more info on android supporting risc-v here:
Chinese semiconductor industry
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Information free paper with lots of words and little else. No specific people saying anything and no specific new policy except a laughably ineffective one and shows a massive misunderstanding of the semiconductor industry (raw material costs are not the main cost driver).
I notice they talked about share prices in Naura dropping but not about their revenue growing 50% and profits doubling.
It also makes it sound like Chinese policy changes since October which reflects a very American short termism, deriving from their experience in WW2 which has never been repeated since.
I think people need to calm down again. I'm really annoyed to see this level of constant hyperventilation. Clearly, someone from SMEE cannot spell everything out for everyone. And frankly, I doubt any of us would understand it if he did. He does not seem to be concerned about mass production of this first generation DUVi machine. Which to me indicates that the project's success does not depend on U-precision piece for at least mass production of SSA800. So, please calm down everyone. The far more important step is having SMIC and others to do their validation of the production prototype and then to raise the production.
According to own U-Precision they send 85 dual wafer stage prototypes
The technologies developed in the DWSi is not just for immersion but also EUV, because is maglev, they are aiming to less than 2.0 nm matching precision I guess closer to ASML. That and the research for advanced grating measuring devices was done also 2021.
Their goal for now is to have a domestic immersion tool that can allow a 28nm process with reasonable performance. Any bottleneck is going to be, is in the process of or already has been solved.
The technologies developed in the DWSi is not just for immersion but also EUV, because is maglev, they are aiming to less than 2.0 nm matching precision I guess closer to ASML. That and the research for advanced grating measuring devices was done also 2021.
Their goal for now is to have a domestic immersion tool that can allow a 28nm process with reasonable performance. Any bottleneck is going to be, is in the process of or already has been solved.
I would take ANYTHING coming from bloomberg, FT and most US mainstream media with a truck load of salt. Because is usually garbage that you have to pay for. No sources, always the famous "unnamed guy", superficial crap, always quotes from national security think thankers and so on.
The goal of the Chinese goverment has always been to make domestic chips... with domestic tools. They don't care if the chips are a few generation behind the leading edge as long they are made with domestic tools. The goal of companies like SMIC and HHGrace, Tsignhua unigroup is to make profits, that its, there is nothing to it. Now been demonstrated that going for the Taiwanese-Korean high tech sweatshop model is not going to work, for now, I hope everyone got the memo that China need access to a secondary and reliable domestic semiconductor tooling ecosystem apart from ASML, Japan, Korea, from down to up. Obviously dismissing current tarnished export controlled unreliable-unavailable US tools.
For the goverment the monopoly of US tools in China was pretty concerning since almost a decade ago due fact that of the abusive use of export controls by the US. Also concerning was the lobbing of US companies of foundries like SMIC and HHGrace, too many foreigners affecting purchasing decisions and delusional Chinese liberals - gradualists in the industry advocating for a model that sooner or later would come to haunt the industry. But as long foundries process were advancing and they were making money some bureaucrats in Beijing just turned a blind eye. The goverment could just had enforced the use domestic tools when gov. money was involved even if some tools lag behind and solve the problems down the road but that would have slowdown some companies. The compromise between the liberals and the goverment was to allow the bidding process to give a "fair chance" to domestic tool manufacturers to win against US behemoths sadly the bias against domestic tools still lead to uneven ecosystem were most of the money when to grow dangerous monopolies and a not a reliable ecosystem.
Honestly, people should be thankful that SMEE is going through these trials and tribulations. It means they aren't just doing this as a check the box, met the letter of the project requirements kind of deliverable to take in the government subsidies (this happens everywhere) but they actually intend for it to be commercially viable in HVM. With so many moving pieces, you cannot expect everything to align perfectly in the first go. If anything, it lays a good foundation going forward. These kind of projects are all iterative and gradual, you should not expect any sort of great leap forward.
From what I understand you do not even need the dual-stage table to just make a working machine. The Japanese machines do not use it. The whole point of it is increasing wafer throughput. So by the fact they are working on dual-stage table you can guess that throughput is a requirement for this set of machines.
One possibility is that SMEE is using a different work stage for their current prototypes. Another possibility is that SMEE is using U-Precision stages but these are pilot or prototype builds. R&D itself is not complete until you’ve finished *all* testing needed to meet some requirement standard or certification and you are not making any further changes to the initial production run. Sometimes products can still be finishing R&D, especially under verification or validation testing, while production run and customer delivery has already started, because observation of performance under customer adoption is necessary to complete the testing requirements before you can comfortably lock a design for production.
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As I have been saying for years in this thread, the most time consuming part of product development is always testing and reliability improvements. This is the stuff that people need to have more patience for. The fact that they don’t need to employ immature technology for emergency use is a sign that that you don’t need to do the job quick because there’s headroom to do the job well.
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