Preface: The middle part mainly introduces the rapid development of chip industry along the trajectory of Moore's Law during the 40 years from 1970 to 2010. Intel Corporation is the flagship of driving chip technology development, x86 series CPU, Pentium series CPU, Core series CPU technology became the milestone of desktop computer CPU chip development, and desktop Internet became the driving force of chip technology progress and FinFET circuit technology, 3D chip technology and multi-core CPU technology have provided strong support for the later mobile terminal chip technology. This article is the next part, which mainly introduces the history of mobile Internet becoming the driving force of chip technology progress and industry development after 1990.

9. Mobile terminal chip became a living force driving the chip industry

In 1971, the American inventor Samuel Hurst. Hurst (Samuel Hurst) invented the resistive touch screen. Samuel's team of ten partners applied for a patent for resistive touch screen, and collaborated to found Elographnics, Inc. The first 25 finished touch screens they produced were named E-100, and in 1973, Elographnics was named one of the "Top 100 Technology Products" of the year, and business began to roll in.

Figure 40. The inventor of the resistive touch screen, Samuel Hurst. Hurst

Founded in 1991 in Cambridge, England, ARM was a great company in the mobile Internet era. ARM established a new business model for microprocessor design, production, and sales by selling licenses for RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) microprocessor (CPU) IP. ARM used RISC CPU technology to support many of the world's leading semiconductor companies, chip design companies, software and OEMs to develop their own chips and complete products, fostering a large family of ARM CPU and SoC chips.

Figure 41. History of ARM microprocessor architecture development

Figure 42. ARM's traditional, application-oriented and embedded microprocessor IP categories

ARM and its business model have contributed to the development of the mobile terminal chip industry. ARM's business model has proven successful over the last 30 years of the chip industry, supporting the development and growth of a large number of small, medium and micro chip design companies (Fabless) and supporting the rapid iteration of chip design technology and the rapid development of the industry. In 2006, the number of ARM chips shipped worldwide was about 2 billion, and in 2010, ARM partners shipped more than 6 billion chips based on ARM technology. ARM currently has more than 1200 authorized users.

In 1993, the U.S. IBM launched the world's first touch-screen cell phone - IBM Simon. it is recognized as the world's first touch-screen smartphone, a monochrome pen-touch touch-screen smartphone. It was recognized as the world's first touch-screen smartphone, a monochromatic touch-screen smartphone with a monochromatic pen. It was a combination of mobile phone, personal digital assistant, pager, fax machine, calendar, itinerary, world clock, calculator, notepad, e-mail, games, etc., which created quite a stir at the time. In 2003, Motorola also produced the company's first touchscreen phone.

Figure 43. IBM Simon Touch Screen Smartphone

In 1998, the American company AuthenTec was founded as a supporter of the innovative features of Apple's smartphones. AuthenTec is the world's largest supplier of inductive fingerprint recognition sensors, whose fingerprint recognition components were embedded in Windows notebooks many years ago, and it is also the creator of Touch ID on Apple's iPhones. 2012 AuthenTec was acquired by Apple, and its fingerprint recognition chip products are all used in Apple smartphones and tablets.

Figure 44. AuthenTec with iPhone Touch ID 

In 1999, Motorola launched its first smartphone, the A6188, which was a touch screen phone and the first smartphone with Chinese handwriting recognition input.

Figure 45. Motorola Tinto A6188 touch screen smartphone

Andy Rubin In 2005, Google acquired Android and its team, a high-tech company established only 22 months ago, in a low profile. Andy Rubin Rubin became the vice president of engineering of Google, and continued to be in charge of Android project.

Figure 46. Andy Rubin and Android system

In 2005, Intel lost its cell phone business and later found itself losing a mobile Internet era. 2005 global cell phone application processor market totaled $839 million, Texas Instruments accounted for 69%, Qualcomm accounted for 17%, and Intel only accounted for 7% of the share. Because the mobile terminal chip is far from the desktop PC and server chips to earn money, Intel simply sold PXA cell phone business to MARVEL, from then on out of the mobile terminal chip field.

