Chinese semiconductor industry

Shanghai Microsystems Institute achieves breakthrough in 300 mm SOI wafer manufacturing technology​

Recently, the team of researcher Wei Xing of Shanghai Institute of Microsystems has made breakthrough progress in 300 mm SOI wafer manufacturing technology and prepared the first 300 mm radio frequency ( RF ) SOI wafer in China. Based on the 300 mm SOI R&D platform of the National Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit Materials, the team successively solved the preparation of low-oxygen high-resistance crystals, low-stress high-resistivity polysilicon film deposition, and non-contact planarization required for 300 mm RF-SOI wafers. Many core technical problems have achieved a major breakthrough in domestic 300mm SOI manufacturing technology from scratch.

At present, RF-SOI wafers have become the mainstream substrate material for radio frequency applications, accounting for more than 90% of the market share of radio frequency front-end chips such as switches, low-noise amplifiers and tuners . With the full rollout of 5G networks, the demand for RF modules in mobile terminals continues to increase. The RF front-end chip manufacturing process is transitioning from 200 mm to 300mm RF-SOI . Taking this opportunity, domestic mainstream integrated circuit manufacturing companies are also actively expanding into 300mm . RF-SOI process foundry capability. Therefore, the independent preparation of 300 mm RF-SOI wafers will effectively promote the coordinated and rapid development of the entire domestic RF-SOI chip design, foundry and packaging industry chain, and provide a solid guarantee for the supply security of domestic SOI wafers.

With a total investment of over 600 million, Xinyichang high-end intelligent equipment manufacturing base has started construction​

On October 20, the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the "Xinyichang High-end Intelligent Equipment Manufacturing Base Project" was held in Cuiheng New District, Zhongshan City. The total investment in the project was 600.4616 million yuan.

According to reports, the Xinyichang high-end intelligent equipment manufacturing base plans to build an area of approximately 149,400 square meters. It will mainly build an intelligent equipment intelligent manufacturing base and a group R&D center (mainly including R&D offices, experiments, testing, and inspection rooms) and supporting facilities. Create a large-scale, clustered, innovative and branded semiconductor intelligent equipment intelligent manufacturing industry demonstration base with independent intellectual property rights, advanced technology and a certain scale.

It is reported that on April 6 this year, Xinyichang announced that it plans to issue convertible corporate bonds to unspecified objects, raising no more than 520 million yuan, of which 370 million yuan will be invested in the Xinyichang high-end intelligent equipment manufacturing base project.

Xinyichang pointed out that the high-end intelligent equipment manufacturing base project aims to build an intelligent manufacturing equipment production base and expand the production capacity of the company's core advantageous products, which will help the company seize industry development opportunities and further enhance the core competitiveness of the market. The smooth implementation of the project is necessary to support the steady growth of the company's performance level and achieve rapid development of the company.

HighGround said:

Some bottlenecks may take longer to solve than others. Confidence and optimism is great, but @hvpc made great points and substantiated them pretty well. I think it's always safer to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.

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It depends on how much money and resources you willing to spend. The progress can be much faster，for instance，if you make ten prototype machines to validate simultaneously rather than one prototype machine. So I think Chinese domestic machines can fulfil the vacancy left by foreign SME much earlier than many anticipated，if push comes to shove

tokenanalyst said:

A year after the almost defacto embargo in chip making equipment and software to SMIC. Who is maintaining SMIC US tools for their 14-7nm fabrication facilities? Are they are doing by themselves? Are Chinese semi repair companies doing it?​

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There are enough experienced talents who have been maintaining these tools for many years already，available on market. They either work for third party tool maintaince companies or hired by Chinese fabs. As for parts and components，from what I know，they can get it from Taiwan and Korea，and increasingly from domestic companies.

High-end MEMS chip manufacturing project in Huzhou, Zhejiang officially goes into production

tonyget said:

There are enough experienced talents who have been maintaining these tools for many years already，available on market. They either work for third party tool maintaince companies or hired by Chinese fabs. As for parts and components，from what I know，they can get it from Taiwan and Korea，and increasingly from domestic companies.

