Why is it so difficult to make CPU chips?

Chip industry has its unique internal structure and industrial characteristics. The chip industry chain is divided into five sub-chains, or the chip industry is divided into five major industries. First, design. How to integrate hundreds of millions of lines requires design first. The largest chip design company in the world is British ARM, while American EDA occupies a monopoly position in designing software. Recently, the biggest news in the chip industry is that NVIDIA of the United States will buy ARM from Britain, and the monopoly position of the United States in the chip industry will be more solid. Huawei's Hisilicon has a design capability of 7 nanometers. I once asked Dong Ming, vice president of Huawei, why didn't China buy it? Answer: China will never have a chance to acquire companies like the United States and Europe. Second, manufacturing, including finished products and semi-finished products. Semi-finished wafers and high-purity wafers are basically monopolized by the Japanese. The Japanese can smelt silicon to 90.9%, followed by 1 1.9%, and then the wafer is the best. As we all know, TSMC is the largest in this industry, and China SMIC is currently the fifth largest in the world. Of course, the output is the fifth in the world, the chip grade is low, and the profit rate is not high, because many patented technologies are not in our own hands and are strictly regulated by the United States. Third, packaging testing. Press the chip on the circuit board and pass the test. Because there are too many circuits and contacts in the chip, there is an error in one place, and the final result is a considerable error, which must be tested one by one. Packaging is basically labor-intensive. In this industry, the gap between China and the world is not big, even in a leading position. Fourth, equipment. As we all know, the most advanced EUV mask aligner is ASML in the Netherlands, and others are mainly from the United States. In Japan, companies such as Mitsubishi and Sony dominate wafer production equipment. At present, only ASML in the Netherlands can provide 7-nanometer technology in mask aligner, and the price exceeds 1 billion dollars. Money doesn't necessarily buy it. Shanghai Microelectronics has been able to produce 28 nm chips. Fifth, auxiliary materials. Include photoresist, mask, target, package substrate, etc. These materials are still the bottleneck in China at present. It is so difficult to make a chip, but it is so important. It is characterized by its fundamental and strategic position in the whole national economy. Whether it is people's livelihood, national defense, industry, equipment, aerospace, etc. If there is something wrong with the chip, it means there is something wrong with the human heart. Chip is a fully competitive industry in the world, but it has high entry threshold, long cycle, capital-intensive, technology-intensive and talent-intensive. Tens of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of R &；; The participation of D personnel is basically the competition between limited oligarchs in the world and the international market competition across national boundaries. However, due to its important strategic value, the competition of chips is not only market competition, but also national competition, even a powerful weapon in the international trade war, and it is a key industry to restrict and sanction competitors. National competition and market competition have different competition rules. Three. Chip in the context of Sino-US competition, since the Sino-US trade war, the chip has become a hot word and focus. On September 15, TSMC officially stopped OEM for Huawei Kirin chips due to the pressure of American technology monopoly. Huawei spent 6 million RMB to contract the production of the last batch of chips from Taiwan Province Province, which is said to be raised by all Huawei executives. TSMC also took care of its compatriots and gave Huawei everything it could. Huawei's chips are only enough to support the mobile phone shipments in the first half of 20021. Recently, the US Department of Commerce announced the inclusion of SMIC in the list of US entities. SMIC just went public in China, raising more than 50 billion yuan. If SMIC has problems in upstream equipment and technology, the production of high-performance chips will be variable and the prospect is not good. In the field of chips, China is basically unable to counter US sanctions, and the supply and demand and technology are extremely asymmetric. Intel, Qualcomm, Apple and Microsoft all rely heavily on China, but their dependence on China is weak. Just like WeChat in Tik Tok now, if the United States wants to contain it, we can't counter it, because Google has long since left China and Facebook has never been to China. The national security strategy and China strategy of the United States regard China as the number one competitor, and it is a national policy to contain China in an all-round way. Chip, asymmetric precision strike, has the lowest opportunity cost to the United States and the greatest harm to me. The trade war for the purpose of tariffs has risen to a technical war and an industrial war with chips as weapons, and Huawei has become a victim. The successor was detained, the chip was cut, and the operating procedures expired at the end of the year. The US Department of Commerce lists more than 300 entities in China, of which Huawei owns more than 60. Of course, the United States is afraid of Huawei for a reason. The information technology revolution was mainly initiated by American communication companies. Huawei is a company with genes in the communication industry, not only mobile terminals, but also the world's leading 5G technology. Just like the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, how to compete for the initiative in space in the coming digital age and intelligent age? Chip has become a key link in key industries. The United States is not simply anti-globalization; It wants to "de-China" in globalization. Although it is an idiotic dream for American hawks to encourage complete decoupling from China, scientific and technological decoupling has already been implemented. What should I do? The first thing that comes to mind is to rob people and pay several times more. TSMC security guards are wary of headhunters from Chinese mainland. It is said that they finally dug up all the security guards. At the end of July, Ren went to some universities in the southeast coast to look for talents, because Huawei needed to add 30,000 engineers to enrich its R&D team: what is most lacking now is talents, chip wars and talent wars. One of the characteristics of high-end manufacturing industry is that it is linked with science and education, and its competition is also the competition of educational and scientific and technological forces in various countries. China's education system has not won any Nobel Prize so far, which means that it lacks subversive innovation from 0 to 1. Where does Huawei's 5G come from? It was a hypothesis of a scientist in Turkey, which was finally discovered by Huawei and turned into a product. Advanced technology is first undertaken by scientists, invented in the laboratory and finally industrialized by entrepreneurs and scientists. China's industrialization is rapidly catching up with the West, and there are bound to be many things and links missing. Because the basic research is poor, the underlying software and hardware have to rely on others, which is the fundamental gap.