Forty days later, Huangkeng Reservoir Microelectronics R&D Center.
In a laboratory, Ye Hua, who was wearing dust-free clothes, skillfully touched the floating screen in front of him. He glanced at the engineer who passed by him from the corner of his eyes. The engineer in his hand was holding a round piece of tin.
The thin film is like a thin pancake with dozens of independent microcircuit arrays on it, which means there are dozens of chips, just like a flat printing process.
Of course, these dozens of chips are all identical and of the same type, but whether it is a CPU or another integrated circuit cannot be seen with the naked eye. It depends on its IC design.
The complete process of chip production includes: chip design, chip production, packaging production, cost testing and other major links. Not to mention the small links, there are more than two thousand process flows.
For chip manufacturing, the process is like building a house. First, there must be wafers as the foundation, and then chips are stacked layer by layer to produce the necessary IC chips.
Before that, you must first have a design drawing. Without the design drawing, the ability to produce is useless. Therefore, the role of the "architect" is quite important.
This role is played by ic design. The ic design in the CSAC system is not just HiSilicon, but almost all ic design. The subsidiary Xianfeng Nano leads the ic design of CPU chips, and it is the ic design of PHC.
In addition, the strongest IC design belongs to HiSilicon. HiSilicon also leads the IC design of another CPU, which is the CPU of Huawei mobile phones.
That's right, Huawei's mobile phone chips in the future will gradually become fully domestically produced, and will no longer use silicon wafers, but tin wafers.
In the IC design and production process, planning is carried out by major IC design manufacturers. The current international representatives are Qualcomm and Intel, which are world-renowned manufacturers. They all design their own IC chips and provide chips with different specifications and performance to downstream
Manufacturer selection.
The IC design process of only one chip includes the design of hardware description language (hdl), chip design debugging, chip design analysis, FPGA verification, etc.
After ic design comes chip manufacturing. According to the needs of ic design, the chip solution design is generated, and the next step is proofing.
Chip raw material wafers are provided by Xianfeng Nano. This time, the composition of the chip samples produced by Ye Hua and his team is no longer traditional silicon, but replaced by stanene material. The purification is the ultimate level of 99 decimal points.
The thinner the stanene material, the lower the cost, but it is also proportional to the process requirements. Shin-Etsu Chemical's purification technology is still very powerful.
The next step is the wafer coating, which is made of a material that can resist oxidation and temperature resistance and is a type of photoresist.
The next step is the process that Ye Hua is leading in the current laboratory: photolithography, development and etching.
During the manufacturing process, a chemical substance that is sensitive to ultraviolet light is used, which is also provided by Xianfeng Nano. It becomes soft when exposed to ultraviolet light. The shape of the chip can be obtained by controlling the position of the light shield. The staff just held it
There are dozens of microcircuit arrays on the surface of the "big pie".
At this moment, Ye Hua directed the staff to the process stage of coating the stanene wafer with photoresist. The part exposed to direct ultraviolet light began to dissolve. After completion, the dissolved part was washed away with solvent, leaving the remaining
The part is the same as the shape of the shading object.
The next step is to add impurities and implant ions into the wafer to produce corresponding p and n type semiconductors.
Starting from the exposed area on the tin sheet, put it into the chemical ion mixed liquid. This process is to change the conductivity mode of the doped area so that each transistor can be turned on, off, or carry data information. For a simple chip, one layer is enough
Well, the complexity is multi-layering, which is achieved by repeating photolithography and repeating the previous process to form a three-dimensional structure, just like building a house.
However, building a house on tin sheets requires nanometer-level precision and a unit scale of hundreds of millions. Chip manufacturing truly represents the pinnacle of today's human industrial manufacturing.
The next step is wafer testing. After the above processes, grid-shaped grains are formed on the wafer, and the electrical characteristics of each grain are tested through needle testing.
The next step is packaging. The completed wafer is fixed, the pins are bound, and it is made into various packaging forms according to the needs. This is why the core of the same chip can have different packaging forms, mainly based on the user's needs.
It is determined by external factors such as application habits, application scenarios, and market forms.
The next step is to test the packaging. After completing the previous process, the chip production has been completed. This step is to test the chip, eliminate defective products and package it.
Although the entire manufacturing process of a chip has been completed here, it cannot yet be supplied to the market. The chip still needs to be functionally tested to gradually verify whether each function is normal before it can be packaged and shipped to the market.
It sounds simple, but there are as many as two thousand process flows in the chip manufacturing process, and no mistakes can be made. If a mistake is made, everything will stop.
Moreover, the process and equipment costs of producing chips are too high. For example, an ASML lithography machine costs more than 100 million US dollars per unit. Even other links in the entire supply chain cannot be afforded by ordinary small companies, or if
Once a small error or unknown prediction occurs during the process, it may lead to the failure of chip production, resulting in the loss of millions or even more funds.
The staff who assist Ye Hua in the laboratory are all elite talents in the high-tech field. Without them, it would still be difficult to produce high-quality chips.
After PHC was banned globally and the Americans banned the sale of chips along the coast, Ye Hua founded the CSAC club. Basically, all members of the system became PHC's upstream supplier partners, and HiSilicon was also on the list.
In addition to providing ic chips for parent company Huawei's mobile phones in the future, HiSilicon will now provide four major ic chips for PHC. One company eats up the four major ic chips because HiSilicon has more than ten years of experience. Other CSAC semiconductor members
If you don't have that kind of strength, it would be great if you can get a supply chain of one of the IC chips.
The first thing to bear the brunt is HiSilicon's flagship product, 5g communication chips. As the standard leader of 5g networks, Huawei, PHC used Huawei's 5g standards from the beginning.
Then there is the Bluetooth chip. The number of this chip is h1309, produced by HiSilicon. There is also the power management chip h1723, which is also produced by authentic HiSilicon. In addition to these three chips, there is also the last h2482, which is
phc audio management chip.
In the future, these major chips for PHC machines on the coastline will be provided by HiSilicon. As a strategic partner in the upstream supply chain, HiSilicon's business can generate revenue of US$8 to 10 billion from PHC every year.
It has become a semiconductor giant that ranks among the top in the world. You must know that HiSilicon's business department is not just PHC.
Other members of the CSAC system are attached to the upstream supply chain of PHC hardware, supplying chips for PHC. The supplier partners in the CSAC system have realized how precious a core seat of CSAC is. In the future, I am afraid that countless domestic semiconductor companies will squeeze it out.
Everyone has to enter this system.
As a partner or ally of the club, all patent barriers between members of its internal system have been broken down. For example, when the major upstream supply chain partners supply PHC, there is no patent fee. It is indeed a lot less income, but outside the system
Supply is not one of them.
In addition, because the entire csac is a community of interests, it breaks down internal barriers, which means that the products are cheaper. Compared with European and American chips, it can immediately gain huge competitive advantages in the world, one is the price advantage, and the other is the technical advantage.
Well, Rabbit is about to implement the rhythm of cabbage prices again.
This is the lingering pain and tears of Europeans and Americans, because rabbits have a lot of "black history" in this area. As long as the black-bellied rabbit enters a field, the products in this field will immediately become cheap.
There was also a joke at one time that said: When Europeans and Americans are preparing to enter a field, they should first see if there are any Chinese people playing there. If there are or Chinese people are planning to go there, then don’t bother. No.
I'm playing with you, because there's no way to play, and there's no profit. How can a rabbit like you compete with you on price?
