Technology: breaking the hegemony that monopolizes the world

The world's leading semiconductor equipment company is an unknown company called American Applied Materials, Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California's Silicon Valley.

In 1992, AMAT reached the top and became the largest semiconductor equipment company in the world, and this glorious glory has been retained by it to this day.

The company is the largest provider of equipment, services and software to the semiconductor and related industries, providing manufacturing equipment, services and software to the semiconductor, display and related industries. Although the market value is only "a measly" more than 60 billion U.S. dollars, and the sales revenue of Xiayin Star Calendar 1017 is "only" 14.5 billion U.S. dollars, it has more than 18,400 employees and more than 11,900 patented technologies, which means that the average daily application More than four new patents, 90 branches in 17 countries and regions.

Moreover, AMAT is also the world's top nano-manufacturing technology enterprise, and its products and services cover atomic layer deposition, physical vapor deposition, chemical vapor deposition, etching, rapid heat treatment, ion implantation, measurement and detection, cleaning and other production steps.

Although its own reputation is not big in the world view of netizens in countries like Daxia, its customers are impressive.

Hansung Electronics, TSMC, UMC, Intel, Xiaxin Technology and other manufacturers are purchasing and using AMAT's equipment, materials and services in large quantities. With the shift of the semiconductor industry's focus to Asia, AMAT has been the largest supplier to TSMC, the world's largest wafer foundry, for many years in a row.

Advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, nano-manufacturing technology solutions and subsequent software upgrades, its products are mainly used in new energy batteries, LED displays, integrated circuits, solar panels, and tailor-made production improvement technologies, software systems and after-sales services suitable for customers .

Moreover, AMAT and Daxia can be said to have quite a relationship.

It is the first foreign-funded semiconductor equipment supplier and a leading company in material engineering solutions to enter Daxia. It has not only donated money to universities and institutions, but also "provided valuable high-end jobs."

The semiconductor industry chain is divided into upstream chip design, such as the chip design solutions of manufacturers such as Xia Wei's HiSilicon Kirin, Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, and Intel Core. Then it is the main business of companies such as Xiaxin and TSMC, midstream chip manufacturing and downstream chip packaging.

The investment in midstream chip manufacturing equipment accounts for about 70-80% of the investment in semiconductor production lines, which is the basis for completing the wafer manufacturing and packaging and testing links, and plays a link between the past and the future.

As mentioned earlier, the semiconductor industry is characterized by a high degree of monopoly, especially the detailed classification of semiconductor equipment.

High technical threshold and strong customer stickiness. According to SEMI statistics, the sales of the top 10 global semiconductor equipment companies accounted for nearly 80% of the sales, and some core equipment such as lithography machines and etching equipment accounted for more than 90% of the market. Companies such as ASML monopolize it.

The art industry, entertainment service industry, and food industry are full of flowers and a hundred schools of thought contend, and the elimination rate is very high. Sometimes the wind changes, and the industry leader one day will be forced to go bankrupt the next day. Therefore, their monopoly is the purpose, not the ability.

But the monopoly of the semiconductor industry is a manifestation of technical strength. I can do 5nm, but you can't. Then all high-end orders must be given to manufacturers who have mastered 5nm foundry technology.

Take a fab with a scale of 10 billion yuan invested by Xiaxin Technology three years ago as an example. 70% of the investment in the fab is used to purchase equipment. Among wafer manufacturing equipment, lithography machines , etching machines and thin film deposition equipment are the core equipment, accounting for about 30%, 25% and 25% of the wafer manufacturing process, respectively.

But such a fierce company has repeatedly scratched its head in the past two years: "Xiaxin is expanding aggressively, so how come the orders placed for us are not increasing? Although we cannot give you the most advanced technology due to certain terms, but you Before, I begged my grandpa to tell my grandma to buy second- and third-tier products, why don’t they buy second- and third-tier products now?”

Fortunately, Xia Xin is a listed company, some orders can be hidden for a while, but not forever.

After the financial reports for the first and second quarters of this year came out, the management of AMAT was keenly aware that Xiaxin had placed a lot of orders for a company called Kyushu Technology.

Deposition equipment, etching, cleaning, planarization equipment, ion implantation equipment, process control equipment and other equipment are among them.

With this clue, they made further progress, and found out a place that made them feel even stranger through more covert means.

The equipment provided by Kyushu Technology is still through some foreign companies to buy their second- and third-line AMAT products, and then sell them to Xiaxin Technology.

It's really weird, it doesn't even make sense.

Because the equipment obtained by Kyushu Technology is not restricted equipment, Xiaxin Technology can place the order directly by itself, saving time, effort and money.

Even the chief engineer of AMAT said at the meeting: "Even if relying on these second-line equipment, even if it is through adjustment to give full play to the most powerful performance of these equipment, Xiaxin Technology can only have a process foundry capability of more than 10nm."

So this is very strange.

How did Xiaxin Technology's 7nm foundry process technology and equipment come from?

The lithography machine is provided by Pudong Microelectronics, and foreign companies like them do not know the specific situation. However, in Xiaxin's 7nm process, where did this level of high-precision equipment such as planarization equipment, ion implantation equipment, and process control equipment come from?

In the newly built workshop of Xiaxin Technology, the researchers sent by Kyushu Technology are explaining the technology and related equipment,

"You also know that deposition equipment uses physical and chemical processes that occur in the gas phase to form functional or decorative metal, non-metal or compound coatings on the surface of the workpiece. Ten years ago, only one layer of atoms could be deposited at a time, three years The former AMAT company adopted new technology and could only deposit three layers. However, after our transformation, the number of layers that can be deposited by this equipment has exceeded the number of layers originally designed.

There is also an ion implanter. We also use the Villion VIISTA series products produced by AMAT, but the process used is more high-precision and low-energy, and high-concentration dopants are quickly implanted on the entire wafer surface, and the product implantation system The technology is deployed on the common VIISTA platform, which helps shorten the time to first silicon and improve the production efficiency of the application.

In terms of operation, except for the technical difficulties we explained before, everything else can be corrected by the intelligent assistance system at any time. Of course, I recommend you to wear SR1 glasses for work, its reality augmented technology and our company's production equipment and The process flow has been matched, which allows users to more intuitively see which process or data setting is most likely to be wrong after system derivation. "

I still remember these IDs!

There are some omissions in the manual, continue next time,

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