Chinese semiconductor thread II

[tokenanalyst]

EDA company Shanghai Lixin completes over 200 million yuan in Series B financing​

According to the Pudong Science and Technology Innovation Group, Shanghai Lixin Software Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Shanghai Lixin) recently completed a round B financing of over 200 million yuan, invested by Pudong Science and Technology Innovation Group, Hongtu Shanli, Guotou Venture Capital, CICC Capital's funds, Shenzhen Capital Group, Fujian Electronics, etc. The funds will be used for Shanghai Lixin's product iteration and market promotion.

Shanghai Lixin was founded in 2020 and has focused on the research and development of full-process tools in this field since its inception. Its core team is composed of well-known scholars and senior technical experts at home and abroad, with an average of more than 20 years of theoretical research, technology development and commercialization experience in the field of integrated circuit design EDA tools. Founder and Chairman Chen Jianli is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Microelectronics of Fudan University. He has been focusing on the algorithm development of EDA layout tools since 2007.

Shanghai Lixin focuses on the development of integrated circuit electronic design automation (EDA) tools such as digital circuit physical design, logic synthesis, 3DIC/chiplet system design, and is committed to creating reliable tools for digital circuit design and helping to build China's independent chip R&D ecosystem.

Currently, Lixin has R&D centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Fuzhou and Changsha, with a team size of nearly 300 people, of which more than 2/3 have master's and doctoral degrees.

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[latenlazy]

keep an eye on this guys, very interesting stuff

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1836674446763208925

TSMC has moved to a 3 year cadence. N5 in 2020 -> N3 in 2023 -> N2 in 2026

Even with that, not all iPhone 18 will be using N2. This suggests worsening economics as process moves up. This is something we've discussed for a while now @latenlazy

Also probably signs of poor yield when trying to increase production for N2. Don’t be surprised if cadence slows beyond 3 years over another one or two iterations, especially since N2 being restricted to only the pro iPhone models implies that the high volume production needed for the rest of Apple’s product lines as well as for other potential customers is actually at more than a 3 year cadence. Would be curious to know what the constraints are (though I have some ideas).

 

[tphuang]

Also probably signs of poor yield when trying to increase production for N2. Don’t be surprised if cadence slows beyond 3 years over another one or two iterations, especially since N2 being restricted to only the pro iPhone models implies that the high volume production needed for the rest of Apple’s product lines as well as for other potential customers is actually at more than a 3 year cadence. Would be curious to know what the constraints are (though I have some ideas).

Of course, while he is a good source, this is not official, so still waiting to be confirmed.

nobody has done GAA successfully yet. It is puzzling that certain people are so optimistic about continued progression.

 

[latenlazy]

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Spent a moment thinking about what kind of instrument this patent is for, since it doesn’t seem to be related to tin excited LPP, and I suspect strongly that these patents are for a xenon excited LPP system, so a completely different tech tree from the LPP instrument currently under development. Would be very interesting to see where this one goes.

 

[latenlazy]

Of course, while he is a good source, this is not official, so still waiting to be confirmed.

nobody has done GAA successfully yet. It is puzzling that certain people are so optimistic about continued progression.

Anything Ming Chi-Kuo reports is about as good as confirmed. He’s got an immaculate record on the Apple and TSMC supply chain. Clearly has deeply embedded sources. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re personal friends and classmates of his.

 

[slime888]

Spent a moment thinking about what kind of instrument this patent is for, since it doesn’t seem to be related to tin excited LPP, and I suspect strongly that these patents are for a xenon excited LPP system, so a completely different tech tree from the LPP instrument currently under development. Would be very interesting to see where this one goes.

I'm confused. Doesn't it literally say "LPP light source" in the patent?

EDIT: misread your comment, sorry

 

[latenlazy]

I'm confused. Doesn't it literally say "LPP light source" in the patent?

LPP just means laser produced plasma. The plasma doesn’t always need to be tin. Xenon is the other plasma source commonly used to produce EUV wavelengths.

 

[tphuang]

Anything Ming Chi-Kuo reports is about as good as confirmed. He’s got an immaculate record on the Apple and TSMC supply chain. Clearly has deeply embedded sources. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re personal friends and classmates of his.

So that means we could get to 2026 and Apple is like, yield is still crap on this. We are going to stick with N3 for another year.

LPP just means laser produced plasma. The plasma doesn’t always need to be tin. Xenon is the other plasma source commonly used to produce EUV wavelengths.

anyone using Xenon to produce EUV wavelength at the moment?

 

[latenlazy]

So that means we could get to 2026 and Apple is like, yield is still crap on this. We are going to stick with N3 for another year.

Potentially. Though TSMC has been pretty good about getting yields up in followup deadlines. Without knowing why the capacity might be bottlenecked it's hard to say how their schedule develops. Could just be process techniques for the more complicated and finer transistor structures, could be resolution quality issues with patterning, or could be etch and/or deposition precision and quality issues.

anyone using Xenon to produce EUV wavelength at the moment?

For LPP only in research. Xenon *is* the primary plasma source used for DPP instruments, and one of the earlier EUV candidates (think it was from Changchun) was a Xenon based DPP system (didn't get employed because of debris issues with the electrodes).

In general from perusing the science lit it seems that laser based Xenon excitation has lower conversion efficacy (from feed laser pulse to EUV emissions) than tin, but it probably doesn't have the same problems with debris management. Still trying to figure out if this conversion efficiency deficit is a fundamental physical limit or an engineering implementation limit. Answering that would go a long way to know whether the patent is viable for an industrial grade scanner or if it's for other kinds of EUV based instruments (like metrology or other kinds of test equipment).

 

[oisilener1982]

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I wonder how did this pass the US restriction. Tiktok might be Singapore based but the majority is owned by a Chinese firm