Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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Very disappointing to hear that the SSA 800 will go into mass production in June at the earliest. I had expected that to be in early Q1, now we're looking at late Q2 if not later. SMEE really needs to get its shit together.
I'm sorry to put it this bluntly but that's just some cope. No matter how intricate and well-made a tricycle is, it's not going to be a motorbike. China needs to get the proper processes in place to manufacture <= 28nm chips at scale. Dry DUV belongs in a museum of technology, not the centerpiece of China's tools manufacturers.
I'm sure it's a very fancy tricycle.
What a sorry state of affairs. It needs to change by supplying SMIC with advanced tools asap, not entrenched by giving it better antiques.
Use the right tool for the job, not an excessive tool, not an insufficient tool. Dry ArF is much cheaper than immersion ArF and not all processes or layers require immersion ArF. It is the most efficient known tool for processes at 45-90 nm node which is the most cost effective node for a wide variety of products.
This isn't about ego, this is just how the industry works. Texas Instruments, Infineon, etc makes a shit ton of money while mostly buying depreciated old tools and "coping" with "tricycles".
That's nice for them, but 45-90nm is not the bottleneck China's facing. If Chinese fabs didn't have ASML's trash to tide them over until SMEE was ready, this situation would be truly dire. To put it like that American prick did, I don't care about the chips that go into airbags.
SMIC is not meant to play in the same little sandbox TI and Infineon play in, it's meant to be China's premier fab on its way to being the world's most dominant. 2 year delays on a technology like DUVi is unacceptable.
It is what it is. In terms of publicly known capability, 45-90 nm is still beyond commercially available domestic lithography, and Huawei itself planned to start with a 45 nm fab. So a dual stage dry ArF would be a stepping stone to start customers working with the dual stage workflow and giving feedback, while getting the immersion systems separately set up. The only reason I can imagine for them not selling this sort of system is either the extreme challenge of the dual stage or the extreme criticality of the dual stage.
bro you are right about SMEE's DUVi being late 2 years but it is what it is. Q2 is also not too far.
new era will begin once SSA800 serial production start in Q2 2023.
work on more advance SSA900 DUVi going on simultaneously. olala said this machine will use more powerful light source to fab 7nm and below.
olalavn
45nm is more useful than you would think. eFlash is basically stuck around 45nm right now.
Any chip which has lots of embedded Flash in it, like some MCU chips used in automotive, won't scale down properly if you use smaller geometries. The eFlash cell size remains the same.
And most of the semi fabs being built in China right now are still using either KrF or dry ArF lithography. One example is the fabs being built by Nexchip. Right now they are mostly making display driver ICs. i.e. the ICs used to drive an LCD panel. Even in cases where fabs use immersion, they likely will be using dry lithography to make the lower resolution layers. Since dry lithography is less costly and the machines have higher output in terms of wafers processed.
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What was the original expected timeline for them? It would be weird for me if dry machine is not already in mass production, since it was announced in that article about Shanghai's ic sector achievements. And we have seen them winning bids for it.
That's fine. I think there is a lot of value when they can get production ramped up for dry arf machines for local needs. I have also been pretty clear that I think it will take some time for them to ramp up production on arf immersion scanner. That's why they still need to buy and stock up large number of asml scanners. but it would be disappointing if they have not produced a small number of ssa800 for fabs to test with and debug the system. I am operating under the assumption that several Chinese fabs do have ssa800 for testing out process.
Sure, given their other struggles, I would say they are not the obvious choice here for euv. These are all large scale collaboration effort. All the advancement in duvi production is not going to help them much in advanced process if they don't have euvs in 5 years.
I think he meant that the dry DUV had been delayed by three years but it's in production now, i.e., even though it's being mass produced and delivered to customers, that was expected to happen three years prior.
We've had indications that that's been happening since at least 2021. What I think is going on here is that since SMIC has a secure supply of DUVi tools sufficient for its near/medium term expansion plans (a stockpile it's in physical possession of and an assurance that the Dutch government will stiff-arm the US long enough to deliver the remaining order), it wants the SSA800 to perform to a higher standard than SMEE has been able to deliver.
If SMIC had no foreign source of DUVi, I think it would put the SSA800 into service much sooner and just chabuduo it. The SSA800 is not competing against nothing, it's competing against mature foreign scanners that its primary customer has warehouses full of.
I've always thought SMEE was the weak link but I might have been unfair to it, given that it's had to compete against much more capable foreign alternatives China has access to and it's very poorly resourced. Having said that, I would like to see SMEE get bought out by a company like Huawei to consolidate the parts integration effort.
We know Huawei is working on an EUV lithography tool, I wonder who else is and who this "other institute" is.
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