With raw material shortages and high technological barriers, when will the chip shortage crisis be alleviated?

Last November, a piece of news appeared in the People's Daily: "The Chinese team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology won the championship in the global EDA competition." The report instantly attracted tens of thousands of readers. Against the backdrop of the US blockade of relevant Chinese technologies, the result of this competition greatly encouraged researchers in the chip field in my country and boosted their confidence in independently realizing high-end chip manufacturing.

EDA award certificate and related personnel

Source: Huazhong University of Science and Technology official microblog

1. The relationship between EDA and chips

EDA is the abbreviation of Electronic Design Automation, which is the design of large-scale integrated circuit chips through drawing software CAD. It is known as the "mother of chips" and is the basis for realizing chip design. The EDA competition topic of this year is the layout and wiring design algorithm problem which is very important in chip design.

Source: pexels

As the competition between China and the United States intensifies, my country is facing dangers in key technologies in many fields, especially in the chip field. It is imperative for my country to break the monopoly and no longer be subject to the control of others in key chip technologies. Therefore, the independent research and development of chip design software is of great significance to the breakthrough in the chip field.

The global wave of informatization is bringing about an overall transformation towards intelligence, networking and digitalization. The vigorous development of advanced technologies such as 5G, AI, autonomous driving and cloud computing has led to an increasingly strong demand for high-performance chips.

Source: pixabay

Chips provide multi-dimensional underlying support for storage, computing, networking, and intelligence, and establish a solid foundation for digital upgrades and smart interconnection. Therefore, chips are called "industrial food". Their technical performance and industrial scale represent a country's development level and international competitiveness.

2. Why are chips so difficult to make?

Difficulty 1: Raw materials

In the process of purifying silicon dioxide to obtain wafers, production furnaces, slicers and other equipment are needed. Each type of equipment has very high requirements for the technical level, and the purity of silicon single crystals is also required to be extremely high during the purification process. Generally, there can be only one impurity atom in one billion silicon atoms.

Single crystal silicon wafer

Source: Baidu Encyclopedia

Difficulty 2: High-end lithography machines are hard to come by

There are two difficulties in manufacturing high-end photolithography machines, namely the light source and the lens. The role of the light source is to engrave the circuit diagram on the silicon wafer. When there are only a few nanometers between each component, the wavelength of the light source needs to be short enough to draw. To manufacture such a light source, extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers is needed, which is difficult to generate and control.

Light source inside the extreme ultraviolet lithography machine

Source: ASML

The lens is the core part of the lithography machine. Its function is to adjust the light path and focus it. The chip has extremely high requirements on the precision of the lens, and the mirror surface needs to be smooth to reach 50 picometers, and one meter is equal to one trillion picometers.

Difficulty 3: High technical barriers and great production risks

Manufacturing chips requires a lot of practice and application feedback, but the early stages of chip production, such as equipment purchases and laboratory construction, are too costly and risky. my country's chip industry has a weak foundation, and downstream industries generally have stable suppliers. Due to quality control, downstream industries generally do not easily replace upstream suppliers, resulting in a weak sense of crisis among upstream suppliers.

For enterprises, the initial cost of chip manufacturing is huge, and they may also face other supply issues such as yield rate in the later stage, resulting in fewer opportunities for trial and error, making it difficult to accumulate technology; without the accumulation of technical experience, the blindness of practice will be aggravated.

3. The current status of Chinese chips

Chips are the cornerstone of the information age and the key guarantee for future technology, but my country's high-end chips are heavily dependent on foreign countries, and the annual expenditure on imported chips is as high as 300 billion US dollars. Although the country has long positioned the conquest of high-end chips as a national strategy, under the current tense Sino-US relations, China's silicon-based semiconductor development is difficult, and most of it is still concentrated in the low-end and medium-end manufacturing links. Although it is now developing in the high-end direction, there is still a long way to go.

There are three main processes in chip manufacturing: design, manufacturing, and packaging and testing. Although my country has certain capabilities in basic packaging and testing, there is still a big gap between the design and manufacturing links and the highest technical standards.

At present, my country's low- and medium-end performance chips have been mass-produced, but there is still a long way to go to catch up with the international level in high-performance chips. The current status of my country's high-end chip research and development cannot be changed in the short term, and patience is required.

In addition, the rapid development of high-end chips has promoted the rapid development of electronic information technology, which is the product of global division of labor and cooperation. Under the trend of reverse globalization, it is inevitable that there will be a shortage of chips, threatening the healthy development of information-related industries in various countries around the world.