Galaxy Technology Empire

Zhang Rujing may be too excited and a little out of breath.

Huang Junjie quickly helped him to a chair aside.

"Haha..." Zhang Rujing laughed with tears streaming down his face: "Mr. Huang! Thank you very much for letting me join Galaxy Technology. I will die without regrets. I can witness Dongtang Kingdom's chips reach the top of the world. I will have no regrets in this life! In this life No regrets!”

"Dr. Zhang can at least fight for Galaxy Technology for another ten years, and we are still far away from reaching the top of the world! This is just the pinnacle of electronic chips. We still have quantum chips that we have not yet conquered." Huang Haojie said while giving Zhang Rujing Smooth the back.

"That's right, I want to witness the bright moon above Mount Everest." Zhang Rujing calmed down a little.

"Du Wei!" Huang Haojie shouted loudly.

"Mr. Huang!" Du Wei stood up quickly.

"Now your mission is the most important. Among the three tanks of the Galaxy Group, Neutron Star has completed the large silicon wafer, and Galaxy Semiconductor has also successfully built a 5-nanometer chip production line. Now it depends on the design of your star map. "

"I will do my best to prevent Xingtu Company from lagging behind." Du Wei also felt a lot of pressure.

"In this way, you will design chips together with Galaxy Semiconductor from now on. Don't be afraid of spending money. Design and tape out at the same time. Keep trying. I don't believe that you can't improve your chip design capabilities." Huang Haojie ordered categorically.

"Yes, our Star Map Company will definitely live up to expectations." Of course Du Wei knew that if he did this, his chip design capabilities would be improved the fastest.

After all, talking on paper on a computer has no effect on the production line. Practice is the only criterion for testing truth.

This is also the only way for Star Map Company to improve its design capabilities to a world-class level, which is to keep trying and tape-out.

Because in the computer design drawings, you can never know the quality of the circuit diagram, nor do you know which ones are good designs and which ones are defective designs.

This is why in semiconductor production, the strong ones such as Taiji Electric and Sanxin can constantly find design defects on the production line and achieve precise improvements.

And those small factories simply cannot afford such a thing.

Taping out is the process of manufacturing a chip through a series of process steps like an assembly line, which is called tape-out.

In the field of integrated circuit design, "tape out" refers to "trial production", which means that after the circuit is designed, a few or dozens of pieces are produced for testing.

If the test passes, mass production will begin just like this.

In the chip manufacturing process, there are generally two periods of time called tape-out.

When the chip design company is designing, they find that somewhere can be modified to achieve better results, but they are afraid that such modifications will bring unexpected consequences to the chip. If chips are manufactured on a large scale based on such a problematic design, , then the loss will be huge.

Therefore, in order to test whether the integrated circuit design is successful, it is necessary to tape out, that is, from a circuit diagram to a chip, to check whether each process step is feasible and whether the circuit has the performance and functions we want.

If the tape-out is successful, chips can be manufactured on a large scale; otherwise, we need to find out the reasons and optimize the design accordingly.

Why tape-out is so expensive at the beginning is because there are many processes that need to be verified at the beginning and the production volume is very small. A good chip generally needs to go through hundreds of processes in the traditional production method. The production cycle is long, and the tape-out cost is The cost is tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

The reliability of chip manufacturing equipment is crucial. After new equipment is developed, there is still a long way to go before customer certification, large-scale production and mass promotion.

Therefore, the initial investment cost for R\u0026D units is relatively large.

When tape-out is used for large-scale production, all process verifications have been completed, all costs have been effectively controlled, and large-scale production will bring better economic benefits to the production unit.

Therefore, large-scale tape-out production is relatively cheaper.

A single tape-out of traditional chips costs tens to hundreds of millions. Who dares to tape-out for no reason? Even Taichi and Sanxin make adjustments while producing.

Of course you can keep trying if you use other people's money to do trial production. If it's a chip factory that doesn't have orders, and you let it do trial production for no reason, it will go bankrupt in minutes.

