AICabbr.1. =American Institute of Chemists American Institute of Chemists IC is the collective name for semiconductor component products, including: 1. Integrated circuit (integrated circuit, abbreviation: IC) 2. 2. Transistor. 3. Special electronic components. More broadly speaking

It also involves all electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, circuit boards/PCB boards, and many other related products. 1. Changes in the structure of the world's integrated circuit industry and its development history since the invention of Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958

After the integrated circuit (IC), with the development of silicon planar technology, two important integrated circuits, the bipolar type and the MOS type, were invented in the 1960s, which marked the era of manufacturing electronic machines from tubes and transistors.

A quantum and qualitative leap has occurred, creating an unprecedented integrated circuit industry with extremely strong penetration and vitality.

Looking back at the development history of integrated circuits, we can see that in the more than 40 years since the invention of integrated circuits, the phrase "from circuit integration to system integration" refers to IC products from small-scale integrated circuits (SSI) to today's ultra-large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI).

The best summary of the development process of ULSI is that the development of the entire integrated circuit product has gone through the process from the traditional system-on-board (System-on-board) to the system-on-a-chip (System-on-a-chip).

During this historical process, the world's IC industry has undergone three changes in its industrial structure in order to adapt to technological development and market needs.

The first change: the initial stage of development of the IC industry dominated by processing and manufacturing.

In the 1970s, the mainstream products of integrated circuits were microprocessors, memories and standard general-purpose logic circuits.

During this period, IC manufacturers (IDM) played a major role in the IC market, and IC design only existed as a subsidiary department.

At this time, IC design and semiconductor technology are closely related.

IC design is mainly manual, and the CAD system is only used for data processing and graphics programming.

The IC industry is only in its initial stage of production-oriented development.

The second change: the rise of Foundry companies and IC design companies.

In the 1980s, the mainstream products of integrated circuits were microprocessors (MPUs), microcontrollers (MCUs) and application-specific ICs (ASICs).

At this time, the combination of fabless IC design companies (Fabless) and standard process processing lines (Foundry) began to become a new model for the development of the integrated circuit industry.

With the widespread application and popularity of microprocessors and PCs (especially in the fields of communications, industrial control, consumer electronics, etc.), the IC industry has begun to enter a customer-oriented stage.

On the one hand, ICs with standardized functions are no longer able to meet the system cost, reliability and other requirements of complete machine customers. At the same time, complete machine customers are demanding that the integration level of ICs be continuously increased, confidentiality improved, chip area reduced, system size reduced, and costs reduced.

, improve the performance-price ratio of the product, thereby enhancing the competitiveness of the product, gaining more market share and richer profits; on the other hand, due to the advancement of IC micro-processing technology, it has become possible to hardware the software. In order to improve the system

speed and simplified procedures, so ASICs with various hardware structures such as gate arrays, programmable logic devices (including FPGA), standard units, fully customized circuits, etc. emerged at the historic moment. Their proportion accounted for 12% of the entire IC sales in 1982.

%; Thirdly, with the development of EDA tools (electronic design automation tools), PCB design methods are introduced into IC design, such as the concept of libraries, process simulation parameters and simulation concepts, etc., and the design begins to enter the abstraction stage, making the design

A process can exist independently of the production process.

Visionary machine manufacturers and entrepreneurs, including venture capital funds (VC), saw the market and development prospects of ASIC and began to establish professional design companies and IC design departments, a kind of production-line integrated circuit design company (Fabless) or design company.

Departments were established one after another and developed rapidly.

At the same time, it also led to the rise of standard process processing lines (Foundry).

The world's first Foundry factory was Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation established in 1987. Its founder, Zhang Zhongmou, is also known as the "Father of Crystal Chip Processing."

The third change: the "four industries separated" IC industry In the 1990s, with the rise of INTERNET, the IC industry entered an advanced stage oriented by competition. International competition shifted from the original resource competition and price competition to the talent and knowledge competition and intensive competition.

Competition for capital.

The competitive approach of expanding equipment investment centered on DRAM is a thing of the past.

For example, in 1990, the United States, represented by Intel, took the initiative to abandon the DRAM market and focus on CPUs in order to counter the threat of Japan's leap to the top of the world's semiconductor industry. It made major structural adjustments to the semiconductor industry and regained its dominance in the world's semiconductor industry.

This makes people realize that the increasingly large integrated circuit industry system is not conducive to the development of the entire IC industry. "Dividing" can lead to excellence, and "integration" can provide advantages.