Chinese semiconductor industry

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ansy1968

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From motif ( China military forum), If SMIC is having trouble in acquiring ASML DUVL, why the massive expansion. The OBVIOUS answer, there is NOW a domestic equivalent available.

SMIC Vows to Triple 300-mm Production Capacity Despite U.S. Sanctions​

By Anton Shilov about 3 hours ago
Despite all odds, SMIC is poised to survive and grow, the company says.
SMIC, China’s largest foundry, has faced extraordinary difficulties in the past 12 months after it got into the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List, which essentially barred the company from developing sub-10nm fabrication technologies and created challenges with obtaining new equipment. Yet in spite of all odds, the foundry remains bullish and plans to triple its production capacity in a few years, the firm said.
"We are planning to triple our capacity for 12-inch wafers in the coming years," said Dr. Haijun Zhao, the company's co-CEO, reports Nikkei.
"Since SMIC was placed on the “Entity List” by the U.S., the company has faced tremendous challenges in production and operations," SMIC's management said in a statement. "Since the beginning of the year, we have focused on the two main priorities of ensuring operation continuity and continuous capacity expansion, realigning the supply chain and finding ways to optimize the procurement process, accelerate supplier qualification, and improve production planning and engineering management."
Based on SMIC’s financial results, the company’s management has succeeded in meeting the foundry’s urgent needs. The company earned $1.415 million revenue in Q3 2021, up a whopping 30.7% year-over-year as well as an increase of 5.3% quarter-over-quarter. The company’s net profits for the quarter reached $321 million, a 25% YoY surge.
Like other foundries, SMIC has probably revised its quotes due to overwhelming demand and an over 100% utilization, but without sufficient (and consistently expanding) production capacities its sales could not have risen by one third year-over-year.
“Operation continuity has been basically stabilized, expansion of mature technology is progressing in an orderly manner and overall as scheduled, and advanced technology business is steadily improving,” the statement from the management reads.
The company is currently run by two co-CEOs: Dr. Haijun Zhao who is responsible for mature nodes and Dr. Mong-Song Liang who is responsible for progressive FinFET-based technologies. Since the company was blacklisted by the U.S. government last year, SMIC cannot do much with its FinFET nodes, yet it continues to invest in further development of its advanced processes (N+1, N+2). Dr. Shang-Yi Chiang (ex-TSMC), who served as vice chairman at SMIC since September 2020 to November 2021, last year proposed to focus R&D efforts on advanced packaging technologies and heterogeneous integration in a bid to serve clients who needed advanced chips. Yet, his departure from the company earlier this month probably means that this plan will be at least put on the backburner.
Without advanced nodes, one of SMIC's ways to grow is to concentrate on mature nodes and hope that one day it will be able to get back to leading-edge nodes. This year SMIC began to build two large 300-mm fabs (including the China's first logic GigaFab) and install additional tools into existing 300-mm fabs that will process wafers using 28nm and thicker process technologies, so it looks like for now it is going to stick to mature process technologies.
At present, the company can process around 120,000 300-mm wafers per month. Once the current expansion plans are complete, the company will be able to process approximately 360,000 300-mm wafers a month. Yet, completing the projects may be tougher than initially anticipated.
The company allocated some $4.3 billion for capital expenditures this year, but in nine months it could only spend $2.4 billion, according to China Renaissance Securities. This indicates that it is not very easy for the company to secure new manufacturing tools, which is perhaps why it prefers not to provide precise dates when its new capacities are set to go online.
The Chinese government wants the country to become self-sufficient in chip manufacturing and since SMIC is without any doubts Chinese semiconductor champion, it plays a crucial role in the government’s plan. But while semiconductor production is hard and capital intensive, chip development requires considerably less resources and there are thousands of chip designers in China that need SMIC's (or someone else's) services. The only problem is that without advanced nodes it will not be able to serve all the customers out there and while demand for all nodes (including mature ones) is very high and will remain high as the world is consuming more chips than ever, it remains to be seen whether reliance only on mature nodes is a good strategy for SMIC.

