Chinese semiconductor thread II

european_guy

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doing some calculations on how much DRAM is needed for 100 million huawei phones

From here, Micron is use 16GB per die on its LPDDR5x DRAM chips
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From here, each LPDDR4 die is between 50-60mm^2 per 8GB DRAM back in 2018
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that translates to about 1000 die per wafer.
Each CXMT LPDDR5 die is 12GB.
Let's say CXMT die is 50-60mm^2 and they get 70% yield. Then each wafer is 12GB * 700 = 8.4TB. Let's say on average, each huawei phone uses 12GB DRAM. Then each wafer gets you 700 phones

100million/ 700 = 143k.

Actually, this turned out to not be as bad as I thought. Supplying all Huawei/Redmi/Transsion phones may only take 500k wafers per year.

Actually each CXMT LPDDR5 die is 12Gb (bit), they are packaged in stacked 8 so that each chip is 12GB (byte)...but each chip is 8 dies.

So you have to divide your numbers for 8 and we get (*assuming die size is correct) around 100 phones per wafer.

60 millions phones in 2024 -> 50K wpm capacity is needed


* regarding die size I found only
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that refers to CXMT 2x nm (22 nm) 8 Gb DDR4, with bit density of 0.102 Gb/mm2 that is similar to the old
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. In that case die size was 76mm2 for a mere 8Gb. But admittedly this CXMT product is from 2020, so the new one should be better...let's wait for someone with access to TechInisight's full analysis.
 

tokenanalyst

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The pan-semiconductor business has blossomed in multiple areas, and Xinqi’s micro-assembly performance has achieved rapid growth.​


Xinqi Micro Devices released its annual report stating that in 2023, the company achieved operating income of 829 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 27.07%; net profit attributable to the parent company was 179 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 31.28%; excluding non-net Profit was 158 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 35.7%.

Entering 2024, Xinqi Micro-Device's operating performance will still maintain a rapid growth trend. In the first quarter of 2024, the company achieved operating income of 198 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26.26%; net profit attributable to the parent company was 39.7604 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18.66%; non-net profit after deduction was 36.7867 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33.16%.

Xinqi Micro-assembly stated that the rapid growth of performance is mainly due to the high-end trend of the PCB market. The company continues to improve the technical level in the fields of PCB lines and solder mask exposure, and has core performance indicators of equipment such as minimum line width, production capacity, and alignment accuracy. It has a high technical level and comprehensively promotes the high-end upgrade of the company's product system. With product stability, reliability, cost-effectiveness and local service advantages, the product market penetration rate has grown rapidly.

In terms of internationalization, Xinqi Micro-Device is actively building overseas sales and operation and maintenance teams to accelerate overseas market expansion. In 2022, equipment has been sold to the Japanese and Vietnamese markets. In 2023, the company's equipment has been successfully sold to Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea and Australia. In other regions, business is growing rapidly and export orders are performing well.

In terms of advanced packaging, Xinqi micro-device direct-write lithography equipment not only has the advantages of mask-free cost and convenient operation in advanced packaging, but also has great advantages in rewiring, interconnection, intelligent correction, and application for large-area chip packaging. Advantages: We are currently cooperating with well-known companies such as Huatian Technology and Shaoxing Changdian. The equipment is progressing smoothly on the client side and has received continuous repeat orders from leading advanced packaging customers in mainland China.

In terms of mask plate making, the company has diverse customer categories in the plate making field. The LDW series of mask plate making equipment that meets the 90-nanometer process node will be launched in 2023 and has been verified on the client side; in terms of new displays, direct-write lithography machine technology is gradually Instead of traditional film exposure technology, the company implements a point-to-area strategy, focusing on the NEX-W model, to penetrate the customer supply chain and promote market sales in this field.

In the field of lead frames, Xinqi Micro Packaging implements a major customer strategy and uses its product development and customer resource accumulation in the fields of WLP, PLP and other semiconductor packaging to promote the replacement of traditional stamping processes by etching processes.

In terms of new energy photovoltaics, the company actively promotes product development and industrial verification of direct-write lithography equipment in the photovoltaic field, and continues to develop in new solar cell technology fields such as HJT/Topcon/XBC.
At present, it has actively cooperated with a number of leading battery companies. The equipment has been shipped to leading photovoltaic companies and overseas customers in 2023.

