On the afternoon of January 31, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee conducted the second collective study on accelerating the construction of a new development pattern. The meeting pointed out that we should speed up the pace of scientific and technological self-reliance and solve the problem of foreign "neck". Make China a global leader in important scientific and technological fields, and strive to become a major scientific center and innovation highland in the world as soon as possible.
At present, China's semiconductor products are mainly concentrated in the low-end and medium-end fields such as semiconductor materials, wafer manufacturing and packaging testing, and the production capacity is also mainly concentrated in the mature manufacturing process of more than 28nm. A large number of high-end and medium-end semiconductor products still need to be imported, of which CPU, GPU, memory and other fields almost all rely on imports. Therefore, the technical breakthroughs of domestic semiconductor equipment manufacturers are particularly important.
Excellent performance of semiconductor equipment performance forecast in 2022
In 2022, affected by the epidemic situation, US export control and the downturn of the boom, the overall performance of the semiconductor industry was low, but the equipment companies rose abruptly and the overall performance was excellent.
For example, the estimated revenue of North Huachuang in 22 years is 13.50 - 15.6 billion yuan,+(39.4 - 61.1)% year-on-year; Net profit attributable to parent company
2.10-26 billion yuan,+(94.9-141.3)% year-on-year; Medium and micro companies: expected revenue of 4.74 billion yuan in 22 years,+52.5% year-on-year; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 1.08-12 billion yuan,+(6.8-18.6)% year-on-year.
Tuojing Technology: The estimated revenue in 22 years is 1.65-17.2 billion yuan,+(117.7-126.9)% year-on-year; Net profit attributable to the parent company was 33-40 million yuan,+(381.9-484.1)% year-on-year; Xinyuan Microenterprise: expected revenue of 1.30-14.2 billion yuan in 22 years,+(56.9-71.4)% year-on-year; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 175-21 million yuan,+(126.3-171.5)% year-on-year.
Domestic substitution is expected to accelerate
In recent years, as China attaches great importance to the semiconductor industry, some Chinese semiconductor special equipment enterprises have made breakthroughs in some technical fields after more than 10 years of technological research and development and accumulation, and have successfully passed the customer verification of some integrated circuit manufacturing enterprises and become the equipment suppliers of wafer manufacturing enterprises.
In terms of subdivision, domestic semiconductor manufacturers have the highest self-sufficiency rate in the field of degumming equipment, and basically achieve domestic substitution. In the field of cleaning equipment, etching equipment, heat treatment equipment, PVD equipment, CMP equipment, and other fields, they can also achieve a domestic substitution rate of 10% - 20%. However, in the field of key equipment such as gluing development equipment and photolithography equipment, they are basically completely dependent on imports, and have not made substantive breakthroughs, It is the core technology breakthrough field for domestic manufacturers in the future.
Recently, the US policy of suppressing the semiconductor industry in China has been upgraded again. Fully prohibit the sale of advanced process semiconductor equipment below 14nm to the Chinese Mainland, and extend the scope of attack from SMIC International to all wafer manufacturers in the mainland, including domestic manufacturers, as well as wafer factories built in the mainland by overseas manufacturers. The United States has continuously upgraded its pressure on China's semiconductor industry. As the "bottleneck" core link, the process of domestic substitution is expected to accelerate in the future.
Tuojing Technology
Domestic semiconductor CVD equipment leader:
Tuojing Technology is the leader of semiconductor CVD equipment in China and the only manufacturer of integrated circuit PECVD and SACVD equipment in China. Its main products include plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) equipment, atomic layer deposition (ALD) equipment and sub-atmospheric chemical vapor deposition (SACVD) equipment.
The company is also a leading manufacturer of ALD equipment in China. It has adapted to the requirements of 180-14nm logic chips, 19/17nm DRAM and 64/128 layer FLASH manufacturing process, and is widely used in the production lines of domestic mainstream wafer factories such as SMIC International, Huahong Group, Changjiang Storage, Changxin Storage, Xiamen Lianxin, Yandong Microelectronics, etc., breaking the monopoly of international manufacturers on the domestic market.
Set up wholly-owned subsidiaries to improve the layout, and verify new products such as HDPCVD and ALD smoothly:
The company announced on January 21 that it plans to invest 500 million yuan to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to engage in the research and development, production and sales of high-end semiconductor film deposition equipment, and further improve its business layout.
While strengthening the market competitiveness of PECVD, SACVD and ALD also continued to make breakthroughs. PECVD: Industrial application has reached the process of 14nm, and applications below 14nm are under development; SACVD: It has achieved industrial application in the logic field of 12-inch 40/28nm and 8-inch 90nm and above; Carry out industrialization verification in DRAM field; ALD: PE-ALD has entered the industrialization verification stage of the process below 28nm; Thermal-ALD completed the product development and obtained the order, and the equipment performance index met the customer's production line requirements.
Changchuan Technology
Backtrack testing business layout is comprehensive, and high-end SoC testing machine is expected to help the company grow at a high speed:
The company focuses on the semiconductor after-testing equipment, with the testing machine as the core, and the development of multiple categories such as sorter, probe table and AOI. The gross profit rate of testing machine business is high, and there is a large space for domestic replacement in SoC, digital, storage and other testing machine fields.
The company's testing machine business includes high-power testing machines, analog testing machines, digital testing machines, etc., and has continued to focus on the research and development of probe stations, digital testing machines and other related equipment, and has received many government subsidies in the SoC testing field. In the future, the company will benefit from the expansion of high-end testing machine business such as digital and SoC, and the order revenue is expected to continue to grow at a high speed.
Constant increase boosts the rapid industrialization and localization of probe station
In 2020, the company plans to raise 372 million yuan through regular increase for the research and development and industrialization of probe stations. The product developed in this probe platform fund-raising project is the company's second-generation fully automatic ultra-precision probe platform, which is compatible with 8/12-inch wafer testing. The product segmentation includes CP12-SOC/CIS, CP12-Memory, CP12-Discrete, CP12-SiC/GaN, etc., which can be applied to the testing of integrated circuits such as SOC/CIS, Memory, Discrete, and the third generation compound semiconductor.
At present, the R&D project of the new second-generation probe platform has completed the development and verification of key technical modules, and is now in the stage of internal machine testing. The global probe station is mainly monopolized by Tokyo Precision and TEL. Among the few domestic probe station suppliers, Changchuan is the most promising to take the lead in realizing localization.
This article is extracted from:
Everbright Securities Research Report -- "Outstanding Performance of Semiconductor Equipment Performance in 2022"
Founder Securities Research Report -- "The revenue has doubled and exceeded the expectation, and the profitability of deducting non-turnaround has been significantly improved"