China has successfully "broken through" key semiconductor equipment

It takes a long time to produce a finished chip. The birth of each chip can be said to be the crystallization of the development of human science and technology, because to produce this chip, the links and equipment involved cannot be explained in three or two sentences.

To put it simply, a chip needs to go through multiple links such as design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, and each link cannot be omitted. In these major links, there are many small links.

Take the chip manufacturing process as an example, the difficulties can be summarized into two categories, one is the production capacity of raw materials, and the other is advanced manufacturing process equipment.

In the aspect of raw materials, China's chips are stuck at the source. The raw material for chip production is polysilicon. Although we can obtain silicon from sand, its purity cannot reach 99.9999%. At present, the raw materials are basically monopolized by enterprises in Japan, Germany and other countries.

Then there is photoresist. In the past, photoresist was also monopolized by Japanese enterprises for a long time. As a high-value consumable product, China imports a large amount of photoresist from overseas every year. Shanghai Xinyang, Nanda Optoelectronics and other enterprises have made breakthroughs in succession, and have mastered the production process of high-end photoresist.

In terms of equipment, the most frequently mentioned is the lithography machine, because the lithography machine is the most complex and core process equipment. Previously, there were three manufacturers that could produce high-end lithography machines in the world, namely ASML of the Netherlands, Nikon of Japan and Canon.

However, the expensive R&D cost makes it difficult for Nikon and Canon to bear, so there is only one high-end lithography machine manufacturer, ASML, which accounts for 90% of the global lithography machine market shipments. However, China is limited by the Wassenaar Agreement and can hardly purchase advanced EUV lithography machines.

In addition to the photolithograph, an etching machine is also needed to produce chips. Its role is to carve the circuit diagrams of the chips that have been etched by the photolithograph one by one, and no mistakes can be made in every link. It is very difficult to carve chips that are the size of nail caps.

However, China has made outstanding achievements in this field, and China Microelectronics Corporation, a domestic semiconductor equipment manufacturer, has successfully achieved a breakthrough.

Recently, Yin Zhiyao, Chairman of Microenterprise, revealed at the annual performance meeting that the company is developing a new generation of etching equipment, which can be used for logic processes below 5nm, 1Xnm DRAM chips and 3D NAND chips with more than 128 layers.

At the same time, he also mentioned that the share of etching equipment of Zhongwei Company in the domestic main client market is increasing, and the 12 inch high-end etching equipment developed has been operated on advanced chip production lines such as 65nm to 5nm for internationally renowned customers.