8K TV 85U9H, equipped with this self-developed picture quality chip, won the "CES 2022 Home Audio and Video Terminal category Innovation Award".
New Consumer Daily learned that Hisense will focus on four chip segments in the future: display product line, SoC product line, IoT product line and PMU product line, committed to providing overall solutions in the display field.
In addition to picture quality chips, in 2020, Hisense's screen-end control chips shipped more than 50 million pieces in the whole year, accounting for more than 50% of the world, ranking first in the world.
Yu Zhitao, president of Hisense Video, said in an interview: "there is a lot of room for domestic alternatives for chips, especially in the context of intelligent household appliances, the demand for chips is increasing day by day. Therefore, the company's R & D investment in the chip industry is not limited to the field of television and display, but the broader space in the future lies in home appliance smart chips."
Can the influx of home appliance companies into chip manufacturing ease the "jam"?
Reviewing the history of "core-making" of home appliance enterprises, TCL is the earliest household appliance enterprise in China to participate in chip research and development. It has invested in consumer chip manufacturing enterprises as early as the beginning of the 21st century, and further set up semiconductor investment funds to pay attention to chip design projects.
In 2018, TCL Chairman Li Dongsheng said in an interview with the media that the company has invested in Cambrian and Shangtang Technology to lay out the field of AI chips. But on the product side, TCL mainly adopts the cooperation mode, and its smart screen products carry Baidu Swan voice chip at the beginning of 2021.
Haier also has a layout in the field of smart home appliance chips. In 2015, Haier established Haier Youjia Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., focusing on customized IoT chips. In the following years, the subsidiary successively iterated a number of "cloud core" chips, together with the jointly developed Internet of things operating system, so that Haier air conditioners have interconnection and interworking capabilities.
In the summer of 2018, Dong Mingzhu, chairman of Gree Electric Appliance, announced that he would invest 50 billion in chip research and development, and then injected 1 billion yuan to establish Zhuhai Zero Border Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd., which attracted close attention from all parties.
In June 2021, in response to questions from investors, Gree said that the company's research in the semiconductor field has made significant progress, self-developed chips and devices have been mass-produced and verified, and core technologies have been independently developed. Among them, Gree 32-bit series MCU chip has been used in Gree intelligent air conditioners, fans and other products.
According to reports, as a series of Gree smart family chips, its MCU chip integrates AI computing power, and can be intelligently controlled for image recognition, human-computer interaction, motor drive and other functions.
Hisense is in the acquisition of Toshiba TV, based on its picture quality chip design team to further carry out TV AI picture quality chip research and development, Hisense also said that in addition to the self-developed 8K AI picture quality chip, it will continue to release a number of TV SoC chips in the near future.
Yu Zhitao lamented at the chip press conference that the investment in chip research and development is a "bottomless pit", which requires a lot of capital investment and talent support, but whether or not to have independent chip technology is related to the upgrading of the industry and the survival of the enterprise. and whether the production cost of the product can be further optimized.
Before Gree Electric Appliances laid out its own chip research and development, Dong Mingzhu revealed that the company spends billions of yuan on chip procurement every year.
In addition, Yu Zhitao also stressed that smart TV must be supported by underlying chip technology if it wants to achieve extended functions such as AI voice control, content networking, intelligent picture quality adjustment, and interconnection with other electrical appliances.
According to Ericsson statistics, semiconductors account for about 10% of the AIoT industry chain, and according to the global AIoT market size of US $374 billion in 2021, the value of semiconductors is expected to reach US $37.4 billion, or about 250 billion RMB. With the improvement of landing applications and demand, the chip sector will focus on benefiting.
Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, analyzed that private enterprises do not necessarily need All in chips, but can get involved in proprietary chips, chip design and industrial chains related to their own products. There are many chip design companies in China, and design is often application-oriented, and small companies can also do it.
As far as the current layout is concerned, no matter Midea, Gree or Hisense, they focus on chip design and development in the field of smart home appliance chip research and development, and many of them are customized application chips, which can be combined with products quickly.
In the more "difficult" field of chip manufacturing, Li Dongsheng said frankly in an interview with the media that the investment in chip manufacturing plants is too large for ordinary enterprises to bear.
Domestic manufacturers with production capacity are still concentrated in Zhongying Electronics, China Micro Corporation, Zhaoyi Innovation and other professional semiconductor production enterprises. While Gree, TCL and other household appliance enterprises mainly cut into the production field through equity investment.
"Chip technology is a great test of the strength, endurance and competitiveness of enterprises," Yu Zongguang, deputy general manager of China Kexin Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd., told the New Consumer Daily. There are two key breakthroughs in this industry: one is to complete the accumulation of technology to launch stable and reliable products; the other is to let the products pass various tests and then push them to the market to achieve commercialization. It is a long process to complete these two breakthroughs, and many enterprises around the world have withdrawn in this process, and the elimination rate is very high. China's home appliance enterprises are crossing these two stages, which is also very rare in the industry.
According to Huaxi Securities Research report, with the upgrading of intelligence, high-end refrigerators need to use at least five sets of intelligent power modules, one to eight power management chips such as air conditioners, washing machines and dishwashers, the main control MCU will be upgraded from 8 bits to 32 bits, and the number of Bluetooth protocols and sensors will increase.
In the future, if we want to land on the smart home of the whole house and access the Internet of things system, the demand for the quality and quantity of household appliance processing chips will continue to rise. This is also the most direct challenge faced by the major domestic manufacturers.
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