Industry knowledge

What is a semiconductor?

Semiconductor upstream and downstream development

# Semiconductor Industry Analysis

# Above the middle and lower reaches of the military industrial chain

Analysis of semiconductor industry

The materials needed by the semiconductor industry mainly include silicon wafer, photoresist, target, polishing liquid and pad, special gas for electronics, etc.

Except for silicon wafers, most materials belong to general chemical products and do not need special equipment specially adapted to the semiconductor industry. The leaders of related industries are all traditional chemical giants, and the semiconductor industry is not strong, so it will not be included in the research scope of semiconductor equipment.

The manufacturing process of silicon wafer mainly includes refining, crystal pulling, slicing and polishing.

Silicon raw materials will be melted and purified by high temperature chemical reaction first. Then it is drawn into a single crystal silicon ingot in a high-temperature liquid state, and the silicon ingot is cut into silicon wafers, which can be sent to a wafer factory for processing after grinding and polishing. The related equipment and technology are designed according to the characteristics of silicon, that is, other semiconductor materials, and the technical content is relatively low. However, in recent years, with the improvement of downstream manufacturing accuracy, the requirements for material purity are getting higher and higher.

The semiconductor industry is mainly used in integrated circuits, consumer electronics, communication systems, photovoltaic power generation, lighting applications, high-power power conversion and other fields. For example, diodes are devices made of semiconductors.

Semiconductor industry belongs to electronic information industry, hardware industry and semiconductor-based industry. No matter from the perspective of science and technology or economic development, the importance of semiconductors is enormous. Most electronic products, such as computers, mobile phones or digital recorders, are closely related to semiconductors. Common semiconductor materials are silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and so on. Silicon is one of the most influential semiconductor materials.

Everything in life can be roughly divided into three categories according to conductivity: conductor, semiconductor and insulator.

Semiconductor: the conductivity is between insulator and conductor.

Semiconductor is a kind of material product usually made of silicon, and its conductivity is higher than that of insulators such as glass, but lower than that of pure conductors such as copper or aluminum. Its conductivity and other properties can be changed by introducing impurities (called doping) to meet the specific requirements of its electronic components.

In a broad sense, semiconductor equipment includes three parts: semiconductor material manufacturing equipment, semiconductor processing equipment (in a narrow sense) and semiconductor packaging test equipment, which respectively serve the three links of raw material manufacturing, wafer processing and packaging test in the semiconductor manufacturing industry chain.

Upper, middle and lower reaches of industrial chain

Upstream: Upstream is the underlying foundation of the whole semiconductor industry, which provides support for the semiconductor industry and consists of semiconductor materials and semiconductor equipment.

The materials involved are fine chemical plants such as copper, sulfuric acid and ten kinds of non-ferrous metals, as well as equipment suppliers such as mask aligner and testing equipment.

In terms of raw materials, copper, sulfuric acid and 10 nonferrous metals are important raw materials for manufacturing semiconductor materials, and their supply presents a relatively stable trend, which is less affected by prices. Therefore, the upstream fine chemical plants do not have high bargaining power in the whole industrial chain.

Midstream: It is the semiconductor manufacturing industry chain, including IC design, manufacturing and packaging. Its products mainly include integrated circuits, discrete devices, photoelectric devices and sensors, among which integrated circuits are the largest.

According to statistics, the sales of integrated circuit industry in China has been increasing continuously since 20 15, and the sales revenue will reach 884.8 billion yuan in 2020, up by 1705438+0% year-on-year.

Downstream: specific application fields of semiconductors, involving consumer electronics, mobile communications, new energy, artificial intelligence, and aerospace.