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-Is this capability unique to SMIC or China in general? because after the past year ban YMTC was left with a lot of unused tools that they asking US toolmakers to buyback.
-Is safe to say that a lot of the high maintenance parts are outside of US controls or a least is challenging for the US to enforce those controls?
-How these knowledge and experience of maintaining and repairing these US high end tools will translate to domestic toolmakers as these export controls get worse and worse in the coming years?

tokenanalyst said:

A year after the almost defacto embargo in chip making equipment and software to SMIC. Who is maintaining SMIC US tools for their 14-7nm fabrication facilities? Are they are doing by themselves? Are Chinese semi repair companies doing it? Or there is a massive gap in US export controls that SMIC has been exploiting? Does anyone in the US even know where these 7nm 14nm facilities are? Do they have acquired more US made tools this year? Or Could be that tools for mature process nodes can be used for advanced process nodes? if that is the case could Chinese made tools who claim being verified for 28nm process being incorporated into SMIC 14nm and 7nm supply chain? If that is the case what percentage 5, 10, 20, 40%? And a what rate?

So many questions.​

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tokenanalyst said:

-Is this capability unique to SMIC or China in general? because after the past year ban YMTC was left with a lot of unused tools that they asking US toolmakers to buyback.
-Is safe to say that a lot of the high maintenance parts are outside of US controls or a least is challenging for the US to enforce those controls?
-How these knowledge and experience of maintaining and repairing these US high end tools will translate to domestic toolmakers as these export controls get worse and worse in the coming years?

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If semis equipment works like equipment in other industries (and from everything I can gather it does) a lot of the components and parts are actually sourced from the Chinese supply chain anyways. The parts that are most IP protected and hard to reproduce aren’t always the parts that need servicing anyways. And if you understand how a part works enough to service them oftentimes that also means you know enough to reverse engineer them to function well, even if the original supplier’s quality is better (again, think car industry and how many 3rd party parts there are).

tokenanalyst said:

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This actually seems to be something that you would develop late on in development process.

Unlike with arfi scanners which have to compete against asml machines, I would just hand prototypes to smic or whoever else and let them test it out in trial process as early as possible.

tokenanalyst said:

A year after the almost defacto embargo in chip making equipment and software to SMIC. Who is maintaining SMIC US tools for their 14-7nm fabrication facilities? Are they are doing by themselves? Are Chinese semi repair companies doing it? Or there is a massive gap in US export controls that SMIC has been exploiting? Does anyone in the US even know where these 7nm 14nm facilities are? Do they have acquired more US made tools this year? Or Could be that tools for mature process nodes can be used for advanced process nodes? if that is the case could Chinese made tools who claim being verified for 28nm process being incorporated into SMIC 14nm and 7nm supply chain? If that is the case what percentage 5, 10, 20, 40%? And a what rate?

So many questions.​

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I assume they are pretty good at maintaining these equipments.

Paul triolo mentioned to me (after a recent trip to china) that they may have been able to sub in domestic & tel machines.

He said all Chinese tools makers now qualified at 28nm and he was surprised to find that out. I don't really know what is meant by that, but at the time, I interpreted as the asml + all domestic process is now qualified.

Again, I have no idea on specifics like if domestic alternative for kla is actually qualified at 28nm or if they are using another non Americanized option.

I will say that while I think ssa800 has likely being testing with several fabs for at a year (from what I hear), the process doesn't seem to be done. Even if it's close to delivery for production usage, it's probably not ready for the same level of work load as asml machines.

But overall, even people working inside Chinese semiconductor equipment industry are left guessing at the status of this project. The opsec is insanely strict.

I wonder why havok went offline. I can only assume he did it because they are close to something.

But I would caution that we overestimate it's capabilities. If we really get to a point where smic can't even get 1980i for 28nm process, then I would imagine it will be forced to use ssa800 (even if it's not comparable performance). But until then, major fabs are likely to continue to work with smee until they are comfortable using it in hvm.

It's also possible that 1 fab, like in the case of yandong with arf dry, will just be used as lab mice here. Maybe central govt will compensate them for this.