Intel lost the opportunity of mobile chips at the beginning, but later also saw the opportunity, after several efforts still did not seize the true meaning of mobile chips, and eventually led by ARM thousands of SoC chip companies crowded out. This is the "rural encirclement of the city" in the mobile Internet era of the wonderful play.

Figure 47. The competition between ARM and Intel in the mobile Internet era

In 2005, MTK seized the opportunity of the cottage phone business and caught the fast train of the mobile Internet era. Taiwan MediaTek (MTK) was founded in 1997, and MTK completed the GSM chip development in 2005. In order to sell the chip, they integrated mobile application processors and GSM processors together, providing a one-stop cell phone solution with MTK chips and a complete software development kit (SDK) to pre-integrate cell phone chips and software platforms, which made the threshold for cell phone manufacturers to develop a cell phone much lower. 2007, China's cell phone license was cancelled, and numerous small mobile phone manufacturers sprang up in Shenzhen at once. In 2007, the Chinese mobile phone license was abolished, and numerous small cell phone manufacturers sprang up in Shenzhen. The founder of MTK, Ming-Jae Tsai, is also known as the father of the "cottage industry", and the MTK chip made Huaqiangbei and MediaTek famous.

Figure 48. MTK founder Ming-Jae Tsai and Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen

The year 2006 is considered the first year of multi-core CPUs. In November, Intel launched the Xeon 5300 and Core 2 Dual Core and 4 Core Extreme Edition CPUs for servers, workstations and high-end PCs. 40% lower power consumption.

Who invented the more widely used capacitive touch screen? It is not yet possible to prove. The technological inventions after 1990 are seldom done by a scientist independently, but are usually the result of collective wisdom, and the intellectual property is owned by the company. 1997 Motorola mobile computer Palm Pilot, 1999 Motorola's first smartphone A6188, are also used resistive touch screen, using stylus input.

In 2007, LG launched Parada multi-point capacitive touch screen, no longer need a stylus, finger click accuracy has been relatively high. June 2007 Apple launched the iPhone multi-point capacitive touch screen cell phones, touch sensitivity and smoothness has been very good. Since then, capacitive touch screen has made rapid development.

Figure 49. The world's first multi-point capacitive touch screen cell phone LG PRADA

In July 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, setting a model for smartphones. iPhone eliminated the complex structure of the previous cell phone flip, slide, moderate, simple and stylish style is refreshing. iPhone eliminated the previously commonly used stylus, using multi-point finger touch screen, greatly improving the user experience. Since then, the smartphone are flat display + finger multi-touch screen appearance. It has put an end to the various styles of cell phones, simplified the operation of cell phones, promoted the popularity of mobile intelligent terminals (including smart phones, tablets, etc.), and played an important role in promoting the development of the mobile Internet industry. It also promotes the technological innovation of mobile terminal chips.

Figure 50. Steve Jobs and iPhone smartphone series

In November 2007, Google presented the operating system called Android to the outside world. At the same time, Google announced the establishment of a global cell phone ecological alliance, which is composed of 34 chip makers, cell phone manufacturers, software developers, and telecom operators. It also formed an open handheld alliance with 84 hardware manufacturers, software vendors and telecom operators to jointly develop and improve the Android system. The alliance members will support the mobile operating system and application software released by Google, and Google will release the source code of Android under the license of Apache free open source license.

According to the data in 2011, the number of Android applications has reached 480,000, and the share of Android phones in the smartphone market has reached 43%.

