The semiconductor industry is facing unprecedented technological challenges, and the success rate of chip fabrication has dropped to a historic low!
According to data from Siemens, an electronic design automation tool (EDA) company, the success rate of initial chip design (Tape out) has dropped to a historic low of 14%, a significant decrease from 24% two years ago.
This means that out of ten chip design companies, eight will fail in their first chip production, and such a high failure rate is truly astonishing.
It can be said that the cost of failure is heavy: the loss of a single production can reach tens of millions, and small and medium-sized design companies are facing a survival crisis.
In addition, with the arrival of 2nm, it is difficult to improve the chip yield under advanced process technology.
The chip has encountered a major problem.
IC design practitioners analyze that this is mainly due to factors such as the increase in chip complexity and the transformation of enterprise development models. In the future, professional division of labor and entrusting ASIC companies to build it will become a trend.
Tape out is like a life and death test for chip design. It refers to handing over the completed chip design to a wafer foundry to produce samples and verify whether the design meets expectations. It is a key milestone in chip development.
Once it fails, not only will the tens of millions of R&D costs invested in the early stage be wasted, but it may also miss out on market opportunities.
In addition, some chip failures are due to overly arbitrary design processes, while others may not necessarily be due to functional issues.
If the running speed is 10% slower than expected or the power consumption is 10% higher than expected after the chip is returned, it may not be competitive in the market and will need to be re chip.
Many chip giants have made mistakes in chip production, such as AMD's Bulldozer architecture chips and Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chips.
So, why is there such a high rate of chip failure?
Firstly, chips are becoming increasingly complex.
Due to the need to integrate more functions and transistors into chips, the design difficulty is exponentially increasing.
Previously, chip design may only need to consider a few core modules, but now chips, especially those like mobile phone processors and artificial intelligence chips, require the integration of multiple complex functional units such as CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and many other factors such as power consumption, heat dissipation, and performance balance.
This places extremely high demands on the abilities of chip design engineers, as any small design error can lead to chip failure.
Secondly, the verification cycle is out of control.
The verification time for customized designs has surged, and customized chips are designed for specific data types, algorithms, or application scenarios, making chip design and verification work exceptionally cumbersome. However, the market window period continues to compress.
Finally, the cost death spiral.
The cost of advanced technology film production has skyrocketed, and failed enterprises have fallen into a vicious cycle of "more film production, more losses".
Flow out is just the beginning of chip production, and the subsequent production processes are equally challenging. Among them, the problem of low chip yield is also tricky, becoming another major obstacle to the development of the chip industry.