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tphuang

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Actually each CXMT LPDDR5 die is 12Gb (bit), they are packaged in stacked 8 so that each chip is 12GB (byte)...but each chip is 8 dies.

So you have to divide your numbers for 8 and we get (*assuming die size is correct) around 100 phones per wafer.

60 millions phones in 2024 -> 50K wpm capacity is needed


* regarding die size I found only
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
that refers to CXMT 2x nm (22 nm) 8 Gb DDR4, with bit density of 0.102 Gb/mm2 that is similar to the old
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
. In that case die size was 76mm2 for a mere 8Gb. But admittedly this CXMT product is from 2020, so the new one should be better...let's wait for someone with access to TechInisight's full analysis.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense, my bad

so if we use this
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Samsung 12Gb D1z is 44mm2 or 0.273 Gb/mm2

So suppose CXMT die is around 45mm2 -> using
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I got about 1300-1400 die per wafer. Let's assume 65-70% yield -> 900 good die per wafer. That's about 130 phones per wafer

100 million phones per year -> 769k wpy -> 64k wpm

Now if they were to ramp up to 300 million to support transsion and redmi, that would required 150k wpm for just LPDDR4/5

And you still need more for servers, PCs, data centers and such. I think there is easily demand for 300k wpm in near term

Back in 2020
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SK hynix is said to have 200k wpm of DRAM capacity in just Wuxi fab in China. IIRC, that produces 40% of their output.

So if CXMT can get to 300k wpm, that would actually go a pretty long way to supplying domestic demand. Maybe address 50% of China's demand of DRAMs.
 

tphuang

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tokenanalyst

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Donghai Investment Honglan Semiconductor Fund was established​


According to news on April 24, Donghai Investment Co., Ltd. and Changzhou Tianning Industrial Upgrading Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) jointly established Changzhou Tianning Donghai Honglan Venture Capital Partnership (Limited Partnership) to focus on investing in the radio frequency field of the semiconductor industry. This fund will give full play to the synergistic advantages of government + capital, attract high-quality semiconductor companies to Changzhou through equity investment, and support and promote the development of Changzhou's semiconductor industry.

Donghai Investment focuses on the investment logic of "domestic substitution" and "core technology independent controllability", relies on its own semiconductor investment advantages, focuses on the radio frequency field of the semiconductor industry, seizes the integration point between emerging semiconductors and various manufacturing links, and uses domestic substitution/product innovation as the Breakthrough, the fund will invest in companies with rapid development opportunities and core technology thresholds, injecting new productivity into Changzhou's semiconductor industry chain.

Donghai Investment was established in 2009. It is the 16th direct investment subsidiary of a securities company in the country, with a registered capital of 600 million yuan. Since its establishment, Donghai Investment has devoted itself to financial fields such as equity investment and private equity funds. With its professional investment capabilities and rich platform resources, it has been deeply involved in the capital market. As of 2023, Donghai Investment has established or serves as a financial advisor/investment advisor for a total of 26 funds, with a total management scale of nearly 4 billion yuan. It has made full efforts in the field of equity investment and has achieved good results frequently.

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tokenanalyst

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Large-size silicon carbide laser slicing equipment and technology​


Nanjing University successfully developed large-size silicon carbide laser slicing equipment and technology, marking my country's important progress in the field of third-generation semiconductor material processing equipment. It not only solves the problem of high loss rate of silicon carbide cutting materials, but also greatly improves the productivity.

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SiC is not only an important technology related to national defense security, but also a key technology that the global automotive industry and energy industry attach great importance to. Cutting the grown crystal into slices is the first step in the processing of silicon carbide single crystals. The performance of the slices determines the level of subsequent thinning and polishing. Slicing processing can easily produce cracks on the surface and subsurface of the wafer, which increases the breakage rate and manufacturing cost of the wafer. Therefore, controlling crack damage on the surface of the wafer is of great significance in promoting the development of silicon carbide device manufacturing technology.Currently, silicon carbide ingot slicing mainly faces two pain points:
(1) Traditional multi-wire cutting technology has a high material loss rate. Since silicon carbide is a brittle material with high hardness, the processing difficulty of cutting, grinding and polishing increases. During the processing, problems such as warping and cracking are serious and the loss is huge. According to Infineon's data, under the traditional reciprocating diamond bonded abrasive multi-wire cutting method, the overall material utilization rate in the cutting process is only 50%. After the polishing and grinding process, the cutting loss ratio is as high as 75% (single The total chip loss is ~250um), and the usable part ratio is low.
(2) Traditional multi-wire cutting technology has a long processing cycle and low productivity. Foreign production statistics show that with 24-hour continuous parallel production, the production time of 10,000 pieces is approximately 273 days. To meet market demand, a large amount of wire cutting equipment and consumables are needed, and the wire cutting technology has high interface roughness and serious pollution (dust, sewage, etc.).In addition to "how to increase production" of silicon carbide substrates, what should be considered is "how to save".

