Chinese semiconductor industry

China's first extremely large-scale fully asynchronous many-core chip was successfully taped out. What is the difference between asynchronous circuits and synchronous circuits?​

At present, the mainstream designs of digital chips are synchronous circuits (Synchronous). This pipeline structure driven by a clock signal is the basis of modern digital circuits. However, with the increasing complexity of design and testing, coupled with the need for low-power design, problems such as clock skew, clock jitter, and power consumption will appear in an actual design. Asynchronous circuits are sometimes also called clockless or self-timed circuits…
Recently, the first extremely large-scale fully asynchronous circuit (Asynchronous Circuit) chip designed by the asynchronous circuit and system team led by the team of Associate Professor He Anping of the School of Information Science and Engineering of Lanzhou University was successfully taped out.

Fully asynchronous circuit chip (picture from: Lanzhou University)

The chip is 120 chips named LZU_GERM, and each small square in the above picture is an independent chip. It is a fully asynchronous many-core chip designed by the asynchronous circuit and system team of Lanzhou University. It adopts a 40-nanometer process and integrates 1512 computing units and 350 million transistors in an area of 96 square millimeters, and the power consumption of each chip is only 98 mW. These chips will be designed by the end of April 2021 and will be successfully back in May 2022.

The UK chip plant is obsoleted. It is jut funny that these politicians and SCMP keep hiking the national security threat over something that is pretty much outdated.

China sold a better fab than this to UMC. The HeJian one at Suzhou.
If the UK do not want to sell that is their own problem.

gelgoog said:

China sold a better fab than this to UMC. The HeJian one at Suzhou.
If the UK do not want to sell that is their own problem.

Click to expand...

I don't know what Wingtech trying to get from this three decade old British fab，didn't they know that even if they hold 100% share of a British firm they still have no control over the firm？

Just look at Imagination Technologies, Chinese Canyon Bridge Capital bought it back in 2017. Later Canyon Bridge tried to change the board of directors, install some of their own people at the board. Guess what，the UK government intervened and rejected the change. What's the point of buying a company if you cannot have control over it？Can you imagine that you cannot even make personnel changes of your own company？That's BS

I actually would love to see the UK gov cancel this acquisition deal，because Wingtech will be the real loser here if the deal goes through. The fab will be "Wingtech property" by name only.

Ultra-Precision Space Separation Heterodyne Littrow Plane Grating Encoder Displacement Measurement System

• Ultra-precision spatial-separated heterodyne Littrow grid encoder displacement measurement system
• Wang Leijie ， Guo Ziwen ， Ye Weinan , Zhang Ming , Zhu Yu
• Optical Precision Engineering Volume 30 Issue 5 , 2022 Page: 499-509
• DOI:
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  CLC number: TH741;TP274
• Paper publication date: 2022-03-10 ,
  Received date: 2021-08-25 ,
  Date of revision: 2021-09-24

Summary​

In order to meet the application requirements of ultra-precision position measurement of double workpiece stages of immersion lithography machine, an ultra-precision space-separated heterodyne Littrow plane grating encoder displacement measurement system is proposed. The principle and scheme design of the measurement system, the design and manufacture of each component of the system, the derivation of the encoder measurement principle and the experimental verification are given. The subdivision rate of the phase card of the designed plane grating encoder displacement measurement system is 4 096, and the measurement resolution is x 50 pm/ z 25 pm. The experimental results show that the plane grating displacement measurement system can realize the simultaneous measurement of the x -direction and z -direction displacement, and the z -direction movement stroke is ±1 mm, which meets the vertical focusing requirements of the double workpiece stage of the lithography machine; R x / R When the y / R z single-axis rotation or the three-axis combined rotation limit rotation angle is ±1.5 mrad, the quality of the AC signal still meets the measurement requirements, and the leveling rotation of R x / R y / R z of the double workpiece stage of the lithography machine meets the requirements . The designed displacement measurement system of the plane grating encoder can realize the corresponding measurement function of the double workpiece stage of the lithography machine and has a high performance index.

