The market is cleaning up the "chip assassins" with soaring prices

The "ice cream Assassin" was made into an expression pack. The high price ice cream represented by high gross profit and high premium was once again surrounded by young people this summer. An ordinary ice cream in the freezer is like an assassin who attacks your wallet when scanning the code to pay, making you tremble and bleed.

In the chip industry, especially in the chip spot market, there are such a group of chip "assassins". Originally, they were ordinary, but they suddenly increased dramatically, becoming high-priced chips for the time being, making the wallets of the terminals "assassinated", and the budget was tight and the "core" was painful.

This contradiction is particularly acute in the automobile industry, and the tycoons have been "mistakenly injured" by high-priced chips. He Xiaopeng, founder of Xiaopeng automobile, is suffering from a lack of chips. He talks about chips that have been fired hundreds of times higher (the cost is only a few yuan, and the price is several thousand yuan); Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei intelligent car Bu, exclaimed that chips of 10-20 yuan were fired to 2500 yuan, and a car needs to use 9 such chips

The big guys are still like this. Poor enterprises will not be "assassinated", but they may close down. In addition to automobiles, there are also high-priced chips in the security, medical and other industries, many of which are hot chips in the market in 2021. The normal price may be only a few yuan. Now that the market fever has subsided, what about their prices?

L9369-tr "more expensive than gold"

From three or four thousand to five or six hundred

L9369-tr has gained popularity from the article "the original price is 13 yuan, the current price is 4000 yuan, and the black market price of Bosch ESP chip soars 300 times" in September last year. This chip has been at a high price for a period of time since it rose to more than 3000 yuan in September last year. In February this year, the price of this chip began to plummet, and it has dropped all the way to the current 500-600 yuan.

L9369-tr chip is the core chip of electronic stability system (standard name should be ESC, ESP is a Bosch patent). Its production capacity basically comes from St (st semiconductor) Mapo plant in Malaysia. Last year, St was seriously affected by the epidemic in Malaysia, resulting in the shortage of l9369-tr. However, 70% of China's automobile enterprises rely on Bosch's ESP system, and many automobile manufacturers rush to help themselves, which aggravates the atmosphere of shortage and inflation. Relevant news reports have aggravated this tension.

With the recovery of chip production capacity, the supply has kept up with the demand, and its price has dropped significantly. From the historical low price, l9369-tr is between 25-55 yuan, which is still about 20 times higher at present. The current high price level is related to the high demand for automobiles.

However, l9369-tr is not the only car chip whose price has skyrocketed.

Is there no lack of security chips?

In May 2020, the United States increased its restrictions on China's semiconductors. In addition to Huawei's inability to obtain 5g chips, the intelligent security market also encountered a lack of core and supply. At that time, Huawei Hisense had an absolute leading ability in China's security video monitoring chips (IPC SOC chips), and it was even more difficult to find fast replacement products in the field of medium and high-end security chips.

In September 2020, Hisense's hi35xx series chips, which usually cost around 150 yuan, sold for more than 600 yuan. The most exaggerated is Hisilicon high-end chip hi3559a, which was once fired from 500 yuan to more than 3000 yuan. More traders said that the price of orders received last week had reached 6000 yuan.

However, around October last year, some media reported that after the explosion of Hisilicon chips, the inflection point of security core shortage had arrived. Sources from many security terminal manufacturers and chip manufacturers said that the supply-demand relationship of both high-end and medium and low-end intelligent security chips has gradually stabilized. At that time, Hisense hi3519 and hi3559 chips could still be sold for 2000-4000 yuan. However, in the market, manufacturers such as Ruixin micro and Xingchen are also launching the agency business of substitutes for Hisense. At present, the market price of hi3559a is still at the high level of 2000-3000 yuan, but the inquiry seems to be cold.

High price car chip

Fall to the altar

From the end of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021, natural and man-made disasters such as epidemic diseases around the world seriously damaged the MCU capacity, resulting in a large-scale car core shortage from April 2021.

NXP's 32-bit automotive MCU fs32k144hat0mlht also experienced a round of soaring, from about 30 yuan to nearly 600 yuan. After more than a year, its price has dropped to below 100 yuan.

As for this car chip that supports ASIL B level certification, it is reported that most of the ESC (electronic stability control system) chips of tier 1 Asia Pacific Co., Ltd. are purchased from NXP, and the purchase price has increased by 20% last year. It can be seen that the supply and demand are tight when the car is short of core.

With the transfer of NXP production capacity to automobiles in 2021, the supply of automobile MCU is also gradually alleviated. Up to now, the automobile MCU in 2022 has generally dropped compared with that in April last year, and the puffiness of the price has further subsided (some of them have rebounded briefly and are at a high price).

When supply and demand reach a certain balance, there is no market for high priced chips in the market.

Tps51200drcr: close to normal price

As a low gross profit power management IC, tps51200drcr has a more tight supply in case of core failure. In addition to the subsequent impact of TI's hacking agent incident, the inflow of chips represented by TI's power management IC into the market has decreased. In addition, factors such as strong demand and rare goods in the market have jointly promoted the soaring of Ti chips in the chip spot market.

The normal price of tps51200 drcr is below 5 yuan. After rising to 60 + in April last year, the price has plunged sharply and steadily decreased since September. At present, the price of about 3.5 yuan is the normal price.

The growth of the consumer electronics market has reached a bottleneck. The destocking has been continuously reflected from downstream products to upstream chips. The price of general-purpose analog chips in the spot market has gradually returned to normal.

It is worth noting that tps51200drcr is applied to DDR memory. At present, the market demand for memory chips is also weak, and the price reduction trend is obvious.

St MCU price rise is no longer in the limelight

The price of St MCU began to fluctuate in September 2020. In October 2020, it became famous because of the "rising trend is more expensive than the house price in Shenzhen". It was the chip that took the lead in starting the rising tide of the lack of core. For models with soaring prices, such as stm32f103rct6, which is 10.5 yuan under normal conditions, and stm32f072c8t6, which is more than 4 yuan under normal conditions, all increased by about 10 times at that time.

At present, stm32f103rct6 has been reduced to about 50 yuan. Although stm32f072c8t6 rose sharply at the beginning of this year, it soon fell to about 30 yuan.

With the alleviation of the shortage and the successful replacement of domestic MCUs, from "best financial products" to low-cost mass shipments, the price of consumer MCUs represented by St returned to normal and the market demand returned to calm.

Infrared sensor chip of forehead temperature gun

After the outbreak of the epidemic in 2020, at the beginning of the year, with the resumption of work and production in various places, the demand for the frontal temperature gun suddenly increased. The price of the frontal temperature gun was one day, and the shortage spread to its core chip infrared sensor. It is inevitable that the shortage and price increase in the vacuum period.

In March 2020, MLX90614 and mlx90615 have soared to 100-200 yuan from about 20 yuan and 1.3 yuan earlier. Now, the price of MLX90614 has dropped to more than 120 yuan, and that of mlx90615 has dropped to more than 20 yuan. The demand is much lower than before, and the price has dropped significantly.

Air filter red ak5720vt-e2

In the spring tide of shortage and price rise of chips in 2020, AKM (Asahi chemical) rose dramatically. It once exceeded the "fried chicken" St around November 2020: the demand soared, and some models soared dozens of times.

By January 2021, AKM had fallen to the altar: the demand had not even cooled down, and the price of some chips had gradually dropped.

AKM commissioned Rissa to produce automotive chips due to the fire. Since November 2020, AKM has started to replenish customers with inventory, helping customers to replace those that can be replaced, and finding alternative manufacturers such as Reza for those that cannot be replaced. Therefore, the price has dropped, and even the demand has been much less. This year, friends in the market said that they have not paid attention to it for a long time.

A few cents went up to 400+

The price of the analog audio switch fsa4157p6x from a few cents to one yuan increased to 400 + in the last quarter, and now it has dropped to about 30 yuan.

Fsa4157p6x is used in multimedia fields such as consumer electronics, such as media tablet computers, storage and peripheral devices, mobile phones, wireless network cards and broadband access, and PMP / MP3 players.

In the past year or two, with the surge of new energy vehicles' demand for automotive IGBT, the brand of Anson beauty has been branded with "shortage" in the spot market, and its chip supply is difficult to ease in the short term.

summary

The above high price chip "assassins" are the products of a specific period. As the representative chips of a certain period, they are the epitome of the imbalance between supply and demand in a certain application. All kinds of natural and man-made disasters and accidents reflect the difficulty of missing chips, and the price of chips changes dramatically. However, as soon as the opportunity passes, the trend of skyrocketing will quickly cool down, and some of them even leave the market in a hurry just after a soy sauce. We don't know how much the price behind the "assassins" is, but in a short time, the flowing chip "assassins" may always exist.