In this regard, the technical team of Nanjing University uses laser slicing equipment to greatly reduce losses and increase productivity. Taking a single 20 mm SiC ingot as an example, 30 350um wafers can be produced using a wire saw, while more than 50 wafers can be produced using laser slicing technology. At the same time, due to the better geometric characteristics of the wafers produced by laser slicing, the thickness of a single wafer can be reduced to 200 um, which further increases the number of wafers. A single 20 mm SiC ingot can produce more than 80 wafers.This project has completed the research and development of large-size prototype laser slicing equipment, achieving cutting and thinning of 4-6 inch semi-insulating silicon carbide wafers and slicing of 6-inch conductive silicon carbide ingots, and is currently undergoing verification of 8-inch ingot slicing. It has more competitive advantages in the market in terms of cutting time. The cutting time of a semi-insulating/conductive 6-inch silicon carbide ingot is ≤15 minutes; the annual output of a single unit is >30,000 wafers. The single-piece loss of semi-insulating silicon carbide ingot is ≤30um; the single-piece loss of conductive type is ≤60um, and the production rate is increased by >50%.

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tokenanalyst

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EUV For China Research Institutions?

Ruilian New Materials: As of the end of 2023, EUV photoresist monomer products have passed customer verification and are sold in hundreds of kilograms, preparing for mass production verification.


According to news from the financial industry on April 24, an investor asked Ruilian New Materials a question on the interactive platform: Hello, Secretary General! The company's EUV photoresist has been verified by customers for three years. What is the current progress? Is the quality up to standard? Can the company now mass-produce and sell EUV photoresist?

The company responded that it is normal for semiconductor materials to take 5-6 years from R&D project to mass supply. As of the end of 2023, the company's EUV photoresist monomer product pilot batch has passed customer verification, and has sales of 100 kilograms, and is preparing for the mass production verification of related products.​
 

tokenanalyst

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Institute of Microelectronics has made important progress in photoresist model calibration research​


Recently, the computational lithography team of the EDA Center of the Institute of Microelectronics and Tencent Quantum Laboratory have made important progress in cooperative research around photoresist model calibration.

In response to the current problem of photoresist model calibration, the team developed a Bayesian optimization method for photoresist model calibration based on machine learning through in-depth theoretical and experimental research and combined with specific process conditions. This method can effectively use historical data to train the Gaussian surrogate model, and at the same time combine with other global optimization strategies to steadily improve the accuracy of the photoresist model and improve the efficiency of model calibration. Experimental data shows that the photoresist model error calibrated by the new method is 21.6% lower than the traditional method, and the time consumption is reduced by more than 80%.

This result was published in the journal OPTICS EXPRESS (DOI: 10.1364/OE.518770). Ma Le from the Institute of Microelectronics is the first author, and associate researcher Dong Lisong and researcher Wei Yayi are the co-corresponding authors. Ma Xingyu and Hao Shaogang from Tencent Quantum Laboratory are co-authors.​

1713967294731.png

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Jamie28

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EUV For China Research Institutions?

Ruilian New Materials: As of the end of 2023, EUV photoresist monomer products have passed customer verification and are sold in hundreds of kilograms, preparing for mass production verification.


According to news from the financial industry on April 24, an investor asked Ruilian New Materials a question on the interactive platform: Hello, Secretary General! The company's EUV photoresist has been verified by customers for three years. What is the current progress? Is the quality up to standard? Can the company now mass-produce and sell EUV photoresist?

The company responded that it is normal for semiconductor materials to take 5-6 years from R&D project to mass supply. As of the end of 2023, the company's EUV photoresist monomer product pilot batch has passed customer verification, and has sales of 100 kilograms, and is preparing for the mass production verification of related products.​

So does it mean that there is a EUVL prototype somewhere in China?
 
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