Chinese semiconductor industry

Bltizo said:

I'm not sure why you've chosen my previous post to rewrite this tirade to.

We are all aware of your obsession of wanting numbers and information from western and English language sources. I'm sorry but you'll have to accept that semiconductor manufacturing equipment is now a fairly high security industry in China and that the best we can get are rumours and indirect indicators, and that any concrete information we receive will probably be delayed multiple months if not a couple of years after something has happened.

Apply the same principles of PLA watching to this, and you will find that might help you to recalibrate your expectations a little.

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The difference is that military equipment pretty much only has military use, whereas semiconductor manufacturing equipment also has civilian use; in fact the vast majority of semiconductors made are for civilian use. That's the difference between this and PLA watching and why it'd be nice to have more concrete data.

IMHO also, the civilian economic sector is many times bigger than the military budget and civilian money flowing into the semiconductor industry can provide a lot more funds on top of just military for R&D and strengthening the industry. There is really no reason for China to neglect the civilian aspect of semiconductor development.

@hvpc , I start liking you, I now believe you have deep knowledge of semiconductor industry. Welcome to the forum (belated), you will be a great contributor here. Thanks for sharing your knowledge

One question from me, you keep saying that only EUV machine from ASML is restricted to China. Does it mean China could buy the most advanced DUV machine from ASML (i.e 2050i) ? and have China bought that machine ?

My understanding is that SMEE will have a DUV machine equivalent to 2000i next year and already shipped (perhaps for testing) 1980i equivalent

gadgetcool5 said:

The difference is that military equipment pretty much only has military use, whereas semiconductor manufacturing equipment also has civilian use; in fact the vast majority of semiconductors made are for civilian use. That's the difference between this and PLA watching and why it'd be nice to have more concrete data.

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I disagree, I think that accurate information about the state of the domestic semiconductor subsupplier industry should now be considered quite high level state secrets, given the targeted way in which the US has chosen to develop policies to sabotage Chinese semiconductor development.

In other words -- no.
Once you start viewing overall Chinese semiconductor efforts as something similar to say, J-20/J-XX back in the 2000s, then I think you will be able to adjust your expectations a little bit more realistically.

gadgetcool5 said:

IMHO also, the civilian economic sector is many times bigger than the military budget and civilian money flowing into the semiconductor industry can provide a lot more funds on top of just military for R&D and strengthening the industry. There is really no reason for China to neglect the civilian aspect of semiconductor development.

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I don't know what you are talking about.

No one wrote anything about neglecting civilian semiconductor development.

My previous post, and this post, is that information about the general, overall domestic semiconductor subsupplier industry is not going to be shared openly -- and is likely to be kept quite under wraps, until such information cannot be practically hidden.

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hvpc said:

ASML, Nikon, or Canon don’t decide what laser to put in their scanners. The customer decides what laser to pair with the scanner. If you buy a Canon system or Nikon system you can chose to use Cymer laser or ASML with Gigaphoton. This, my friend, is not hearsay, this is first hand info. But feel free to verify with any of your sources that had purchased scanners before.

With regards to EUV system, I don’t know if Gigaphoton EUV source has been qualified by ASML for use on their EUV scanner since I left the fab before EUV adoption. But my understanding is the restriction on EUV is not based on where its parts is made but more so that it enable leading edge technology. This paragraph is my opinion/speculation.

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ArF and KrF scanners providing a customer their choice of laser vendors makes sense to me. The laser modules for those scanners should be pretty modular (the stuff I work on in my day job involves solid state lasers that are pretty modular, so long as you give the vendor some very specific specs about what you want your beam profile to look like). However, I can’t see that being the case with EUV scanners, because the LPP light source almost certainly would require a whole bunch of integration optimizations with both the power supply and optics module to work correctly. That means the optics and power design of the whole scanner is mostly likely specifically configured for the exact operational properties of that specific light source.

FairAndUnbiased said:

Competition = high performance is just another form of market fundamentalism no less destructive than religious fundamentalism. See what happened to Russia and especially Ukraine.

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Financiers and economists think that competition drives innovation because they don’t understand engineering and science. The claim that things like competition and strict IP are responsible for innovative capacity sounds downright loopy to anyone with an engineering background and has done engineering work. Anyone with an actual background in this profession knows all about all the R&D dollars and development time engineers everywhere have wasted to come up with a new solution to do the exact same thing for a component design that is critical to function but doesn’t drive performance. Burning time money and energy just to keep up on the treadmill.

@hvpc Does SMEE immersion system has US tech that currently sanctioned?

antiterror13 said:

@hvpc , I start liking you, I now believe you have deep knowledge of semiconductor industry. Welcome to the forum (belated), you will be a great contributor here. Thanks for sharing your knowledge

One question from me, you keep saying that only EUV machine from ASML is restricted to China. Does it mean China could buy the most advanced DUV machine from ASML (i.e 2050i) ? and have China bought that machine ?

My understanding is that SMEE will have a DUV machine equivalent to 2000i next year and already shipped (perhaps for testing) 1980i equivalent

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thanks for your kind remarks.

SMIC already have at least one or two NXT2050. I’m certain CXMT and YMTC will take this system shortly, too. But like what most of you pointed out, the US politician can cut this off in a heartbeat. Or at least a lot of efforts to stop it is in motion.

SMIC announcing investment plan for their Shanghai advanced fab is a good indicator that they can or still expect to buy the latest 2050 in the coming years. But this may change.

I don’t know what performance SMEE is aiming for. But it’s very difficult to go from zero to an immersion system equivalent to even 1980. My direct experience stopped at 1970 and that’s for 16nm. 28nm was first manufactured with 1950i systems. if SMEE is going for 1980 level, then they can claim 10nm as their target. But all I read so far is they are building system capable of 28nm. That’s all I know about SMEE. Hopefully the background allow you all to narrow down what we THINK what SMEE system next year can really do. I am actually very curious what other experts in this forum can share on this…what is the true capability SMEE is targeting.

resistance said:

@hvpc Does SMEE immersion system has US tech that currently sanctioned?

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I strongly don’t think so. Having US parts in SMEE‘s immersion would defeat the whole purpose of this effort to build a domestic made system.

i had seen an earlier post with all the domestic source of each modules. It’s very similar to ones that I’ve seen. And all major components are all domestic From what I see…and all are ready and already shipped to SMEE.

hvpc said:

thanks for your kind remarks.

SMIC already have at least one or two NXT2050. I’m certain CXMT and YMTC will take this system shortly, too. But like what most of you pointed out, the US politician can cut this off in a heartbeat. Or at least a lot of efforts to stop it is in motion.

SMIC announcing investment plan for their Shanghai advanced fab is a good indicator that they can or still expect to buy the latest 2050 in the coming years. But this may change.

I don’t know what performance SMEE is aiming for. But it’s very difficult to go from zero to an immersion system equivalent to even 1980. My direct experience stopped at 1970 and that’s for 16nm. 28nm was first manufactured with 1950i systems. if SMEE is going for 1980 level, then they can claim 10nm as their target. But all I read so far is they are building system capable of 28nm. That’s all I know about SMEE. Hopefully the background allow you all to narrow down what we THINK what SMEE system next year can really do. I am actually very curious what other experts in this forum can share on this…what is the true capability SMEE is targeting.

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As mentioned by @foofy from his previous past post (thanks for confirming) how many? If NXT 2050i cost $80 million, then a maximum of 15 units may had been bought by SMIC. As a way of achieving its 2 prong strategy by developing 7nm and 5nm core competency using foreign machine while indigenizing 28nm and 14nm production line.

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