First, let's look at a true story. Jin Chen graduated from Tongji University on 199 1, and received her master's and doctor's degrees in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin on 1997. Then he came to IBM and Motorola as senior chief engineer and chip design manager. In 200 1 year, Jin Chen resigned and returned to China as the director of the Chip and System Research Center of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and began to lead the research and development of Hanxin-1, the first chip in China. It was expected that research and development would last for a long time, because after all, there is a big technological gap between us and the West. However, just two years later, in February, Jin Chen held a press conference in Shanghai, announcing the success of Hanxin-1.
Moreover, he also claimed that he adopted the international advanced 0. 18 micron semiconductor process design, with 2.5 million devices on an integrated block only half the size of a nail, and a 32-bit operation processing core, which can perform 200 million operations per second. Later, after being appraised by an expert group composed of several academicians of the "863 Program" integrated circuit special group, the chip in Jin Chen's hand really achieved what he said. The news shocked the whole country, because it meant that China not only broke through the technical blockade, but even surpassed the West.
Therefore, Jin Chen was awarded various honors and titles overnight. For example, Shanghai Science and Technology Commission awarded him the title of Shanghai Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Leader, Changjiang Scholar, Dean of Microelectronics College of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and CEO of Shanghai Silicon Intellectual Property Exchange Center. It can be said that at this moment, Jin Chen is pinning the expectations of the people of the whole country.
However, on June 5438+1October 65438+July, 2006, a mysterious post appeared on the bbs forum in Tsinghua University, claiming that Hanxin No.1 in Jin Chen was forged, and then the media quickly found out the truth according to the clues provided by the informant. It turned out that Jin Chen didn't develop the chip himself at all, but entrusted his younger brother in the United States to buy it from Motomora. As for the logo on the chip, he hired migrant workers to polish it off with sandpaper and replace it with a new one.
Things got worse and worse. On June 28th, 2006, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and the Shanghai Municipal Government set up an expert investigation team and started work. After two months' investigation, the fraud in Jin Chen was declared true. So far, China's self-developed chips have suffered heavy losses, but it also reflects the high difficulty of chip manufacturing, and even makes professionals helpless, and finally embarked on the road of counterfeiting.
Let me briefly talk about the difficulties in chip manufacturing. First of all, whenever it comes to chips, you have to mention the Dutch company Asmel. The company is the world's largest manufacturer of chip design and equipment. The HiSilicon Kirin chip used in Huawei's well-known mobile phones was redesigned and improved after Huawei bought the architecture from Asmel Company, and the equipment used to make the chip is known as mask aligner.
What we are going to talk about today is the most advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography machine called EUV mask aligner, and the only company that can manufacture it in the world today is Asmel, with a market share of 100%, that is, there is no competitor and monopoly operation. The reason for this situation is that many technologies are difficult to integrate and the production requirements of many parts are very high.
Take EUV mask aligner as an example, there are as many parts as100000, including lens system and light source. According to the main parts suppliers listed in this table, we can see that they are all leaders in this field. For example, Zeiss, a German company that produces reflector lenses, requires that the lens error value produced by EUV mask aligner is very small. To what extent? If the lens is as big as the earth, then the allowable error is two hairs falling on the lens. In addition, the extreme ultraviolet light it reflects is a light source that is easily absorbed by other substances, even by air. Extreme ultraviolet light will be weakened by 30% every time it is refracted, which makes the lens have extremely high light transmittance to reduce the weakening of light. But it is such a lens that needs to be polished by hand.
After the lens, let's look at the extreme ultraviolet light source of EUV mask aligner. From this picture, we can see that EUV mask aligner, as the fifth generation mask aligner, has greatly surpassed the previous four generations, especially the wavelength has been lowered from 193 to 13.5. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the light scattering, which means that EUV mask aligner can realize the production of smaller process chips. To this end, they invented a liquid metal that was bombarded by light 50,000 times per second, thus successfully producing extreme ultraviolet light. The process is what you see so far. If you have to give an example, you have to poke a grain of rice falling from the air into 50 thousand holes in one second with a needle.
After reading these two examples, I believe you have some understanding of the difficulty of making mask aligner. But as the saying goes, it depends on human effort. In addition to technical difficulties, the backwardness of China's chip technology is the blockade of the West. As far as Asmel Company is concerned, its shareholders are all companies such as Intel and Samsung, and the capital behind it is also American capital. Therefore, when the United States issued a ban on Huawei, Asmel had to stop supplying, and even companies using its technology took action together, such as TSMC and other enterprises.
But don't be disappointed. In fact, as early as 2006, China issued the Outline of National Medium and Long-term Scientific and Technological Development Plan, which defined the core electronic devices, high-end general-purpose chips and basic software, VLSI manufacturing technology and complete sets of technologies, new generation broadband wireless mobile communication, high-end CNC machine tools and basic manufacturing technology, large-scale oil and gas-bed methane development, and water pollution control and treatment of large-scale advanced PWR and high-temperature gas-cooled reactor nuclear power plants. Major projects 16, such as the cultivation of new varieties of genetically modified organisms, the creation of major new drugs, the prevention and treatment of major infectious diseases such as AIDS and viral hepatitis, the manned space flight of high-resolution earth observation system, and the lunar exploration project, put the related technologies of chip manufacturing and processing in the first and second place.
If we look at this timetable now, we can find that many plans have been successfully realized, such as a large plane flying 20 people in space and a lunar exploration project. In terms of chips, the Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in tackling key problems jointly with SMIC, Shanghai Institute of Microelectronics and Changchun Institute of Optics and Mechanics of Harbin Institute of Technology, and successively broke through technologies such as light source control system. Although there is still a big gap, I believe that with the joint efforts of the country and scientists, we can still make the world sit up and take notice, just like when we developed two bombs and one satellite!