Chips are the jewels in the crown of human ingenuity, and lithography machines can be called the pearls in the field of chip industrial manufacturing. Asma in the Netherlands (ASML), Japan's Nikon and Canon are the top three in the field of lithography machine manufacturing, of which Asmak has a market share of 60% in high-end lithography machines, a market share of high-end lithography machines has reached 90%, and the market share of lithography machines with chip processes below 14 nanometer nodes has reached 100%, and there is almost no opponent. Peter Win, the CEO of the company, said:
It is unlikely that China will independently replicate top-notch lithography technology, as Asmak relies on relentless innovation and the integration of components that are only available from non-Chinese suppliers. But what I mean is not absolutely impossible, because the laws of physics in China are the same as we have here. Never be so absolute, they will definitely try.
I believe that many people will be dissatisfied when they see the words of the CEO of Asma, after all, our Chinese scientists have independently completed the research of two bombs and one satellite and the space station in the case of being blocked by technology; they have later achieved anti-superiority in the once backward shield machine and high-speed railway. We can give a bunch of examples like this.
Even in the field of chips, Huawei's semiconductor subsidiary HiSilicon Semiconductor, since 2004, has rushed into the global semiconductor TOP10 list in just over 10 years, growing much faster than other semiconductor companies.
I believe that seeing this, many people may think, a small chip, no matter how difficult it is, can not be more difficult than two bombs and one satellite technology, right?
Two bombs and one star
To understand this problem, we must first understand the difficulty of making two bombs and one satellite, in general, two bombs and one satellite refers to atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, missiles and artificial satellites. Among them, whether a nuclear bomb can be developed, the key element is actually the raw materials used to make a nuclear bomb. If there were not enough raw materials, it would be impossible to build an atomic bomb. In World War II, the United Kingdom encountered similar problems and had no choice but to cooperate with the United States.
Now we also determine whether a country has the energy to make nuclear weapons by analyzing "how much enriched uranium is being purchased" and "how many enriched uranium centrifuges" a country has. Therefore, from the current point of view, the raw materials for nuclear weapons are the problems for making nuclear weapons.
Chip manufacturing
The difficulty of manufacturing chips is completely different from nuclear weapons, it belongs to precision manufacturing, so how precise is it?
We often hear 14nm, 7nm chips, 5nm chips and even 3nm, not that the chip is only a few nanometers. You know, "1 nanometer" is only 10^ (-9) meters, which is a very small length, only 10 times larger than an atom. And here "nano" refers to the thickness of the gate, which is a technical term, and it does not matter if you do not understand it. We all know that there are transistors in the chip, taking HiSilicon's Kirin 9000 as an example, which is the most advanced 5mm process chip now, and there are 15.3 billion transistors on this chip. How frightening is the density of this transistor? Let's take a simple example, in this chip, there are hundreds of millions of transistors arranged in the range of a grain of rice.
If you want to make such a chip, you need knowledge of dozens of disciplines, at least thousands of processes. At the same time, it also needs the blessing of the most cutting-edge technologies in dozens of industries, including precision machine tools, precision chemicals, precision optics and so on. Asma's CEO said: China can't make it independently. But in reality, he only said half of this sentence.
Because, so far, no country in the world can independently manufacture a state-of-the-art chip. Because the most sophisticated lithography machine now needs the strength of global enterprises, several core components are not manufactured by Asma, for example: the optical system of the lithography machine is provided by zeiss in Germany, and the light source system is provided by Cymer in the United States.
Asma itself only focuses on the integration of lithography system and the design of next-generation products, so it is equivalent to integrating the resources of related companies around the world to manufacture the highest-end lithography machine.
Not only that, but what we need to know is that it takes three steps to make a chip, design, manufacture and packaging testing.
Although Huawei's HiSilicon Semiconductor has done quite well in the design field, but the design needs to use EDA software, there are three companies that can provide software services, of which 2 are from the United States, one is from Germany, and the headquarters is in the United States. Not only that, but the ARM architecture required for the design was also provided by a British company.
In addition to the use of lithography machines, many other materials and technologies are needed for manufacturing, for example, the manufacture of chips requires very high purity monocrystalline silicon. This process will involve the purification of the material, the need to convert the silica into polycrystalline silicon, here for the purity requirements of polysilicon is very high, the purity needs to be 99.999999999% (9 after the decimal point 9), and then the high-purity polysilicon is refined into monocrystalline silicon, and the monocrystalline silicon slice can get the wafer.
The production of chips is the process of arranging components according to the design scheme on the wafer. Therefore, it is also very important for the purification of polysilicon, otherwise the yield rate will be very low. From a global point of view, the technology of purifying polysilicon, Japan has done the best, and our country has not been able to make such a high-purity polysilicon until now.
In addition, Japan has done a relatively good job with photoresist, which is a necessity in the process of making chips.
The final step in chip manufacturing is packaging and testing, which is to add a protective cover to the chip. In this regard, we are not lagging behind, and we are still doing a relatively good job.
That is to say, Huawei's HiSilicon is at a good level in chip design, but it still needs to use EDA software in Europe and the United States.
In terms of sealing and testing, our country has done a good job. And in chip manufacturing to lag behind a lot, this is also the place where the neck is stuck, which involves the core technology of enterprises in various countries around the world, these technologies are the technical barriers formed by decades of technology accumulation in Europe, the United States and some Southeast Asia, it is difficult to break the monopoly for a time.
Global supply chain
Because the technology required for chips is too high, it is necessary to integrate global technologies. Therefore, no country in the world can make chips independently, which is not to say that only China cannot do it. Because these technologies developed decades earlier than us in Europe and the United States, long-term technical barriers have been formed, which will make China's chips stuck in the neck.
However, we can also see that if it is not deliberately suppressed. Chinese companies have actually shown a very amazing speed of development, and Huawei's HiSilicon Semiconductor is a typical example.
Therefore, although we are now in a state of being pinched by the neck, the matter of pinching the neck also makes us understand the importance of chip technology for a country. Therefore, no matter how difficult it is and how long it takes to overcome it, it is very necessary. We also believe that in the next few years, our country will certainly emerge a lot of chip technology talents, under their efforts, to break the current card neck dilemma, and even let China's chip technology to the forefront of the world, which is like high-speed rail, shield machines and other technologies.