0 1 Status of Domestic Chips
Chip (also known as microcircuit, microchip and integrated circuit) refers to a silicon chip with integrated circuit, which is very small and is often a part of a computer or other electronic equipment. As the core component of smart home appliances, the chip has always acted as the "brain" position.
According to the forecast of professional organizations, China's chip import will exceed 200 billion US dollars (about 12, 185 billion RMB) this year, far exceeding the annual import of oil. As the Pearl River Delta, which has the strongest demand for chips and consumes nearly 70% of the country, there is no advanced chip factory.
Although the chip design industry in China is catching up, and more than 500 companies such as Spreadtrum and Huawei Hisilicon have emerged, most of the chip design companies in China are only low-end designs. Last year, the total sales of the top ten IC design companies were only 22.6 billion yuan, while the turnover of Qualcomm, which ranked first in the world, reached1365,438+800 million US dollars (about 80.3 billion yuan), which was 3.55 times of the total sales of the top ten chip companies in China.
The pain of China's core: the share of domestic chips in China's core integrated circuits is zero, and the trade deficit is as high as US$ 6,543.8+US$ 065.7 billion.
It seems that there are many large high-tech enterprises in China, such as Haier and Huawei, which also export many electronic products every year. But as the core of electronic control system, more than 80% chips need to be imported.
At present, the auxiliary chips that do some simple work are all a few cents, which can account for about 50% of the domestic market, and these chips are highly replaceable. Chips that do complex or core work (such as the CPU of a computer) range from 1 dollar to thousands of dollars, almost all of which are imported and are essential in the system.
02 chip design and manufacture
Most people only know that mobile phones, computers and all walks of life are using electronic devices. Microcontrollers, numerical control equipment and automobiles are all inseparable from chips, but only a few people know the design and manufacture of chips.
The technical content and capital of the chip are extremely intensive, and the production line is tens of billions of dollars. In addition, talent is also a scarce resource in this industry. Technology is expensive, difficult and difficult to train talents. A few large enterprises monopolize the cutting-edge technology and market of the industry.
The chip manufacturing process can be roughly divided into several steps, such as wafer processing, wafer needle testing, assembly and testing. Wherein the wafer processing procedure and the wafer needle testing procedure are front-end procedures, and the assembly procedure and the testing procedure are back-end procedures.
Wafer refers to the silicon wafer used in the production of silicon semiconductor integrated circuits, which is called wafer because of its circular shape. After the wafer is obtained, the photosensitive material is evenly coated on the wafer, and the complex circuit structure is transferred to the photosensitive material by mask aligner, and the exposed part will be dissolved and washed away by water, thus exposing the complex circuit structure on the wafer surface, and then etching the exposed silicon wafer part by etching machine.
After hundreds of complex processes such as ion implantation, these complex structures have specific semiconductor characteristics, and hundreds of millions of transistors with specific functions can be manufactured within a few square centimeters. Hundreds of millions of transistors can be connected by using copper cover as conductor.
Discarded wafers after cutting qualified wafers.
After several months of processing, a chip integrates several kilometers of wires and hundreds of millions of transistor devices in a space the size of a fingernail. After the test, the qualified wafers will be cut and the rest will be scrapped. A real chip was born after thousands of choices.
03 chip manufacturing difficulties
There are four factors that restrict the development of integrated circuit technology: power consumption, technology, cost and design complexity, among which mask aligner is the most important and the core of core technology.
Mask aligner is one of the core devices in chip manufacturing, which can be divided into several types according to their uses: there are mask aligner used to produce chips; Mask aligner for packaging; There is also a projection mask aligner used in the field of LED manufacturing. Mask aligner, which is used to produce chips, is the largest short board for semiconductor equipment manufacturing in China, and the high-end mask aligner required by domestic fabs depends entirely on imports.
High-end mask aligner claims to be the most sophisticated instrument in the world, and its resolution is usually between ten nanometers and several microns. It is the flower of modern optical industry, and it is extremely difficult to manufacture. Only a few companies in the world can make it. Foreign brands are mainly ASML in the Netherlands (the lens is from Germany), Nikon in Japan (high-end mask aligner, from which Intel once bought Nikon) and Canon in Japan. (ASML's high-end mask aligner accounts for 90% of the global market share).
On the other hand, China's integrated circuit manufacturing technology is two generations behind its international counterparts. It is estimated that 14 nanometer products will be made in China in 20 19 years, and 7 nanometer products will be made abroad in the same period.
The long-term OEM mode leads to the mismatch between design ability and manufacturing ability, and the lack of core technology; Problems such as chaotic investment, R&D investment and lack of talents have caused China's integrated circuit industry to remain in a state of "core technology controlled by people and low-end products", which cannot be fundamentally changed for a long time.