Why is the BLDC market still showing a growth trend against the background of core shortage?

2021 - brushless DC motor control technology seminar, attended by nearly 20 BLDC industrial chain enterprises, in which experts from excellent enterprises at home and abroad such as intelligent microelectronics, keysight, St, national technology, Hangshun chip, Jihai semiconductor, Wang Xin, Zhao Yi innovation, Feng Yan technology, Taixin semiconductor, qorvo, etc. had a wonderful sharing.

From the market feedback and guests' sharing, although this year's BLDC market is affected by the rise in the price of raw materials and the shortage of chips, it is difficult to obtain supply in some application fields, but the application fields with high value and guaranteed profit margin will continue to grow. Generally speaking, the market size of BLDC will continue the current growth trend in the next few years, but the growth rate may slow down slightly.

Market situation of BLDC motor industry.

According to the statistics of Grandview research, the market scale of BLDC in 2020 is US $17.1 billion. The market size is expected to reach 17.9 billion US dollars this year.

The compound annual growth rate is expected to reach 5.7% in the next few years. As we all know, since the end of last year, the manufacturing industry has actually faced great difficulties, such as the serious rise in the price of raw materials and the shortage of chips. Many manufacturing enterprises can only stop production of raw materials.

For example, the price of copper, which is the most used by motor manufacturing enterprises, has exceeded 70000 yuan a ton, compared with 35000 yuan a ton more than a year ago.

In addition, at present, the top enterprises in the BLDC industry include abb, Amtek, Japan electric products, meibeiya group, Dechang motor, United sports technology, Baode electronics, North American electric company, Schneider Electric Company, Leibo electric company, etc.

BLDC controller industry chain.

The drive circuit of BLDC is mainly composed of controller and gate drive, namely pre drive and power MOSFET / IGBT, which is usually called drive. There is also a feedback signal fed back by BLDC to the controller, which is used for Hall sensor or not.

First, the most traditional discrete drive solution; Secondly, the gate drive and power MOSFET are integrated into IPM, together with the controller solution; Third, the gate drive is integrated into the controller, plus the solution of power MOSFET or IGBT; Fourth, an integrated ASIC solution that integrates these three parts.

Although there are many kinds of BLDC controllers, such as MCU, DSP, FPGA and even CPU, MCU is the most widely used and the most widely used at present. Therefore, we take MCU as an example and classify it according to several forms such as MCU, MCU + pre drive and SOC.

As far as MCU is concerned, there are many domestic participating enterprises. At present, there are no less than 100 domestic MCU enterprises, many of which can be used for motor control. In the BLDC industry, well-known master MCU enterprises include microchip, Ti, St, Infineon, NXP, etc. There are Zhaoyi innovation, Huada, smart micro, Hangshun, etc. in China.

MCU + pre drive includes Ti, St, Feng, Lingdong micro, Shilan micro, Jingfeng Mingyuan, etc.

There are Ti, St, Roma, Feng, Toshiba, Pucheng, qorvo, Allegro, etc.

For BLDC scheme providers adopting general MCU scheme, they may encounter some difficulties this year. Since the end of last year, general MCU has become the most scarce material, including 32-bit and 8-bit. Especially for overseas original MCU, domestic MCU may be slightly better.

It is said that the delivery time of overseas original factories basically exceeds 16 weeks, that is, 4 months, generally about half a year. It takes more than 50 weeks to obtain goods for scarce materials. In other words, it may take a year.

Today, some MCU suppliers even stop receiving orders in 2022. For example, Sheng Qun, who sent a notice a few days ago, and Yilong have suspended receiving new orders.

With the shortage of goods is the price increase. I believe many terminal enterprises have received the price increase letter from MCU enterprises.

According to public information, the delivery dates of NXP, st and Xintang are basically about half a year to one year. Q1 has increased by 2 to 3 months, and it takes 8 to 15 months to get the goods.

In addition, power devices are also widely used in BLDC drives. According to ihsmarkit statistics, the demand scale of China's power semiconductor market in 2019 is US $14.47 billion, it is expected to be US $15.1 billion in 2020, and the market scale is expected to reach US $15.9 billion this year.

But at the same time, the shortage of power devices this year is also quite serious. It can be said that it is the third shortage of goods except MCU and power management chip.

Similarly, according to the public information on the market, we sort out the delivery cycle of the current main power device suppliers. Compared with MCU, the delivery cycle is better. Relatively speaking, the delivery time of domestic suppliers is better. For example, the delivery time of Anson semiconductor and silicon Lijie is about 2 months shorter than that of other overseas original factories.

The power equipment used by BLDC motor driver is mainly MOSFET, IPM and IGBT. For example, generally speaking, our BLDC motor driver needs to use 6 MOSFETs to drive. Therefore, in terms of dosage, it is quite a lot.

In the mainstream equipment market of medium and high-end MOSFET and IGBT, China mainly depends on imports and is basically monopolized by European, American and Japanese enterprises. At present, the market share of domestic power semiconductor leading enterprises is still very low, which needs the follow-up of domestic power equipment manufacturers. I believe that with the rise of BLDC motor market, this is an opportunity for the rise of domestic power equipment manufacturers.

The main incremental market of BLDC in the future.

BLDC is widely used and can be divided into fans, pumps, electric vehicles, electric tools, compressors, agricultural machinery, automobiles, etc.

According to our observation, there are several areas with great demand for BLDC at present.

Fan.

In the field of fans, fans include: fans, range hoods, hair dryers, curtain fans, HVAC fans, etc. The main downstream manufacturers are Midea, Emmett, Gree, pioneer, vantage, boss, etc.

According to the data of the National Bureau of statistics, from 2013 to 2020, the number of domestic electric fans increased year by year, and the output in 2020 was 230 million.

At present, the domestic mainstream small household appliance manufacturers, such as Midea, pioneer, ricai and Emmett, basically have products using brushless motors on the market. Among them, Emmett has the largest number and Xiaomi has the lowest cost.

With the entry of some cross-border manufacturers such as Xiaomi, the conversion rate of brushless motor in the field of household fans began to accelerate. At present, domestic brushless motor manufacturers have a place in the field of household fans.

In addition to household fans, there are equipment cooling fans. In fact, equipment fans began to convert to brushless motors many years ago. There is a benchmark enterprise in this field, EBM, whose fan products are widely used in ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, household appliances, heating, automobile and other industries.

At present, many domestic companies are making brushless cooling fans similar to EBM, seizing a lot of EBM market.