Chinese semiconductor industry

ACuriousPLAFan said:

He's just saying what the West would have said about China on doing literally anything.

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OK, A bit weird way to phrase it but whatever man.

President Xi Jinping would beg to differ. In his estimation, technology comes in two varieties: nice to have, and need to have. Social media, e-commerce and other consumer internet companies are nice to have, but in his view national greatness doesn’t depend on having the world’s finest group chats or ride-sharing.

By contrast, Mr. Xi thinks the country needs to have state-of-the-art semiconductors, electric-car batteries, commercial aircraft and telecommunications equipment to retain China’s manufacturing prowess, avoid deindustrialization and achieve autonomy from foreign suppliers.

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The whole article is just smell more WSJ China bad crap, but if this is truly what Xi think then he is not entirely wrong, in life there are things that are nice to have and things that there are necessities, is nice to have a huge flat screen TV in your living run but having the electricity to power that TV is a necessity. Tecent is a nice company to have but without access to chips they are doomed.
Living in such hostile environment were every necessity can be denied, Chinese had been forced to develop their own GNSS systems, nuclear reactors, machine tools and so on.
Science and Manufacturing is the only way China have to ensure that the nice things to have keep working a least partially properly when the things that are necessities are being denied.

Hitomi said:

Regarding this EDA ban, would the realistic delay actually be smaller if the fabs rely on pirated EDA software or find other ways to circumvent it by running the software on overseas servers and remotely utilizing it from China.

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from my understanding, fabs don't use EDA software directly. the designers use it. Fabs can accept vendor neutral EDA file outputs like EDIF.

Tuojing Technology(Piotech): It is planned to invest 930 million yuan in the research and development and industrialization project of advanced semiconductor technology and equipment.​

A few days ago, Tuojing Technology announced that the company intends to use over-raised funds of 930 million yuan for the development and industrialization of advanced semiconductor process equipment.

According to him, this project will build a R&D and industrialization base in Lingang New Area of Shanghai Free Trade Pilot Zone for the research and development of advanced ALD equipment and processes, and realize the industry of semiconductor equipment required by Lingang as the center customer base. change. The implementation of this project will promote the continuous growth of the company's business scale, and at the same time, it will also help the company to continuously strengthen its competitive advantages in the segmented fields and maintain its leading position in the industry.

This project, by laying out the R&D and industrialization of advanced semiconductor process equipment, meets the needs of the integrated circuit wafer manufacturing line, and is conducive to promoting the development of key integrated circuit equipment. Provide necessary measures that are autonomous and controllable.

With the iterative upgrade of integrated circuit chip technology, the complexity of the chip structure continues to increase, and the requirements for thin film performance are also increasing. This trend has put forward higher technical requirements for thin-film deposition equipment, and the market's dependence on high-performance thin-film equipment has gradually increased.

This project develops thin-film deposition equipment suitable for advanced technology nodes on the basis of existing technology reserves by building a new R&D and production environment, and realizes the industrialization of semiconductor equipment required by the Lingang-centered customer base, which is conducive to product improvement. technology level and core competitiveness, and consolidate the leading position in the industry.

With the improvement of the overall prosperity of the semiconductor industry, the global semiconductor equipment market has shown a rapid growth trend, driving the market demand for thin film deposition equipment to increase. Maximize Market Research predicts that the global semiconductor thin film deposition equipment market size will reach US$34 billion in 2025, maintaining a compound annual growth rate of 13.3% from 2020 to 2025.

This project can further increase the market share in the field of integrated circuit manufacturing equipment such as logic circuits and memory chips by laying out semiconductor equipment suitable for advanced process fields, and win the first place in the upcoming emerging application fields and the growth period of high-end chips required for them. opportunities, and then seize market opportunities to rapidly expand the scale of the enterprise.

Microwave and millimeter wave radio frequency chip company, Shixin Semiconductor won the C round of strategic financing of over 100 million yuan​

According to micronet news, recently, Chengdu Shixin Semiconductor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Shixin Semiconductor") completed the C round of strategic financing of over 100 million yuan, led by Dachen Caizhi, and the previous investor Qixin Capital followed. This round of financing will be mainly used for the company's new product research and development, market expansion and expansion of test production lines.

