Fang Hong established two major categories of semiconductor materials and semiconductor equipment in the document, and then further subdivided them into industries to be invested in and allocated the proportion of capital expenditures.
Semiconductor materials mainly include two major categories: "wafer manufacturing materials" and "packaging materials".
Wafer manufacturing materials are further divided into: silicon wafers, masks, photoresists, polishing materials, special gases, targets, etc.
Let’s look at the application of each major material in detail.
The silicon crystal link mainly uses silicon wafers; the cleaning link uses high-purity special gases or reagents; the deposition link uses targets; the glue coating link uses photoresist; the exposure link uses masks;
High-purity reagents will be used in the development and etching process; precursors and targets will be used in the film growth process; polishing fluids and polishing pads will be used in the polishing process.
Packaging materials include: packaging substrates, lead frames, bonding wires, plastic packaging materials, ceramic substrates, chip bonding materials and other packaging materials.
Among them, packaging substrates and lead frames are used in the patching process; bonding wires are used in the wire bonding process; silicon powder and plastic sealing materials are used in the molding process; silicon wafers, gas masks, etc. are used in the electroplating process.
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It can be said that each link and each material must correspond to a company. Of course, large companies may also master multiple links and the R&D and production of multiple materials.
Fang Hong created the document and began to edit and refine it one by one. After completing these, he handed it over to Hua Yu and asked him to execute it according to the content of the file plan.
Among the many semiconductor materials, there are seven main categories that are the most critical materials, namely: silicon wafers, special gases, photomasks, wet electron reagents, polishing materials, photoresists, and sputtering targets.
Let’s look at it specifically.
Silicon wafer:
Silicon material is actually widely available. The silica in ordinary sand and gravel can be made into 98% pure silicon after purification. High-purity silicon needs to be further purified into 9 n or 11 n, which is 99.999999999%.
, an ultra-pure material with a purity level of 9 9s or 11 9s after the decimal point.
This ultra-pure polysilicon needs to be melted in a quartz crucible at 1400 degrees, doped with boron or phosphorus elements to change its conductive properties, and then grown into a specific single crystal through single crystal growth, and then sliced and other processes.
After a series of grinding and polishing, epitaxy, bonding and other process processes, the semiconductor silicon wafer materials are almost ready.
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Special gases:
Electronic special gases are indispensable basic materials for industries such as integrated circuit flat panel display devices, solar cells, and optical fiber cables. According to the different process links in which electronic special gases participate, they can be subdivided into six categories: chemical vapor deposition, ion
It is mainly composed of a light-transmitting substrate, including resin or glass and an opaque light-shielding film. In the manufacturing process of the photomask, its direct material cost accounts for 67%, and the substrate accounts for 90% of this direct material.
, the entire substrate accounts for about 60% of its total cost, and other auxiliary materials account for a smaller proportion.
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Wet electron reagents:
That is, high-purity reagents. According to different uses, wet electronic chemicals can be divided into ultra-clean and high-purity reagents, and functional chemicals represented by photoresist supporting reagents.
Wet electronic chemicals are mainly used in cleaning, photolithography, and etching in various processes. In the photolithography process, they are mainly used in silicon wafer pre-processing, cloud glue, development, and stripping. In wafer processing, they are mainly used.
It is used in high-purity polishing and cleaning, which uses sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, developer, etc.
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Polishing material:
This is a general term for the process of flattening the wafer surface through chemical etching or mechanical grinding. One of its technical difficulties is that it needs to be made below 0.35 microns.
Mechanical polishing is used in both front-end processing and back-end manufacturing of semiconductors, such as shallow trench isolation, interlayer dielectric polishing, intra-metal dielectric polishing, etc.
The components of the polishing system include: polishing equipment, polishing fluid, polishing pad, etc. The polishing pad is made of a loose porous material, generally such as polyurethane, which has a certain elasticity and can absorb a certain amount of polishing fluid.
The polishing fluid is a mixture of abrasive pH adjusters, oxidants, dispersants, and surfactants.
