The data shows that among the industry sectors, the semiconductor sector was among the top gainers, closing up 1.53% in a single day. Specifically, the advanced packaging sector led the gains, closing up by 4.18% in a single day; Many stocks in Chiplet concept stocks are also active.

According to industry insiders, Chiplet can achieve the performance equivalent to that of more advanced technology in the case of slightly backward technology, which has become one of the industrial trends. Good investment opportunities in the industry include carrier board, sealing and testing equipment, etc. However, some insiders also reminded that from a technical point of view, new technologies will also be accompanied by new problems, and we cannot expect technological development to happen overnight.

What is Chiplet?

Chiplets generally refer to core particles, but they are also translated as "chiplets", which refer to prefabricated chips with specific functions that can be combined and integrated. Core is a combination of different functional chip dies, and in a sense, it is also a combination of different IPS.

Cinda Securities said in the research report that under the current technological progress, Chiplet scheme can reduce the complexity and cost of chip design, which is conducive to the subsequent product iteration and accelerate the product listing cycle.

Specifically, Chiplet encapsulates bare chips meeting specific functions through die-to-die internal interconnection technology, forming a new form of IP reuse. The small chip scheme based on bare chip is to divide the traditional SoC into multiple cores with single function or multi-function combination, and interconnect them into a complete complex functional chip through a substrate in the package, which is a hard-core ip provided in the form of bare chip.

"With the concept of small chips, for some IPS, you don't need to design and produce them yourself. You just need to buy silicon chips that others have already realized, and then integrate them into a package." AVIC Securities Research Institute said. However, they believe that advanced packaging is the premise of realizing small chip, and to realize small chip signal transmission, it is necessary to develop advanced packaging technology with high density and large bandwidth wiring.

"In the post-Moore era, small chips have brought many development opportunities to China's integrated circuit industry," said Core Primitive Shares in response to investors' questions.

Core original shares believe that, first of all, the chip design link can lower the threshold of large-scale chip design; Secondly, semiconductor IP companies such as Core Yuan can give full play to their own value, upgrade from semiconductor IP licensees to small chip suppliers, effectively reduce the design cost of chip customers, and especially help system vendors, Internet vendors and other enterprises lacking chip design experience and resources to develop their own chip products; Finally, domestic chip manufacturing and packaging plants can expand their business scope and improve the utilization rate of production lines. Especially when the development of high-end advanced technologies is blocked, they can participate in the development of cutting-edge technologies by providing Chiplet based on other process nodes for high-end chips.

Technical bottleneck gives birth to new concepts.

"Under the background of the development of the semiconductor industry, small chips have become one of the industrial trends." Yang Lu, a senior researcher at Debon Fund, thinks that this is a trend. In his view, small chips can achieve a relatively higher transistor density by stacking, and achieve performance equivalent to that of more advanced processes when the process is slightly backward. Importantly, the gap between domestic related companies and overseas companies in this field is relatively small, so it is a feasible way to strengthen China's semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

Wang Bin, fund manager of Zheshang Fund, said that Chiplet is the core technology of advanced packaging testing. Chiplet technology can improve the performance as much as possible under the limited wafer process conditions. In this environment, small chip technology has received extra attention.

A TMT professional in Shanghai told China, a brokerage firm, that chip stacking is the key to the concept of chiplet. With the development of the industry, there are more and more types and quantities of chips used in equipment, and it is a new trend to integrate various chips into micro-systems or modules.

He told China, a brokerage company, that the chip technology in the past was bare chip, and the finished chip was packaged with plastic shell, metal shell or ceramic shell. Under the protection of the insulator shell, the chip is not easy to be damaged and has superior performance. A small chip is equivalent to stacking a dozen or twenty unpacked bare chips directly together, and with the protection of the shell, it becomes a chipset. The function of this chipset is equivalent to doubling ten or twenty times.

"Stacked chips are probably chips with different functions." He told China, a brokerage firm, for example that with the evolution of mobile phones from 3G, 4G to 5G, the number of RF chips in mobile phones increased from a dozen to dozens, and then to more than 100. "The mobile phone is so big, there are so many communication chips and RF chips that it can't be put down." He said that in this case, there are two solutions. One is to make the original chip more powerful, such as reducing the weight of a single chip; Secondly, the chips with multiple functions are directly stacked together to form a small module and installed in the mobile phone, the main purpose is to save volume.

In his view, the rise of Chiplet also has an important industry background, that is, the original chip will move towards a new generation every one or two years, but with the technology reaching a certain level, the optimization process of the chip itself has encountered bottlenecks. "I feel that in the past two years, the update iteration has not started so fast. The optimization of a single chip may be close to the limit and cannot be broken, forcing the original technical path to change. At this time, chip stacking has become a new idea, which also saves volume and improves performance to a certain extent. "

Optimistic about sub-industries such as sealing testing equipment.

It is worth noting that people in the industry are optimistic about this new technological path, but at the same time they also give some hints about the risks of development.

A semiconductor chip investor in Shanghai believes that chip stacking is not so difficult technically, and it is more efficient to improve the function of a chip module in this way without advanced manufacturing technology. But there are still several problems in this process.

First of all, in the past, a single chip was broken. Just take the phone apart and replace it with a specific chip. However, if the chipset produced under the small chip technology is damaged, maintenance will be a big problem. And this point has not been fully concerned and valued by the market at present.

Secondly, at present, companies that can make small chips in the industry pay more attention to the packaging process, but the whole process, upstream chip manufacturing and downstream packaging need to be completed in coordination, so an enterprise with only one business is equivalent to "missing a leg", and it is not easy to make small chips well.

Then, at this stage, which investment opportunities in the small chip industry chain are more optimistic for institutional investors?

Yang Lu believes that carrier board and sealing and testing equipment are relatively good investment opportunities in this field. Wang Bin thinks, around the small chip technology, semiconductor packaging test equipment and materials, IP licensing companies, semiconductor packaging test factory, etc. Everyone has the opportunity to improve the value of their products. AVIC Securities Research Institute believes that the development of chiplets involves the whole semiconductor industry chain, which will affect all participants in the industry chain, from EDA manufacturers, wafer manufacturing and packaging companies, core IP suppliers, chiplet product and system design companies to fabless design companies. They suggest paying attention to domestic platform-based IP suppliers, enterprises actively deploying 2.5D packaging technology, and EDA suppliers.

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