How do you feel about the size of the company? Is ~50 employees sufficient for this kind of thing or do they need to scale up?
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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I guess they will grow with the demand.
these companies don't need too many people because its a small volume, high specialization field.
For example Canadian company Angstrom Engineering is similar. They only have 50-200 employees yet they have 25-50 million USD revenue and can support a large variety of PVD/CVD products at the R&D and pilot production scale.
Note that they're producing R&D and pilot scale systems though. A huge company like Lam Research or Applied Materials does this for production scale systems. What's the difference?
1. wafer size. Notice how most of Angstrom Engineering's systems are 200 mm or smaller and are single wafer per chamber. Lam Research and Applied Materials does 300 mm systems. It costs way more to machine a 300 mm chamber than a 200 mm chamber. You can buy commercially available chambers for 200 mm or single 300 mm. Or you can fabricate them with standard diameter stainless tubing, standard CNC tools and TIG welding. it is expensive for an individual, but cheap for a company. When you go to 300 mm production scale chambers, you need customized chambers fabricated by methods like hollowing out a solid block of aluminum such that it is entirely weldless.
2. reliability. this is not about business or statistics, this is technical. For example I bet that Angstrom Engineering's chambers are stainless interior. That's fine for R&D or pilot where you just need high purity and for it to work in a non-aggressive environment. But what if you're running 24/7 production cycle with highly aggressive gases like plasma CVD? These gases corrode stainless and sputter off Fe, Cr containing contaminants. It isn't much - maybe amounts to just ppm or ppb level. But that's too much for a leading edge fab. Lam and AMAT have proprietary coatings to resist plasma corrosion and contamination. It in fact needs to not only resist process based corrosion but also in situ cleaning agents i.e. reactive fluorine or oxygen containing plasmas that are designed to volatilize silicon and metal oxides. This in turn requires proprietary processes to conformal coat an oddly shaped piece of metal with a thin yet uniform film that can have absolutely no holes in it.
3. automation and control. Angstrom engineering might have a wafer hot stage that controls the temperature. Lam Research might have a properitary wafer hot stage that has 100 temperature control zones that can keep wafer temperature uniform at +/- 0.1 degrees even right up to the edge of the wafer. Angstrom engineering might have a PLC based program that can automate internal workflows. AMAT tools might have seamless integration with external wafer handling robots built by other companies.
4. own IP. Angstrom engineering might buy alot of its components elsewhere. it's not easy to have 50-200 people be able to do controls, metallurgy, plasma chemistry, thermal engineering, electrical power engineering, R&D, sales, etc. they might say, buy the plasma source, or buy the electrical power supply, buy the chambers, etc and focus on integration and a few "specialties". Big companies don't have to choose. They can just take as much internal as they need to.
5. quality control. They definitely won't have an internal QC lab with a paper trail for every component to ensure that it is clean. They'll ship the systems and solve the problems as they come up because it's not like their systems lose millions per day they're down. But a company like Lam or AMAT have like 50 people handling the paperwork alone because going down for even 1 hour is a concern.
lel.
Thanks for the explanation. What's your take on the patent filing for an EUV light source? Big deal? To me it appears the most important piece of news since the thread started.
Sorry if I am answering a question that you asked to another person. I didn't posted that patent as a proof that they will have an production ready EUV scanner next year, I just posted that patent as a proof that they are not resting in their laurels waiting for a miracle to happen for ASML ship their EUV scanners next year.
China has been researching EUV for quite some time the big difference now is that there is a more sense of urgency to develop something because the risk of their electronics industry being cut off of chips by the United States.
I know China's been researching EUV for decades, but the significant thing to me is that experimental devices aren't patented, commercial devices are. It's also an important indication that the 2025 goal is still on track.
The EUV lithography instrument is complex and consists of many components, of which the EUV source is necessary but not sufficient.
The optics to control the light flow is also important and not trivial. This is particularly true for EUV where refractive optics are useless since all materials either reflect or absorb EUV, and due to the number of mirrors even small reflective losses add up. A better optical system can compensate for a worse source or vice versa.
So until the whole system is out I can't say anything.
That is the start the commercialization of parts and sub-systems for EUV lithography, but that is still a far cry of having a functional scanner. I guess the big deal will be when this institutes start creating "shell companies and funds" to mass produce and commercialize those parts and sub-systems, that is when you can be sure that something is coming.
By example in immersion lithography:
U-Precision is a shell company from Tsignhua University
CheerTech is a shell company from Zhejiang University.
RSLaser and Guowang Optical comes from CAS institutes.
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