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Photoresist:
This is composed of solvents, resins, photoinitiators, monomers and other additives. In application, photoresist can be understood as having the same properties as the tape used to spray paint on some objects, except that the photoresist is micron or even
Nanoscale process.
In the process of large-scale integrated circuit manufacturing within the photoresist process, photolithography and etching technology are the most important processes, and because of the small scale, photolithography and etching are repeated more than ten times during the production process.
Through a series of processes such as baking and coating, the circuit is printed onto the silicon wafer, making the application of photoresist very important.
As the semiconductor manufacturing process continues to improve, evolving from the micron level to the nanometer level, the wavelength of the photoresist has also extended from the ultraviolet broad spectrum to the G line (436nm), I line (365nm), KrF (248nm), ArF (193nm) and
EUV (13.5nm) process.
The corresponding photoresist composition will also change, because the shorter the exposure wavelength, the higher the technical level of the photoresist, and the more advanced the integrated circuit process it adapts to, and the light used in different photolithography wavelengths will be more advanced.
The composition of the engraving materials is also different.
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Sputtering target:
During the sputtering process, a high-speed ion beam bombards the target material, that is, the target material is bombarded, and the metal ions are stripped and deposited on the silicon wafer. This is the raw material for depositing electronic thin films.
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Fang Hong edited the material content and took a look at these semiconductor materials. All of these require money!
At this time, no major national fund has been established yet, and it will not be established until 2014.
But Fang Hong obviously cannot waste four years. One of the most typical characteristics of the semiconductor industry is rapid updates and upgrades, because according to Moore's Law, about every 18 months, the performance of the next generation of products will be improved by one book, and the cost will be reduced by half.
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So why can’t China always catch up?
It's just because you finally caught up with it, only to find out that it was a technology that was eliminated by others. That's not the most terrible thing. What's terrible is that you can't even reach the technology that others have eliminated. Without support and subsidies from the state, companies have to do it on their own.
You can't get back the money you put in, and you'll lose 100% of your money, so of course no one will do it.
Just like Pixiu, throwing money can only get in but not out.
Fang Hong decided to engage in semiconductors because he had to be mentally prepared for long-term financial support for this super gold-eating beast. It didn't matter if he didn't make money for five or even ten years. There was no other way. This was the tuition fee that had to be paid to make up for the lessons.
But once the entire industrial chain is completed, all the costs invested previously will be recovered with profits. Just look at the scale of domestic demand for chip imports in ten years.
The money spent on buying chips is more than the money spent on imported oil in an entire year.
Fang Hong took a short rest and immediately created a subcategory in the document - EDA software.
EDA is the abbreviation of Electronic Design Automation. It is mainly used in the field of chip design and manufacturing. It uses computers as tools and uses hardware description language expressions to calculate database mathematics, graph theory, graphics and topological logic optimization.
A general term for computer software that scientifically and effectively integrates theories to assist in completing the entire process of VLSI chip design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing.
EDA is mainly used in the design and manufacturing fields. As the chip manufacturing process becomes more and more complex, the application of EDA software becomes more and more important. It can greatly improve the design efficiency of the chip.
In fact, the market size of EDA software itself is not large. The current global market size is about three to four billion US dollars, which is a fraction compared to the scale of the semiconductor industry.
However, the importance of EDA software in the semiconductor field is really to the extent that it is impossible to operate without it. The reason is that if you want to design a chip, assuming that EDA software is not used, the result will be a significant increase in costs.
For example, if you want to design a consumer-grade processing chip today and use the most advanced EDA software to design it, the cost will be about US$40 million. However, if EDA software is not used, the cost will be as high as US$7.7 billion.
$40 million versus $7.7 billion!
In other words, with the addition of EDA software, one iteration of its technology is enough to increase the efficiency of the entire design by nearly 200 times.
It can be seen that without EDA software, the cost of any new chip, especially consumer-grade chips, is simply unaffordable.
This is the importance and indispensability of EDA software. Its market size is small, but it is impossible to function without it. It can be seen that EDA software plays an outlining role in the entire chip manufacturing.
