SZHT Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. was established in 2015, mainly engaged in the research and development of RF filters and related RF chips and devices. The team has gone through the entire process of product development from laboratory development to mass production and sales. It has a number of core technologies on RF MEMS resonators, filters, and oscillators; it is the first to fully master the mass production of RF MEMS filters (BAW) in China Technology company.
5G communication is the technological commanding heights that European and American giants and developed countries compete for, and the RF front-end is one of the cores of 5G communication. As the largest business segment in the entire RF front-end (power amplifier, RF filter, low noise amplifier and RF switch) market, RF filters can be divided into surface acoustic wave filters (SAW filters) and bulk acoustic wave filters. There are two types of filters (BAW filters), and BAW filters based on MEMS technology are more competitive in the 5G era because of the performance advantages of the mid- and high-frequency bands.
The R&D and production of radio frequency MEMS filters require a high degree of coordination between design and technology. At the same time, the production and manufacturing process is a non-standardized special process, which requires high precision and high difficulty coefficient. Due to the early development of foreign countries, a relatively complete patent layout has been formed around core technologies. At present, the BAW filter market is mainly occupied by two American companies, Avago and Qorvo; and SAW filters are basically monopolized by giants such as muRata and TDK. Chinese companies There is almost a blank in this field, only a few companies and institutions have a very small number of low-end filter products shipped. It is a key technology that is subject to others that needs to be solved urgently throughout China.
In the absence of the Chinese market and almost no R&D experience in this field in the industry, SZHT lasted 4 years. After repeated trials, trial production, and adjustment of the production process, SZHT achieved breakthroughs in product design, structural optimization and key processes, and successfully completed The research and development of RF MEMS filter chip fills the gap of China's RF filter. The performance of the early samples has been comparable to that of foreign giants, breaking the technological monopoly of foreign giants. The company has fully mastered a complete set of MEMS filter industrialization technology from design and modeling, manufacturing, packaging to testing.
In the 5G era, filters will account for more than 50% of the cost of RF front-ends, with a compound annual growth rate of 21%. By 2020, the total market for filters will reach $13 billion. SZHT RF MEMS filters were officially shipped in the second half of 2019, and the market has responded well, striving to become China's largest supplier of RF chips and RF modules within three years. At the same time, it has promoted the optimization and upgrading of the industrial chain of the regional radio frequency communication manufacturing industry. The regional upstream and downstream output value has driven more than 10 billion yuan, directly solving the problem of domestic and foreign intelligent hardware industrial chain rupture caused by the technological monopoly of international giants and trade wars. The successful research and development of China's domestic filters has solved the pain points of China's filter chips being controlled by others and relying heavily on imports. Its independently controllable products will provide effective guarantees for localization and independent brands, and contribute to the rise of "China Core Techonolgy".
The core team of SZHT brings together top design talents in high-volume fields from famous universities such as Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai Jiaotong University and American universities. Most of the team members have R&D and management experience in well-known domestic and foreign companies such as Avago, Skyworks, and GlobalFoundries. He has been deeply involved in the fields of integrated circuits and MEMS for more than 10 years, with rich design experience and leading domestic technology.
After more than four years of process development and practice, the company has fully mastered the key core technologies of piezoelectric layer deposition, photolithography, etching, and cavity structure release, and has independent intellectual property rights. In terms of packaging, the company has jointly developed wafer-level bonding packaging technology with packaging manufacturers. After a long period of exploration, the packaging process has become mature and has the conditions for mass production. In terms of technology, Han Tianxia is a leading RF technology company in China. Since 2015, it has been developing MEMS filter chip products with independent intellectual property rights and has successfully verified all related design and simulation processes. The whole process adopts MEMS three-dimensional processing technology, which is compatible with IC technology. After more than four years of development and practice, all key processes have been overcome, and the relationship between the key structure of the device and the main frequency, differential loss and other performance parameters of the device has been systematically mastered. All technical bottlenecks of MEMS filters have been completely overcome.
SZHT plans to form mass production of existing products and mass production of 5G frequency band products within three years. Based on our own process foundation and research and development capabilities, we are also developing large-scale applications of MEMS sensor devices and MEMS communication chips in 5G, Internet of Things, and other fields, and try to establish a complete production line, including filters, antennas, R&D of multiple single-product chips for power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers, and RF switches, and start to develop RF modules that highly integrate all single-chip RF front-ends, and improve the strategic layout of the entire RF front-end products.
The progress of the chip industry comes from continuous struggle, and the advancement of chip innovation needs to carry forward the past. Now the Chinese chip industry has broken through the technological monopoly of foreign giants in various local areas. In the future, China's chip industry will continue to break through industry fields and industrial chain barriers.