Figure 51. The main Android flagship phone brands at present

The two camps of mobile terminal operating systems and their application products. Google's open-source operating system Android and Apple's closed operating system iOS form the operating system duo in the mobile Internet era - the Apple system and the Android system, which learn from each other, compete with each other and keep developing and growing. There may be a new star of mobile Internet operating system rising in the future, that is, Huawei's Hongmeng system. The mobile Internet industry based on smartphones and mobile smart terminals has gradually replaced the desktop Internet industry and become the main force driving chip technology innovation and industrial development.

Figure 52. The two camps of mobile smart terminals, Apple system and Android system

In 2008, Taiwan-based HTC Computer (HTC), founded in 1997, launched the world's first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, which became the first challenger to Apple's iOS system. The phone is powered by Qualcomm's MSM720 series processor. The processor uses a dual-core solution (ARM11+ARM9 dual-core architecture) and contains an internal 3D graphics processing module and a 3G communication module, an image module that provides high-resolution images as well as video playback capabilities, and excellent streaming media performance. All the way from the communications industry, Qualcomm finally understood how the smartphone SoC should come to do.

HTC's smartphone and Qualcomm's cell phone chip have been iteratively upgraded together, achieving Qualcomm's position as the first dominant communications chip in the field of Android. HTC has achieved Qualcomm, but ultimately not itself. In January 2018, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired HTC's cell phone foundry business for $1.1 billion.

Figure 53. Ladder chart of smartphone SoC chips of Qualcomm (left) and other companies (right)

In 2008, the demonstration effect of Apple smartphones led to the explosion of multi-touch and fingerprint technology applications. After Apple iPhone series cell phones, iPad and other mobile terminal products, the world set off a "multi-touch storm", multi-touch technology has become a variety of smart phones, LCD TV, notebook computers, MID / PMP and various electronic systems and other user interfaces of choice, capacitive touch chip and fingerprint chip companies have emerged in large numbers.

At present, the leading touch chip companies include Synaptics, Atmel, Cypress, Focaltech, Goodix Tech, Mstar, and so on. Leading fingerprint chip companies include AuthenTec, Validity, FingerPrintCards (FPC), Goodix Tech (Hui Ding Technology), SileadInc (Silicom), Focaltech (Duntech), etc.

AuthenTec was acquired by Apple in 2012. Validity was acquired by Synaptics in 2013, and its chips are now mainly used in HTConemax and Samsung GalaxyS5 products.

Figure 54. Major global suppliers of touch and fingerprint chips

In 2009, Huidian Technology launched the first ten-point touch chip, becoming the first domestic manufacturer to make a ten-point touch chip outside of Apple. The first cell phone manufacturer to adopt Huitian's solution was Boeing.

In 2011, Huifa International, a subsidiary of MediaTek (MTK), invested in Huideng Technology. The strong alliance with MTK has made Huidian Technology take off with the east wind of mobile Internet. Huidian technology for the rapid growth of domestic smart phone manufacturers to provide cost-effective touch products to support the company's performance began to explode, profits from 2011 only 26.525 million yuan, grew to 225 million yuan in 2012, a surge of nearly 10 times.

Figure 55. Huidian Technology Chairman Zhang Fan and the miracle of the company's performance takeoff

In 2013, after Apple released the cell phone with fingerprint recognition, fingerprint recognition was ready to rule the cell phone recognition market.

In 2014, Huideng Technology launched a fingerprint touch product prototype and officially entered the fingerprint recognition industry. Unlike European and American companies which generally use high voltage drive, Huideng used low voltage drive method. In November of the same year, Meizu MX4 Pro was released, equipped with Huideng's frontal press fingerprint recognition, which is an epoch-making product in the history of domestic cell phones, breaking the monopoly of Touch ID on frontal press fingerprint recognition, and also breaking the monopoly of FPC, bringing another possibility and choice to the industry.

In 2015, FPC almost monopolized the fingerprint chip market of Android machines. 2016 domestic manufacturers have grabbed back a lot of fingerprint chip market, but FPC still occupies the most 40% share of the fingerprint chip of Android cell phone system.