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tokenanalyst

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The American Paradox.

The most damning submission, though, came from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which slammed member companies of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) like Intel and Qualcomm for asking the US government for industry funding on the one hand, but using their spare cash for stock buybacks on the other. The latter, of course, is meant to boost share prices and increase the wealth of stock-holding executives at the companies.

“Most of the SIA corporate members now lobbying for the CHIPS for America Act have squandered past support that the US semiconductor industry has received from the US government for decades by using their corporate cash to do buybacks to boost their own companies’ stock prices,” report authors William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins charged.

“Among the SIA corporate signatories of the letter to President Biden, the five largest stock repurchasers – Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom – did a combined $249 billion in buybacks over the decade 2011-2020, equal to 71 percent of their profits and almost five times the subsidies over the next decade for which the SIA is lobbying.”

It’s not only chipmakers that do this. The Semiconductors in America Coalition (SIAC) was formed in May to lobby Congress for the passage of the CHIPS act. Members include Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and Google, who spent a combined $633 billion on buybacks during 2011-2020, according to the report, which pointed out this was about 12 times the proposed government subsidies under CHIPS to support wafer fabs on US soil.

“If the Congress wants to achieve the legislation’s stated purpose of promoting major new investments in semiconductors, it needs to deal with this paradox,” the report authors said.

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tokenanalyst

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"The upcoming EXE:5200 requires precision mirrors one meter in diameter, ground and polished to the point they can position images on the surface of a silicon wafer within 20 picometer. That's a margin of error less than the width of a single helium atom, the smallest element on the periodic table. It could take the Chinese a generation to develop anything similar, the thinking in tech circles goes."

Is this even physically possible? Sounds like somebody is exaggerating massively.
I think the Chinese have working on that kind of polishing technique for some time. In this presentation the have been able to polish a surface to the sub-nanometer (picometer range) RMS using ion beam figuring, the size of a few atoms, and that was in 2014, i imagine that today they will be even more capable. The light source i think will be a bigger challenge.


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tokenanalyst

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Speaking of EUV this is the abstract from the 2021 EUVL workshop, Tsinghua researchers are already doing experiments exposing photo-resist polymers to SSMB EUV light and getting interesting results. Still need to improve a little more. but it is still interesting.

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This is apart from the ongoing research on laser plasma being done by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, according to this by 2014 they already have some underlay hardware, my guess is that they are more advanced now. This tech it's pretty hardcore i'm not going to lie, imagine hitting the exact same point hundred of thousand times per SECOND.

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ansy1968

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Speaking of EUV this is the abstract from the 2021 EUVL workshop, Tsinghua researchers are already doing experiments exposing photo-resist polymers to SSMB EUV light and getting interesting results. Still need to improve a little more. but it is still interesting.

View attachment 79098

This is apart from the ongoing research on laser plasma being done by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, according to this by 2014 they already have some underlay hardware, my guess is that they are more advanced now. This tech it's pretty hardcore i'm not going to lie, imagine hitting the exact same point hundred of thousand times per SECOND.

View attachment 79099
@tokenanalyst bro a dual approach? with an EUVL LPP within 2023?
 

MortyandRick

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The article was actually much milder. It was just on preferential government procurement policies. You know, the same ones that China's had for decades and still don't work for encouraging endogenous technology development in China (cc: Huawei Direct Product Rule)

Oh so these government procurement policies are exactly the same ones they had for to decades? You actually read the policy word by word and know it will have the same effect?

Hmm and china had no endogenous technology development ? So what about 5G, high speed train, large cranes that even the US needs for their ports and ev and ev batteries ?
 

GodRektsNoobs

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The article was actually much milder. It was just on preferential government procurement policies. You know, the same ones that China's had for decades and still don't work for encouraging endogenous technology development in China (cc: Huawei Direct Product Rule)
Mmmmm...such is the case of Chinese high-speed rail for example, right? I mean, the guy in the video is almost eighty. What does he know, right?

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