Founded in 2017, Shixin Semiconductor is a high-performance microwave and millimeter-wave radio frequency chip company. At present, it has successfully developed more than 20 categories and more than 200 subdivided models of chip products. The company's independent research and development and independent intellectual property rights of voltage-controlled oscillators, frequency converters, analog phase shifters and other chips have been widely used in leading customers in communications, radar and other industries.

It is worth mentioning that in the list of the fourth batch of specialized, special and new "little giants" recently announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Shixin Semiconductor is among them.

hvpc said:

Bro, I think you still don't see it. It takes more than just immersion systems to make 28nm wafers. I gave an estimate on TOTAL number of scanners needed. @tinrobert clarified his estimate is ONLY on immersion systems. My numbers are actually more conservative than @tinrobert. If I use his assumptions on the immersion tools, we'll end up with an even higher number than what I had shared earlier.

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I actually was referring to the number of immersion scanners needed. Since you were talking about production capacity of DUVs for ASML, I thought you were talking about limitations to how many immersion scanners ASML can produce a year. The other scanners are a lot cheaper and SMIC could buy them from other suppliers and also second hand ones. SMIC spent $1.2billion in scanners from ASML from Mar 2020 to Mar 2021. They can buy 15 immersion scanners and 20 to 30 non-immersion scanners with that type of expenditure. With greater expansion plans now, the budget for lithography machines will only go up.

hvpc said:

I am aware money is not an issue for SMIC, never question it so don't know why people keep bringing this up.

Sum up what I said before:
1. You get out (wafer out) what you put in ($$ spent)
- fab announcement doesn't translate to actual wafer output
- CAPEx is $$ actually spent or budgeted to spend
- actual $ invested regardless where the money come from is recorded as CAPEx; this is not how much money SMIC has or has access to
- Faster the spending spree, the quicker the wafer capacity scale up.
- the current CAPEx pace is not enough for SMIC to complete all the announced fab by 2024*
- SMIC needs to spend more and faster than their current (2021/22) CAPEx to if @ansy1968 claim that >400K wpm added by 2024 is to happen.
- Since SMIC is not money limited, CAPEx is to be taken as actual money they are able to spend (what WFE suppliers limits SMIC to spend)

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I don't think anyone outside of @ansy1968 claims that they will add 400k wpm by 2024. Ansy himself might have just been overly excited. Based on my calculation, SN1 will be fully ramped up and SN2 will probably be half ramped up by 2024. Shenzhen plan is smaller, so will likely be close to fully ramped up by 2024. Beijing fab will probably be more than 50% ramped up in another 2 years. Both Lingang/Tianjin are liked to have just started production by then.

SMIC itself has said they are planning 15 to 20% additional 8-inch equivalent wafer production per month a year, so would take at least 4 years to double capacity. That is actually quite impressive already!

They actually have more planned expansion than just the aforementioned. Beijing plant will get a phase 2 that will probably just be as large. Chongqing will probably sign a new fab soon. I think SMSC fab will eventually expand to 100k as SMIC increases it's advanced node production.

hvpc said:

2. Got money, but not enough scanners available for purchase
- SMIC has money to spend
- ASML/Nikon/Canon not able to meet SMIC's and global demand. ASML said they're not able to increase their supply before 2025
- Supply limited, China as a whole currently receives ~90systems/year.
- Assuming SMIC could buy 30 out of 90 per year, this is not enough if >400Kwpm added by 2024 is to happen

In summation, CAPEx measures actual money spent (not how cash rich SMIC is). SMIC needs to increase the pace of CAPEx spending, but actual CAPEx SMIC could spend will mostly be limited by the supply of scanners.

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That's actually not what you said before. You were pretty insistent on explaining why SMIC doesn't spend enough on capex. We all had to correct you on that.

I also don't think you are seeing the full picture on scanners. SMEE will be a part of the equation here. It has advertised 30% local market share in front end lithography machines. With this world wide slow down, other fabs around the world will be slowing down. SMIC and other Chinese fabs have the ability to buy up more of the scanners that other fabs don't need whether from second hand market or just taking up other fabs delivery slots. I don't think scanners will be the limiting factor here to Chinese fab expansion.