Figure 57. FPC's capacitive optical fingerprint module FPC1020AM

In 2017, the fingerprint knowledge chip of Huidian Technology dropped to about 10 yuan, Huawei eliminated FPC and chose Huidian Technology's products on the new flagship P10 phone. Huitian's fingerprint awareness chip used in Huawei's cell phone P10 is a milestone. In the mid- to high-end mainstream Android brand phones, Huitian broke the dominance of FPC. 2018, Huitian launched the under-screen fingerprint chip. vivo X21 phone released in Wuzhen and Samsung Galaxy J7 Duo phone in India batch listing, are using Huitian's under-screen fingerprint solution.

Figure 58. 2019 global under-screen fingerprint chip vendor shipment share

10. Mobile terminals have high requirements for chips, promoting chip technology innovation
Mobile terminals pursue light, thin, short and small in the extreme, and generally integrate as many peripheral interface circuits and central processing units (CPUs) as possible in a single chip, forming the so-called single-chip system (SoC). For example, smart phones, smart speakers, car navigators, smart home appliances, etc., are implemented with SoC chips. Mobile terminal chips are large in volume, complex in function, and require the smallest and thinnest possible size and power consumption, which places high demands on chip design, manufacturing and packaging. Technologies such as advanced manufacturing processes, multi-core CPUs, low-power design, 3D manufacturing and stacked packaging have extremely important applications on mobile terminal chips.

Figure 59. Some examples of application-oriented SoC chips

The development of chip technology in accordance with Moore's Law is a real and urgent need. Every two years or less, chip integration doubles and performance increases, which is the development law foreshadowed by Moore's law. The requirement for chip integration and functional improvement is also a realistic and urgent requirement for chips in the era of desktop Internet and mobile Internet. After entering the 14nm process node, the difficulty of lithography technology has risen steeply. the selling price of ASML EUV lithography machine reaches 120 million USD, the cost of lithography equipment accounts for 35% of the cost of all manufacturing equipment, and the lithography process accounts for about 40% of all manufacturing man-hours. The lithography process has become the soul technology of chip manufacturing, and the lithography machine has become the neck equipment of chip technology.

Figure 60. Chronology of chip manufacturing process evolution along Moore's Law

In 2014, Huawei Haise launched its first mobile SoC chip, Kirin 910, which used the mainstream 28nm HPM process at that time and made its debut in the mobile SoC chip market. In June of the same year, Huawei launched Kirin 920, the world's first commercial LTE Cat.6 with the industry's most advanced 4xA15+4xA7 octa-core SoC heterogeneous architecture, which is very powerful and meets the demand for high-speed Internet experience during the transition from 3G to 4G. Back then, the Kirin 920-equipped Glory 6, Glory 6plus, Mate7 became a generation of miracle machines.

In 2015, Samsung's flagship product Galaxy S6 abandoned Qualcomm's cell phone chip and adopted Samsung Semiconductor's own Orion Exynos7420 cell phone chip. As early as February 2011, Samsung Semiconductor officially named its own processor brand Exynos, which is a combination of two Greek words Exypnos and Prasinos, representing the meaning of "intelligent" and "environmental protection" respectively. The Exynos family of processors is mainly used in mobile terminals such as smartphones and tablet PCs.

Figure 61. Samsung Semiconductor's latest 14nm to 5nm mobile processor chips

In 2016, Huawei Haise launched Kirin 960, which is the first-class chip in the industry in terms of overall performance and is officially among the top mobile chips in the industry. Huawei Haith's cell phone chips form a three-legged battle with Qualcomm and Apple. In 2017, Huawei released Kirin 970, the first integrated artificial intelligence computing platform NPU in the SoC, which pioneered the end-side AI industry.

In July 2017, CK Storage successfully developed the first 3D NAND flash chip in China. 32-layer products achieved mass production in the third quarter of 2018. 64-layer products achieved mass production in the third quarter of 2019. The successful development of 128-layer 3D NAND flash chip series has been announced [13]. The rapid development of CK's 3D NAND flash technology is attributed to its original XtackingTM technology, which "manufactures the Cell Array and Periphery separately, and then combines them into a single package".

