America's Road to Fame

Chapter 460 Key News

In the end, the chip project of the Eurasian Semiconductor Group was still taken down by Xinwu with the most favorable policy they could offer and with great sincerity.

Next, the original Hynix manufacturing base will be expanded. At the beginning, Xinwu approved 55 hectares of land for the Hynix project, and the current Hynix No. 38 factory has used [-] hectares of it.

In the expansion plan of Hynix, the area of ​​the second factory is larger than that of the first factory, so the other party approved an adjacent 25 hectares of land for them, so that the area of ​​the entire Hynix manufacturing base will reach 80 hectares.

In addition, the Eurasian Semiconductor Group will also obtain more than 100 hectares of land approved by the local government not far away, and directly establish the Eurasian Semiconductor Xinwu Manufacturing Base. The scale here is even larger than the Hynix base. This time, Semiconductor will re-produce all the obsolete production lines in the United States and Europe.

Having said that, it is necessary to briefly introduce the concepts of fab specifications and chip manufacturing processes in chip manufacturing.

In fact, what we call a chip is actually an integrated circuit, which is composed of transistors subdivided on silicon crystals.

The so-called 6-inch, 8-inch or 12-inch fab refers to the diameter of the wafer, which can also be understood as the size.

Silicon is refined from quartz sand, and the wafer is purified silicon element (purity can reach 99.999%).

Then the pure silicon is made into silicon crystal rods, which become the material of quartz semiconductors for manufacturing integrated circuits. After photolithography, grinding, polishing, slicing and other procedures, the polycrystalline silicon is melted and pulled out of single crystal silicon crystal rods, and then cut into pieces. Thin wafers.

Therefore, depending on the process, these fabs can produce wafers with diameters of 6 inches, 8 inches, and 12 inches.

The chip manufacturing process, in simple terms, is the distance accuracy between the transistors distributed on the chip. The current manufacturing process can reach 22 nanometers, but after a few years, 14 nanometers, 5 nanometers or even 1 nanometer process accuracy will appear.

Therefore, the larger the diameter of the wafer and the smaller the distance (process) between transistors, the more grains (chips) are integrated on a single wafer, that is, the higher the degree of integration, the higher the computing efficiency. , and lower energy consumption.

Therefore, the wafer size of the chip industry is getting bigger and bigger, the process (nanometer) is getting smaller and smaller, and the technology is becoming more and more complex.

It's just that due to the technological blockade, Huaguo's development in chips has been very slow. Not to mention now, even after ten years, Huaguo's fabs will not be able to see the 12-inch production ranking at all, and only 8-inch Huaxin International has entered the top ten, and its output accounts for less than 5% of the world's total. Most of the fabs are still 6-inch technology.

Therefore, it is also possible to understand why they have paid so much attention to the capacity transfer of the Eurasian Semiconductor Group, which is mainly 8 inches.

Of course, these transfers of production capacity are not carried out at the same time. With the construction of local manufacturing bases and the upgrading of equipment in overseas fabs and chip manufacturing plants, the entire process may last for two to three years.

Because some key equipment, such as the arrival of lithography machines, require waiting time.

It was also at this time that William Chen received feedback from Felipe Zetter, CEO of Eurasia Semiconductor Group, about the group's ordering of lithography machines from the Dutch company ASML, which has the most advanced lithography machine technology at this time. .

Because the output of lithography machines is limited, it is one of the most important equipment in wafer manufacturing, so it is very critical for the technological upgrading of fabs.

Semiconductor manufacturing equipment can be divided into front-end equipment and back-end equipment.

Among them, the front-end manufacturing equipment mainly includes photolithography machines, glue coating and developing equipment, etching machines, glue removal machines, film deposition equipment, cleaning machines, CMP equipment, ion implanters, heat treatment equipment, and measurement equipment; back-end manufacturing equipment It mainly includes thinning machine, dicing machine, chip loading machine, wire bonding machine, testing machine, sorting machine, probe station, etc.

Statistics show that the photolithography process is the most time-consuming step in the wafer manufacturing process, accounting for about 40%-50% of the total wafer manufacturing time.It can be said that without a lithography machine, chips cannot be manufactured.

If we look at the proportion of investment in various wafer manufacturing equipment in the production line, lithography machines are currently the most expensive semiconductor equipment in the wafer manufacturing production line, accounting for about 27% of the total cost of wafer production line equipment.

Therefore, the lithography machine is also one of the biggest factors restricting the equipment update of the overseas manufacturing base of the Asia-Europe Semiconductor Group.

You must know that not only the Eurasian Semiconductor Group hopes to upgrade its manufacturing equipment, but in this period of relative sluggishness in the entire semiconductor industry, as long as companies with spare capacity understand that it is also the most suitable way to upgrade equipment without expanding production capacity. At that time, the order for ASML's latest lithography machine has been scheduled until the end of next year.

The main content of Felipe Zette's report to William Chen was the purchase of those equipment in the plan to upgrade the equipment.

But among them, what William Chen was most interested in was a piece of information he mentioned.

At this time, ASML has to fight on two fronts in the research and development of 18-inch lithography machines and EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines, and the funds are very scarce.

Moreover, the risks of EUV are huge, and they themselves have no confidence that they will be able to develop successfully in the end.

Therefore, in order to raise funds and share risks, this year, ASML has just proposed a customer investment plan, and plans to take out 25% of the shares and invite major customers to make joint investments to raise 50 billion euros in research and development funds.

Originally, the financing plan for raising funds this time was only aimed at companies with the closest business relationship with ASML, including Intel, Samsung Electronics, and TSMC. To put it bluntly, these companies are relatively strong at this time.

However, after the acquisition of STMicroelectronics and Hynix, and the holding of MediaTek, the Eurasian Semiconductor Group also entered the field of vision of ASML at this time and invited them.

At this time, Intel, Samsung Electronics, and TSMC, the chip giants, are not very optimistic about EUV.

Because the technical difficulty of this project is too great, from the conception to the present, it has been developed for nearly ten years, and only a prototype with a lot of problems has been produced. This is almost the most limit-breaking thing humans have ever done.

Therefore, these companies are not active in ASML's investment proposal, including the CEO of Eurasian Semiconductor Group Felipe Zeit, who is not optimistic about ASML's research and development of the EUV lithography machine project, and does not take this matter into consideration. Report as too necessary.

But William Chen knew that, contrary to everyone's expectations, ASML finally completed the project, and the investment at this time will also reap great returns.

(End of this chapter)