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Previously, large-scale price increases and shortages dominated for nearly a year, making the entire supply chain feel the fear of being dominated, especially memory, which has become the hardest hit area for out-of-stock components. Now, the first half of the first half of the second quarter is almost over, the price of electronic components has been ebbing, and new trends have emerged in electronic components. However, the new market that started in the second half of the year is not as optimistic as imagined, and another major component is facing huge demand for goods.

Huge demand is about to fall, and wafer production capacity is strangled again

After more than a quarter of inventory adjustments, Chinese smartphone brands will complete the inventory digestion of mid-to-low-end products in June. The sales target of high-end machines in the second half of the year is one step higher, and the supply chain will restart the momentum of pulling goods. Since Apple's iPhone 7 led to the popularity of dual-camera design, Huawei, Gionee, Xiaomi, OPPO, VIVO and other major shipping giants have adopted dual-camera selling points on their high-end machines, officially becoming the standard for high-end Android flagships, and further infiltrating into the mid-end market. In the second half of the year, Samsung will also be equipped with a dual-camera function on the Note 8 to compete with the iPhone 8. ZTE, Lenovo, and ODM's own brands will also launch dual-camera phones to enter overseas markets.

Such a huge market demand will directly detonate the supply chain of CMOS image sensors and related modules. From the second half of the year, CIS (mobile phone camera sensor) components will be swept away and hot. In particular, CISs above 5M have been in a state of tight supply, and CIS will inevitably usher in a new round of shortages.

At present, Sony is still the leader in the market, production and technology, followed by Samsung and OmniVision, and maintains a strong competitive strength. However, the development of China's CMOS sensor industry started relatively late. Relying on the huge market demand for smartphones, domestic manufacturers quickly seized the mid-to-low-end market mainly by virtue of their strong price advantages. Judging from the current market situation, in the product market of 2M and below specifications, domestic CMOS sensors have firmly occupied more than 80% of the market share; in addition, 5M and 8M product lines have also begun to compete with international companies. is expanding its share. However, domestic manufacturers are breaking through from low-end products to high-pixel products.

Since last year, after giving up the CCD image sensor, Sony announced that it will no longer be involved in the market below 8M. The market below 5M has become a battleground for the military. The low-end CIS market (below 8M) has experienced a fierce price war. SK Hynix, BYD Microelectronics and Taiwan Wonders have all joined the fray. Domestic IC manufacturers Gekewei and Spicco are fighting, and the bottom line of the low-end mobile phone camera chip unit price has fallen below 0.73 US dollars. It can be said that domestic CIS chip manufacturers basically did not make much money last year, but made SK Hynix bigger in 8M.

The foundry of domestic CIS chips is SMIC, and the packaging and testing manufacturers are Jingfang Technology, Huatian Technology, etc. Since the CMOS image sensor uses a general semiconductor process, it shares a similar wafer process and fab production line with ICs and components such as Memory, AP, fingerprint, and logic devices. The price of wafers and packaging raw materials have risen, the overall production capacity of Fab is insufficient, and fingerprint ICs and power management ICs are occupying production capacity. Price pressure and reducing production costs will be the biggest challenges faced by domestic image sensor manufacturers in the near future. However, with the support of market demand for surveillance, automotive semiconductors, and mobile phones, the price of CMOS chips will not fall in the second half of the year.

Sony expands production, Samsung and SK Hynix vacate memory factories to prepare for war

The Japanese Sony (Sony+Toshiba) still dominates the top of the CIS chip food chain, hitting a new high in profits in the past 20 years. It has already increased the production of image sensors by about 10% in the first quarter, increasing the monthly output to more than about 80,000 pieces (based on 300mm wafers). Conversion), priority supply to Apple and Chinese mobile phone manufacturers. Previously, Sony acquired Toshiba's image sensor business, which further enhanced the production capacity advantage of its sensor business. Toshiba has strong competitiveness in 1um pixel products. Sony also sold its Chinese camera factory to Shenzhen OFILM, which is the main supplier of Sony's sensor modules. As the demand for dual cameras becomes stronger, the two parties may further cooperate. At present, there is no information about shortages and price increases in the supply chain. Sony, as a large original factory, will not easily increase prices, and other manufacturers naturally dare not make any moves. However, the shortage of Sony CMOS has caused Samsung to steal many Chinese customers. The main agents of Sony in Taiwan are Shangli and Dalian University, and the main agents of Sony in China are Patai Electronics.