Figure 62: CK Storage's XtackingTM technology

In 2019, Huawei Haith released the latest generation of flagship mobile chips Kirin 990 series, including Kirin 990 and Kirin 9905G. Kirin 990 processors are manufactured using TSMC II's 7nm process, and the biggest highlight is the built-in Baron 5000 baseband, which enables true 5G Internet access.

Figure 63. Huawei's Hisense mobile SoC chip R&D timeline

In 2020, Micron (USA) 176-layer 3D NAND Flash has started mass production. It uses a design that fuses dual 88 layers together (stacked 512Gbit TLC flash). The chip technology switched to a charge trap memory cell solution, which seems to greatly reduce the thickness of each layer. The current 176-layer die is only 45 μm, the same as Micron's 64-layer floating gate 3D NAND. 16-layer die stacked packages are less than 1.5 mm thick and are suitable for most mobile/memory card usage scenarios.

Figure 64. Micron's 176-layer 3D NAND Flash structure schematic

In October 2020, Huawei announced Kirin 9000, a mobile SoC chip based on the 5nm process. 8 CPU cores, 3 NPU cores and 24 cores GPU are integrated on this chip with a 5nm manufacturing process and 15.3 billion transistors are integrated on it. It compares with MediaTek's most powerful 5G mobile chip, Tiangui 2000, and has a clear advantage in performance test scores.

Unfortunately! Due to the US multi-level precision strike on our chip industry chain, blocking the production channels of Huawei's high-end smartphone chips, making the high-end chips designed by Huawei Haith impossible to produce, Huawei's flagship phone Mate40 series equipped with Kirin 9000 may become out of print.

Figure 65. Huawei Haith's most powerful 5G mobile chip Kirin 9000 

In November 2020, Apple launched the MacBook Air, Pro, and mini with its own processor chip M1, an 8-core SoC chip based on the ARM architecture with four high-performance Firestorm CPU cores and four high-efficiency Icestorm CPU cores, and an 8-core GPU. The M1 is made on a 5nm process, integrating about 16 billion transistors on a chip of about 120mm².

Figure 66. Apple's self-developed Mac computer processor chip

Apple's computer processors have undergone four CPU architecture migrations. The first was in 1984, starting with the Macintosh 128k, when the CPU switched from the original MOS Technology's 6502 processor to Motorola's 68000 processor; the second was in 1994, when the CPU switched to the IBMPowerPC processor; and the third was in 2005, when Steve Jobs announced the adoption of the IntelX86 processor. Now is the fourth time, Apple abandoned Intel X86 processor, the future will use self-developed ARM architecture-based processor.

In 2020, domestic CPU maker Feiteng released a multi-core CPU chip for server applications, the Tengun S2500, which is manufactured using a 16nm process with a chip area of 400mm2 and can be configured with up to 64 CPU cores of the FTC663 architecture, with a main frequency of 2.0 to 2.2 GHz and a three-level cache of 64MB. The chip is manufactured with a 16nm process area of 400mm2 and can be configured with up to 64 CPU cores of FTC663 architecture, with a main frequency of 2.0~2.2GHz, a three-level cache of 64MB, support for eight channels of DDR4 memory, four direct connection ports with 800Gbps bandwidth, support for 2~8 channels of parallelism, a single system configuration of 128~512 CPU cores, and a thermal design power consumption of 150W. The software ecosystem has made a promising breakthrough.

Figure 67. 64-core CPU chip Tengun S2500 from Feiteng 

In November 2020, Samsung Semiconductor released its flagship chip, the Orion Exynos 1080, which uses a 5nm process and ARM's latest CPU architecture, Cortex-A78, and the latest GPU architecture, Mali-G78. Vivo will be the first to launch new products equipped with this chip.