I think it just naturally takes time to build new fabs and get them up and running. It takes time to hire enough qualified people to operate the additional capacity. The current SMIC expansion plan is already quite aggressive. If they want to achieve higher market share, then they need to move into more advanced nodes. As such, it's ability to ramp up SN1/SN2 with N+1/N+2 production is probably more important than how quickly the Beijing fab can be ramped up.

Major take away from this YT video,

1)A single ASML NXT 3400C consume 30,000 kilowatt of hours of electricity per day, What more of the latest HIGH NA EUVL.

2)Average power of typical DUVL light source is 45 watts (earliest model NXT1950i?) while that of an EUVL is 250 watts, the claimed 500 watts is maybe referring to HIGH NA EUVL?

3)TSMC plan to reduce 15,000 EUVL WPM capacity and more to save cost.

4)TSMC is in a conundrum both high inventory stock and restarting idled EVUL cost money.

5) Due to high energy cost inputs from the Ukraine War, Taiwan gov't announce an electricity price increase of 15%.

With the info provided above, the Chinese maybe thinking,

1) In a possible conflict in the Taiwan strait, Don't need to destroy the TSMC FAB, sabotaging the power infrastructure will do.

2) DUVL is still attractive and future improve iteration is cost effective.

3) The exciting prospect of SSMB technology.

To our esteem members, I want your expert opinion, from public info we have a single SSMB can potentially power 80 EUVL, so how much electricity is needed? IF we do the math 250 watts for a single EUVL so times 80 machine = 20,000 watts?

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And from this I'm being thinking, the Indians need to solve their power sector infrastructure first before embarking and dreaming of becoming a semiconductor powerhouse.

ansy1968 said:

Major take away from this YT video,

1)A single ASML NXT 3400C consume 30,000 kilowatt of hours of electricity per day, What more of the latest HIGH NA EUVL.

2)Average power of typical DUVL light source is 45 watts (earliest model NXT1950i?) while that of an EUVL is 250 watts, the claimed 500 watts is maybe referring to HIGH NA EUVL?

3)TSMC plan to reduce 15,000 EUVL WPM capacity and more to save cost.

4)TSMC is in a conundrum both high inventory stock and restarting idled EVUL cost money.

5) Due to high energy cost inputs from the Ukraine War, Taiwan gov't announce an electricity price increase of 15%.

With the info provided above, the Chinese maybe thinking,

1) In a possible conflict in the Taiwan strait, Don't need to destroy the TSMC FAB, sabotaging the power infrastructure will do.

2) DUVL is still attractive and future improve iteration is cost effective.

3) The exciting prospect of SSMB technology.

To our esteem members, I want your expert opinion, from public info we have a single SSMB can potentially power 80 EUVL, so how much electricity is needed? IF we do the math 250 watts for a single EUVL so times 80 machine = 20,000 watts?

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250 watts is only like 2.5 100-watt lightbulbs.

So I'm quite sure the " 30,000 kilowatt of hours of electricity per day" comes from the rest of the lithograph machine.
30,000 kWh per day is pretty high. Household consumption is like 20 kWh per day.

Quickie said:

250 watts is only like 2.5 100-watt lightbulbs.

So I'm quite sure the " 30,000 kilowatt of hours of electricity per day" comes from the rest of the lithograph machine.
30,000 kWh per day is pretty high. Household consumption is like 20 kWh per day.

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No the light output is 250 watts. The input to generate that output is much much higher. Photon generation for shorter wavelengths of light tend to be less efficient than for longer wavelengths of light.

latenlazy said:

No the light output is 250 watts. The input to generate that output is much much higher. Photon generation for shorter wavelengths of light tend to be less efficient than for longer wavelengths of light.

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I took the 250 watts figure from ansy1968's calculation " IF we do the math 250 watts for a single EUVL so times 80 machine = 20,000 watts?" which obviously implies the 250 watts is the input energy.

I had no idea what percentage of the total input energy is over that of the eventual light output.