The difficulty of chip manufacturing is the material and precision
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Although the silicon for making chip wafers comes from sand, the wafers for chip manufacturing require a purity of 99.9999999% or more. At present, there are 15 silicon wafer manufacturers in the world that monopolize more than 95% of high-purity electronic grade silicon wafers.
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Silicon is widely distributed on the earth (for example, the main component of sand is silicon dioxide), but the only thing that can really make wafers is quartz sand, although the sand can also be purified to prepare wafers, but the purity is far from reaching. The global sand shortage caused by the hot discussion of the glass used in the new coronavirus vaccine, and the sand to manufacture high-purity wafers is also not enough, which shows the contribution of materials to the development of chips.
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When it comes to materials, photoresist has to be mentioned, photoresist is also the top product of fine chemicals, there are dozens of types of photoresist, and we only have a few, the vast majority of them are still monopolized by a few giants.
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The most critical part of the chip is the chip manufacturing equipment lithography machine, which for a long time has to see the face of AMSL, and it is a price without a market, and the high-end ultra-violet lithography machine is monopolized by AMSL, and no one can look up to it. The preparation of the light source of the lithography machine is quite difficult, and the requirements for the optical components are extremely high, and all the pits on the surface of the lens need to be polished to control below 1mm, so it can also understand why the chip of the lithography machine choose Zeiss in Germany.
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More than 90% of the parts of AMSL's lithography machine are imported, such as the grating from the United States, bearings from Sweden, valves from France, etc., which can be said to be a lithography machine bringing together the world's top intelligence products. But even if you give the drawings and all the parts, it is difficult to debug the accuracy of the production chip, AMSL installation and debugging takes 1 year.
The technology chip is the pinnacle of human intelligence, as difficult as the space shuttle. Why is a tiny chip so hard to make? What's the difficulty?
First, chip design is difficult. You have to fit hundreds of millions of semiconductor components into a space the size of a fingernail, each on the order of nanometers. It is important to know that there are tens of thousands of people in Intel's research and development department, and more than 80% are doctors, which shows the difficulty of research and development.
Second, chip manufacturing is also difficult, because the size is too small, and it needs to be processed by ultraviolet light, commonly known as \"lithography\". At present, there are only a handful of manufacturers in the world who can do lithography machines, and a lithography machine is also hundreds of millions of dollars, which is still in short supply.
Third, the funding problem, the chip industry is also a capital-intensive industry, technology, capital is indispensable. Chip from research and development to standardized production, it is normal to spend three to five years, during which the research and development costs are huge, foreign high-end chip manufacturers R & D costs are more than 10 billion dollars.
Chip manufacturing is a kind of precision manufacturing, for the general integration of the chip is not high, the manufacturing difficulty is not very large, for example, as we learn in the digital circuit of all kinds of logic chips they belong to the low-end chip, relatively easy to manufacture, we know that due to the rapid development of electronic technology, the performance of the chip is getting higher and higher. High-performance chips mean that the degree of integration will also increase, and the higher the degree of integration, the more difficult it is to make a chip.