Recently, Huawei has announced that it has overcome some key aspects of autonomous substitution. At the "Breakthrough Wujiang Natural Insurance to Achieve Strategic Breakthrough - Product Development Tool Stage Summary and Recognition Conference" held recently by Huawei, Huawei's rotating chairman Xu Zhijun disclosed several key information points.

First of all, around the three R&D production lines of hardware development, software development, and chip development, Huawei has made efforts to create independent tools and completed the replacement of 78 software tools for software/hardware development, ensuring the continuity of R&D operations.

In addition, Huawei's chip design EDA tool team, in collaboration with domestic EDA companies, has jointly created EDA tools required for processes above 14 nm, and has basically achieved localization of EDA tools above 14 nm. It is expected that its comprehensive verification will be completed in 2023.

Earlier, on March 17th, Huawei Ren Zhengfei stated at a symposium that Huawei had completed the replacement development of 13000+devices and the repeated replacement development of 4000+circuit boards in three years. It is reported that in April this year, Huawei's MetaERP will pledge to completely use its own operating system, database, compiler, and language to develop its own management system MetaERP software. The software has undergone practical application tests in various departments around the world and is confident of promotion. Currently, on many design tools, Huawei Cloud has also been made public to social applications, gradually overcoming the embarrassment of cutting off supply.

Domestic EDA Enterprises Strive to Catch Up

According to public information, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software, as an upstream basic tool in the field of integrated circuits, runs through integrated circuit design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing, and is known as the "cornerstone" of chip design.

Industry data shows that in 2020, the global market size of the EDA industry exceeded 7 billion yuan, but it supported a digital economy of tens of billions of scale.

Since the 21st century, the global EDA market has experienced several waves of industrial integration, and the global EDA industry has become highly concentrated. Currently, the EDA industry is dominated by Synopsys (US), Cadence (US), and Siemens EDA (Germany).

In the Chinese market, in recent years, the Chinese EDA industry has grown rapidly, and leading enterprises such as Guangli Microelectronics, Huada Jiutian, Gallon Electronics, Xinhuazhang, Xinhe Semiconductor, Jiutongfang Microelectronics, Lixin Software, and Guowei Silicon have been born. The industry forecasts that the CAGR of China's EDA market from 2020 to 2027 is expected to be as high as 11.7%.

In the past two years, many enterprises in China have been scrambling to develop the latest EDA technology. Through cooperation with universities and other companies, they have jointly explored technical difficulties and achieved success.

Huada Jiutian recently stated on the interactive platform that some EDA tools of the company can support 5nm advanced process manufacturing, and has established good business cooperation relationships with major domestic integrated circuit design enterprises and wafer manufacturing enterprises to jointly build an industrial ecosystem;

Guangli's micro customer group includes internationally renowned IDM manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, domestic leading Foundry manufacturers, and Fabless manufacturers;

According to official data from Gallon Electronics, more than 500 sets of device models have been successfully delivered and 10000 hours of wafer testing service have been completed every year. Recently, Gallon Electronics stated that the company's core product, the NanoSpice series simulator, has obtained several domestic and foreign invention patents, and the overall level has reached international leadership. Recently, Gallon Electronics took the lead in collaborating with key upstream and downstream enterprises, including chip manufacturing enterprises, design enterprises, universities, and others, Industry-university-research cooperation to build an EDA innovation consortium and accelerate the ecological construction of domestic EDA.

In the first half of 2022, Core Semiconductor joined the UCIE Industrial Alliance, an organization established by semiconductor, technology, and internet giants such as Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and ASE. Core Semiconductor is the first domestic EDA to join.

In addition, China's policies have also continuously increased support for the EDA industry. During the "12th Five Year Plan" and "13th Five Year Plan" periods, China actively promoted the development of domestic EDA and issued a number of incentive and support policies. In particular, in 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed in the "14th Five Year Plan" for the Development of Software and Information Technology Service Industry that it should focus on breaking through industrial software and making up for the weaknesses of key basic software to design electronic design automation software (EDA). In addition to documents issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, governments in Beijing, Shanghai, and other places have also issued relevant incentive and support policies.

At present, EDA companies such as Huada Jiutian, Xinhe Semiconductor, Galen Electronics, Guowei Sierxin, and Guangli Microelectronics have overcome technical barriers in some specific fields (simulation IC, FPD) and some point tools (post simulation, timing analysis, etc.).

Currently, although there is still a gap between domestic and international manufacturers, driven by the trend of localization, China's EDA software is accelerating its breakthrough. As Ren Zhengfei said, although Huawei is still in difficult times, it has not stopped on the way forward.