South Korean Samsung and SK Hynix followed. According to Korean media reports, compared with DRAMNAND memory products, the status of CIS chips in Korean factories such as Samsung and SK Hynix is ​​relatively low. Samsung will make every effort to sprint for customers in mainland China (13M), and massively expand the design manpower of system chips including CIS to more than 1,000, intending to improve the competitiveness of the system semiconductor market; Samsung plans to convert some DRAM production lines to CIS production, and will produce on-track DRAM to production. The production of CIS is intended to strengthen the competitiveness of non-memory products. After SK Hynix incorporated the CIS chip supplier silicon file (8M-5M), it invested in the construction of a 12-inch factory and accelerated the research and development of 13M pixel SIX chips in 2017, freeing up M10DRAM production equipment for the production of CIS, and became the sixth largest CIS manufacturer in the world . Qingya is the agent of Samsung Greater China, and LG is mainly responsible for module production.

The local manufacturer Beijing OmniVision led the way. Although the merger with Beijing Junzheng failed, the merger of Spicco and OmniVision was not affected. OV was the inventor of BSI technology and CSP packaging technology. The two sides mainly cooperated to develop BSI+Stacking high-end products. OV was responsible for For the development of the process platform, Spicco is responsible for the connection between cost-effective products and customers. Geke Micro has established a firm position in the 5-2M market, and is fully sprinting into the 8M market. The 13M chip is also ready to go, and its products have entered Huawei's supply chain. Ruixin Micro and Changguang Chenxin mainly focus on the niche CMOS sensor market, and the shipments are not large. Chinese manufacturers basically monopolize the mobile phone camera module market, and the top three of Oufeiguang, Sunny and Qiu Ti account for more than 60% of the market.

In addition, ON Semiconductor, which ranks among the top ten in the CMOS market, acquired Aptina Imaging (Micron CMOS business) after acquiring the image sensor business of Truesense Imaging and Cypress Semiconductor, and also greatly improved its sensor business, including 14M -2M full product line. ST's CMOS products are mainly used in the industrial and automotive markets and TOF sensor business, while Infineon focuses on the supply of 3D camera chips. Taiwan Qijing focuses on providing 3D sensing camera solutions, providing integrated structured light modules and 3D depth of field algorithm chips.

In terms of process, the pursuit of higher resolution and smaller pixel size, the technological innovation of CMOS image sensors has never stopped. At present, the mainstream foreign platforms are 12 inches, supported by BSI or BSI+Stacking process, and produce 1.12um and smaller pixels; most of them are 8-inch FSI process, and the pixel size is 1.4um. In addition, the full-size 30fps preview also requires high power consumption for the Sensor. To realize the miniaturization of pixels, it is important to ensure the pixel structure of sensitivity and saturation electron count. Meanwhile, in order to ensure color reproducibility and resolution, a structure in which adjacent pixel signals are not mixed is required. The three major image sensor manufacturers, SONY, Samsung, and OmniVision, provide high-quality images with leading pixel sensitivity, quantum efficiency and low sensor noise. At the same time, they have launched corresponding PDAF sensors to respond to customers' new demands on deep-field, 3D and other images. need.

In the next five years, the CMOS chip market will have great prospects

Dual cameras are driving the growth of the CMOS image sensor industry, and front-facing cameras are brewing for change. The revolution of image technology will change many fields such as biometric identification, machine vision, film and television entertainment, security monitoring, intelligent transportation, and biomedicine.

In the next five years, the global image sensor market is expected to exceed $20 billion, according to a new report by British market research firm Smithers Apex. The report pointed out that in 2014, the global sales of image sensors was 1.6 million, and it is expected that by 2022, the global sales of image sensors will be close to 4.1 million.

According to the IC Insights report, automotive electronics, security monitoring, medical and image recognition systems are replacing smartphones and digital cameras as the growth driver of CMOS image sensors. The report predicts that the CMOS market will grow from $9.9 billion in 2015 to $15.2 billion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 9%. The smartphone market is the largest segment.

According to Yole Development's statistics, the market size of CMOS sensors in 2015 was 10.3 billion US dollars, and the compound annual growth rate from 2015 to 2021 is expected to reach 10.4%, when the entire market value is expected to reach 18.8 billion US dollars.

According to industry estimates, in the mobile phone CIS chip market in 2017, products below 2M will account for about 35%, 5M/8M will account for about 50%, and products above 12M will account for about 15%.