Abstract​

An ultra-precision spatial separation heterodyne littrow grating encoder displacement measurement system was proposed to meet the requirements of an ultra-precision position measurement of dual workpiece table of immersion lithography machine. This study mainly includes the principle and scheme design of the measurement system， the design and manufacture of each component of the system， the measurement principle derivation of the encoder， and the test verification. The subdivision rate of the phase card of the displacement measurement system of the designed planar grating encoder was 4 096， and the measurement resolution was x50 pm/z25 pm. The experimental results showed that the planar grating displacement measurement system can measure the x and z direction displacement simultaneously， and the z direction motion stroke was ±1 mm， which met the vertical focusing requirements of the dual workpiece of the lithography machine. When the limit rotation angle of Rx/Ry/Rz uniaxial rotation or triaxial combined rotation was ± 1.5 mrad， the AC signal quality still met the measurement requirements. Moreover， it met the requirements of Rx/Ry/Rz leveling rotation of the dual workpiece table of lithography machine. To summarize， the displacement measurement system of the designed planar grating encoder met the corresponding measurement requirements of the photoengraving machine dual workpiece table and achieved higher performance indexes.






Tsinghua University
U-Precision???

TSMC is not happy with long delay subsidy while at the same time loosing their main customer Huawei. Well that the price you pay if you depend on US market which make up 64% of their sale. And they depend on 1 company Apple if it ever Apple change their mind TSMC will be in trouble! Not only that the cost of production in US is so much higher than in Taiwan while talent is hard to come by. So they are in a fix

It isn't going to be easy but attracting more investment in semiconductors are still welcome.

Suzhou aims higher in China’s IC industry with its SND mapping up to become a top-notch IC design center

Suzhou，China’s famous ancient and strong industrial city, has plans to notch up further in key strategic industries including IC in the next five years. The city’s technology district, Suzhou New District (SND) already with some leading IC companies, aims to become a top IC design and first-class green and low-carbon industry center.

In the plan announced in late March, SND will strive to achieve an output value of RMB220 billion ($32.78 billion) in the new generation of information technology, and RMB180 billion ($26.82 billion) in the high-end equipment manufacturing industry..
As one of the earliest industrial parks in China, SND started in 1990 in the western part of Suzhou in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province and become a top-notch high tech zone in China along with the China-Singapore Industry Park in the eastern part of the city.
In 2021 SND registered double-digit GDP growth, being first in the city.
In May 2020, SND released a plan to accelerate IC industry development. That includes up top RMB10 million ($1.49 million) subsidy given out to a qualified R&D project, and RMB6 million ($0.9 million) per year for chip tape-out projects.
SND has some successful IC industry parks. Suzhou Innovation Park is such one. Founded in 1993, it is home to large-scale IC design companies like NationalChip (国芯科技), Analogix (硅谷数模), and SDMicro (昇显微电子). It has some other AI and 5G technology-related companies located there.
Also in SND, Suzhou Integrated Circuit Innovation Center has gathered nearly 30 companies. It has plans to attract more than 200 more with an expected annual output value of RMB3 billion ($449.4 million) to RMB5 billion ($749 million).
In September 2021, a fund of funds totaling RMB10 billion ($1.5 billion) was established for SND’s IC development, focusing on high-quality projects and teams.
The newcomers in SND includes Huade Semiconductor (华锝先进) ramping up its MEMS sensor packaging and testing, and Everbright Photonics’ (长光华芯) Laser Innovation Research Institute in laser chip development.
SND has so far 26 listed companies, making it the only area in Suzhou that has established ties with Shanghai Stock Exchange, Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Beijing Stock Exchange and the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ). It has established a long-term cooperation mechanism with the Shanghai Stock Exchange to provide preferential and convenient listing channels for enterprises in the area.
So far this year, three companies in SND are listed - NationalChip, Everbright Photonics and Rigol Technologies (普源精电).（校对/WM Zhang）

tokenanalyst said:

Yeah I think, if foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers are not willing to sell their high end equipment to China then they SHOULD NOT be allowed to monopolize the low and medium end semiconductor equipment Chinese market.
Unless there is a severe shortage, the only ASML machines that should be allowed in the Chinese market are Arf immersion lithography and EUV lithography. The same goes for KLA, LAM, AM, Axecilis and so on, if they are not willing to sell their high end equipment then they should find another market to dump their low end equipment.

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@tokenanalyst Yeah I think, if foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers are not willing to sell their high end equipment to China then they SHOULD NOT be allowed to monopolize the low and medium end semiconductor equipment Chinese market.
Foreign companies except for ASML with EUV do sell high-end equipment to China. It is the US government blocking ASML.
By the way, readers can see my latest article on Applied Materials and China here: