Electrical Equipment / Components & Telecoms

In recent years, due to the impact of global trade conflicts and epidemics, and the rapid popularization of home appliance intelligence, the localization process of home appliance chips has been greatly promoted. According to the observation report on the import and export data of Huacheng, the sales scale of China's household appliances MCU and IPM will increase by 10% and 37% respectively in 2021.

Meiren chip under Midea Industrial Technology was born under the background of localization substitution. It was established in 2018, and the first master MCU MR88F001 series was successfully applied in smart home appliances related to Midea Group's washing machines, refrigerators and kitchen heating divisions in 2020. According to the official information of Midea Industrial Technology, as of October 2022, the cumulative sales volume of master MCU MR88F001 series has exceeded 10 million, and the chip products such as master control, touch control and frequency conversion have also been delivered in batches to more than 30 customers.

Recently, Midea Industrial Technology and Meiren Semiconductor shared the development opportunities and challenges of domestic home appliance chips.

According to the Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation Report, according to the project information released by Meiren Semiconductor, Meiren Semiconductor officially launched the development of MCU product line in 2019, officially launched MR88F001 series master MCU and MR86F001 series touch MCU in 2020, and realized mass production in Midea Group's washing machine, refrigerator and kitchen heating divisions. In 2021, Meiren Semiconductor will continue to launch MR88F002 series master control MCU, MR86F002 series touch control MCU, MR82F001 series frequency conversion MCU and MRD7110S three in one IPM, and achieve mass production in Midea's domestic air conditioning and HVAC business divisions. In 2021, Meiren Semiconductor completed the preliminary layout of four product lines: MCU, power, power supply and IoT, and nearly ten products were successively released. In 2022, Meiren Semiconductor started external customer promotion, and has completed sample delivery and mass production in many customers.

According to the product route planning of Meiren Semiconductor, in addition to the subdivided three categories of master control, touch control and frequency conversion, the MCU product line also started the research and development of on-board MCU this year, which is expected to be launched in 2024. In the power supply product line, Meiren Semiconductor mainly provides ACDC, DCDC and voltage stabilizing products for household appliances; IoT products include Wi Fi, BLE and other chips. In the future, it will provide intelligent solutions for the whole house based on the Internet of Things. Huacheng Import and Export Data Observation Report.

MR88Fx01 is a M0 series master control chip, featuring large capacity, high integration and strong immunity. The MR88Fx01 can provide up to 256KB of Flash space, with a built-in 32bit multiplier unit. The powerful DMA function makes data transmission simpler, faster and more efficient. The MR88Fx02 series is also a M0 master chip, which focuses on multiple peripherals, pin full function mapping and strong interference, and is widely used in electric ovens, microwave ovens, electric pressure cookers, dishwashers, water purifiers, beauty instruments, dashboard and other small household appliances. The touch series MCU has little difference from the above MCU. With touch function, it is used in various home appliances in Midea.

MR82F00x series frequency conversion MCU has a variety of analog peripherals, providing dual motor drive. The main frequency is up to 160MHz. It supports up to two FOC motors for control. It can provide two kinds of packages, and is widely used in the fields of air conditioning appliances, motor drives, industrial servo drives, elevator drives, UAVs, etc.

Semiconductor in household appliance industry

According to the observation report on the import and export data of Huacheng, according to the data at the conference, the output of major household appliances MCU in 2021 will be basically covered by seven countries. From the perspective of output structure, the largest market shares are Japan, Germany, China and the United States. Focusing on China, the domestic scale is expanding steadily, increasing from 12% in 2020 to 17.4%, which is also directly related to the substantial growth of the market demand for complete machine products.

In terms of household appliance IPM, the global output is mainly covered by China, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. Among them, Japan's household appliance IPM is the largest, accounting for more than 70% of the global share. The second is China's IPM output. Although there is still a gap between China and Japan, it accounts for 14.7% of the total output and is still increasing. The domestic IPM output is also experiencing rapid development.

Focusing on China, the demand for the three major white power MCUs of air conditioners, refrigerators and washing machines has increased from 570 million in 2017 to more than 700 million in 2022. With the transformation of MCU to 32-bit, the clustering is becoming more and more obvious, the functions of household appliances are more and more, and the added value is significantly improved.

According to the observation report on the import and export data of Huacheng, according to the conference report data, the domestic proportion of the main household appliance MCU is steadily rising from 2019 to 2022. In 2019, the proportion of domestic MCU will only be 11.1%, which will rise to 12% in 2020. In 2021, the proportion of domestic MCU will increase rapidly, reaching 17.4%. According to incomplete statistics this year, the proportion will reach 22.3% in 2022, and there is an opportunity to exceed 30% next year. Although the epidemic has brought some impact to the household appliance industry, it is not so serious as a whole. Now the entire household appliance product is constantly upgrading to the high-end and low-frequency direction. Compared with the mechanical products before, the market has a lot of demand for MCU, which is still quite dynamic. Many domestic manufacturers are also steadily promoting the application of MCU in the household appliance industry, accelerating the localization process of MCU in the household appliance industry.

It is reported that, with the support of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Chinese Academy of Home Appliances has taken the lead in jointly undertaking a project - key chip modules and applications of frequency converters, in conjunction with Midea, Hisense, Haier and other enterprises. The project has developed and customized a number of 32-bit MCU and IPM, with the goal of using more than 6 million sets of products. After verification and market feedback, these chip modules can basically meet the needs of manufacturers and users. In terms of progressiveness chip functions, it can reach the same level as foreign chips. However, the actual application scale is not large enough and the time is not long enough, so the cost performance ratio does not have obvious advantages. This requires the joint efforts of upstream and downstream enterprises to adhere to long-term investment.