Digital appliances such as mobile phones and computers, as well as some advanced electronic systems, will use chips in large numbers. However, for the development of domestic chip field, it has become a concern of Chinese people. Why can't China manufacture high-end chips now?
Since modern times, China's economy has been in a state of rapid development, but the top technology has not reached the forefront of the world, especially in electronic technology, the chip is a very deadly thing.
China was stuck in the neck by the United States. Take the Huawei incident as an example. At present, Huawei's chip design ability can be said to be the top in the world, because only Apple can put the 5nm chip into use. After its birth, Huawei's Kirin 9000 chip has withstood various tests and become a well-deserved king of performance, which can also be compared with Apple's A 14 chip.
However, under the blockade of related technologies in the United States, it was suddenly returned to its original shape. Therefore, the chip problem facing Huawei at present is also the dilemma of domestic chips.
Chip manufacturing. The manufacturing process of the chip is extremely complicated. Generally speaking, the chip manufacturing consists of the design of the integrated circuit of the chip, the fabrication of the silicon wafer, the coating of varnish on the silicon wafer, the photoetching and etching of the silicon wafer, the plasma implantation of the silicon wafer, and the testing and packaging of the silicon wafer.
In fact, there are already institutions or enterprises in China that can manufacture chips, but the problem is that we are still a long way from real high-end chips.
The difficulties of high-end chip manufacturing in China are mainly reflected in two aspects.
On the one hand, there is a shortage of chip design talents. Chip manufacturing is different from industrial manufacturing in the traditional sense. It is a very large category and involves many industries, so the theoretical requirements for chip technicians are very high.
We need not only the fields of mathematics and physics, but also a large number of high-end talents in chemistry, materials, machinery, electrical appliances, etc., and there is still a long way to go to train talents in our chip industry.
On the other hand, there is no high-end mask aligner in China. In the process of chip upgrading, mask aligner is indispensable. Because the gap is shrinking, it is necessary to improve the accuracy of mask aligner. As the core equipment for chip engraving circuit patterns, the accuracy of lithography gauge can directly determine the accuracy of chip manufacturing.
But from the current situation, China has been unable to achieve a breakthrough in mask aligner parts.
Mask aligner is a systems engineering. Mask aligner's working principle is actually similar to that of developing photos with a camera, which mainly uses exposure to make some fine graphics printed on silicon wafers.
Although its principle is relatively simple, a mask aligner that can produce high-end chips is quite difficult to master and manufacture its own technology and required parts.
To put it simply, mask aligner is a global industrial chain manufacturing, such as the current Dutch ASML, which can manufacture mask aligner by the global industrial chain, and nearly 90% of the spare parts of the whole machine100000 are imported from the world.
These include American light sources, German objective lenses, Swedish bearings, French valve parts, Japanese optical equipment, and the core technologies owned by Dutch ASML, such as EUV lithography technology.
The manufacturing difficulty of high-end mask aligner. Mask aligner, as one of the most technologically advanced equipment in the world, only a few countries have the manufacturing capability of mask aligner at present. Among them, only ASML in the Netherlands can really manufacture mask aligner with a diameter of more than 7 nanometers, and the price of their single mask aligner has exceeded 100 million dollars, and it is not in stock.
China's mask aligner technology has been stuck in a state of being unable to break through, mainly because the most critical technology in mask aligner is too difficult to master, and its research and development difficulty is comparable to that of atomic bombs. At present, nine countries in the world can manufacture atomic bombs, but only two countries have high-end mask aligner, which shows its technical difficulty.
A high-end mask aligner consists of tens of thousands of parts, and the requirements for each part are very high. The lens is the most difficult to manufacture, and its precision requirements are quite high, because the circuit diagram on the chip is printed.
If there is no lens with high enough precision, there may be deviation when drawing the circuit diagram, which will make the chip unusable. For example, the technical requirements of the lens used on the EUV mask aligner in the Netherlands can be described as limit, and the lens surface must be very smooth.
Conclusion. As far as the current situation is concerned, China cannot develop a lens with high precision. Not only that, high-end mask aligner also requires higher precision for other parts.
According to an American engineer, in order to build a part on the mask aligner, he polished it repeatedly for nearly 10 years, from which we can see how difficult the technology in mask aligner is!
Generally speaking, we are now facing a relatively backward dilemma, and there is still a long way to go in chip manufacturing, so we still need to continue our efforts and make steady breakthroughs to catch up.