Figure 68. Samsung Semiconductor launches flagship mobile SoC chip 

The Huawei P50 series was announced by Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, at the Huawei Hongmeng launch event in June 2021. Because of well-known reasons, Huawei did not announce the P50 series launch time.

In July 2021 a web article revealed that the upcoming Huawei P50 series will have three chip versions, a 4G version of the U.S. Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 4G chip version, a Huawei Haith Kirin 9000L 4G chip version, and a Huawei Haith Kirin 9000 5G chip version. It is said that Huawei P50 series of the main 4G version of the phone only prepared more than three million, while the Kirin 9000 5G version of the phone is even less, only more than 300,000 volume. Because of the Huawei Hongmeng system, it is believed that future sales will exceed demand.

Figure 69. Pre-sale site exposure Huawei P50pro real machine pictures

In the post-Moore era, advanced packaging technology has taken over the baton of process miniaturization, FinFET and 3D integration technology, continuing the vitality of Moore's Law. 2020 onwards, when the chip process progresses to below 7nm, design, manufacturing and packaging are extremely expensive. Packaging technology has developed from 2000 to date and has become more mature. Many advanced packages have moved many chip integration technologies and processes back to the package, and continue to write the saga of microelectronics and integrated circuit technology continues to chase the "tiny but powerful". Currently, there are dozens of advanced packaging technologies, and chip packaging can be chosen flexibly for different needs.

At present, the main advanced packaging technologies include: WLP, FIWLP, FOWLP, eWLB, CSP, WLCSP, CoW, WoW, FOPLP, InFO, CoWoS, HBM, HMC, Wide-IO, EMIB, Foveros, Co-EMIB, ODI, 3D IC, SoIC, X-Cube, SiP, etc. SiP, etc.

Figure 70. Chronology of 12 mainstream advanced packaging technologies today

Figure 71. Schematic diagram of several advanced packaging technologies

11. Looking back at more than 60 years of development history and sorting out chip technology milestones

Chip technology is the result of long-term accumulation of human wisdom, but at a critical moment, an important invention and creation may change the direction of chip technology development. And when chip technology advances on a certain path, it also requires continuous technical research and technological innovation in order to meet the actual application needs, striving to overcome a difficult hurdle on the technical road. These important technical inventions, creations, and breakthroughs are all milestones in the development of chip technology.

The 114 years from 1833 to 1947, when the transistor was invented, can be regarded as the budding period of chip technology; the 24 years from 1947 to 1971, when the microprocessor i4004 was launched, can be regarded as the initial period of chip technology; the 36 years from 1971 to 2007, when the Apple iPhone was launched, can be regarded as the formative period of chip technology development driven by the desktop Internet; the 14 years from 2007 to So far 14 years can be seen as the mobile Internet to promote the development of chip technology maturity period, during this period, new technology inventions and innovations have emerged, but because there are too many matters, the time interval is very short, and most of them are company inventions, are the result of collective wisdom. Therefore, it is very difficult to sort out the milestone events since 2000. In addition, the Internet of Things, 5G communication and artificial intelligence after 2000 are also some of the main lines driving the development of chip technology, and this paper does not introduce events in these areas for the sake of the clarity of the text path.

Postscript: Entering the 21st century, human beings are in the era of explosive information growth. In the field of chip technology, new technological innovations and important events have been happening at different times and places, and it is more difficult to write a good history of chip technology development after 2000. If we roughly divide the development of chip technology into a trilogy, the first part of this paper introduces the budding and nascent stage of chip technology, the middle part of this paper is the formative stage of chip technology development driven by desktop Internet, and the next part of this paper is the mature stage of chip technology development driven by mobile Internet. since 2000, Internet of things, 5G communication and artificial intelligence have injected new momentum into chip technology and industry, and applications, Innovation and competition are the inexhaustible driving force for the development of chip technology and industry.