Therefore, there is no investment of tens of billions of dollars in semiconductors, just think about it.

For Galaxy Technology, the price of trial production tape-out is very low.

First, the raw materials for producing chips are all produced by ourselves. Second, Galaxy Semiconductor’s process production costs are very low, only about one-tenth of those of traditional chips.

Generally speaking, how much does traditional chip production cost?

It’s very simple. The larger the scale, the lower the cost. The smaller the chip process, the lower the cost. If the chip process is 16 nanometers and 1 million pieces are produced, the cost is US$30; then the chip process is 7 nanometers and 10 million pieces are produced. The production cost is $20.

If hundreds of millions of units are produced, the cost can be reduced to $10, or even lower.

According to the internationally accepted pricing strategy of low-profit chip design companies, the 8:20 pricing method, that is, when the hardware cost is 8, the price is 20.

Don't think this price is high, it's actually very low. Intel's general pricing strategy is 8:35, and AMD has reached 8:50 in history.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, which was only released this year, is priced at around US$70, which means that the cost of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is around US$15.

The reason why Galaxy Semiconductor can keep costs down is that, on the one hand, it produces silicon wafers and other raw materials in-house;

On the other hand, the new process does not require the use of auxiliary materials such as photoresist, which account for about 30% of the cost in chip production.

At the same time, because the production speed of the new process is very fast, this shortens the production time, which means that the unit labor cost and electricity cost are reduced.

After all, for photolithography machines and the like, if those lasers are used for a long time, the electricity bill alone is enough.

The unit cost of Galaxy Semiconductor is 20 to 30 Chinese yuan, equivalent to between 3 and 4 US dollars.

Of course, this does not count the depreciation of the equipment. Galaxy Semiconductor built such a production line that can produce 23 million chips a year. It cost more than 50 million yuan in total. If the depreciation of the production line is divided equally, it is equivalent to each chip. Add two dollars to the cost.

In fact, the really expensive atomic imprinting machine, people from Galaxy Semiconductor like to call it the chip mother machine, costs about 120 million yuan to build.

In order to enhance the strength of Galaxy Semiconductor, 20 atomic imprinting machines alone were built, and a total of 2.4 billion yuan was spent.

However, if these are mass-produced, the cost will become lower and lower.

Therefore, Galaxy Semiconductor's tape-out costs about 100,000 yuan each time. Huang Junjie does not believe that after dozens or hundreds of tape-outs, Star Map Company has not made any progress.

Next, Huang Haojie has already discussed with Wang Bosi, Zhang Rujing and others to let Xingtu Company design and tapeout improvements at the same time.

At the same time, it is necessary to increase the number of chip production lines to 20 before March 2018.

The other is the research and development of packaging and packaging and testing equipment, because currently the strongest and largest packaging, testing and packaging company in the world is Dongdao ASE. Together with other packaging, testing and packaging companies in Dongdao, this field is monopolized by them.

Don’t underestimate packaging, testing and packaging. Sometimes the cost of these two links is very high.

Packaging is to stack the substrate, core, and heat sink together to form the CPU that everyone sees every day. The packaging cost is the funds required for this process.

Under normal circumstances with huge output, packaging costs generally account for about 5%-25% of the hardware cost. However, some of IBM's chip packaging costs account for about half of the total cost, and the highest is said to have reached 70%.

The test can identify the key characteristics of each processor, such as maximum frequency, power consumption, heat generation, etc., and determine the grade of the processor, such as classifying a bunch of chips into: I5 4460, I5 4590, I5 4690, I5 4690K Wait, and then Intel can offer different selling prices according to different levels.

However, if the chip production is large enough, the test cost can be ignored.

Therefore, Huang Haojie does not intend to let other companies seal, test and package chips, because Galaxy Semiconductor can complete it by itself, and there is no need to let others make money.

What's more, if the domestic packaging and testing companies are not good enough, do they have to travel across the ocean to Dongdao for packaging and testing? How much will the cost of this round trip increase?

Instead of wasting money and time looking for others to package and test, it is better to be self-reliant.