China's integrated circuit equipment made significant progress

China's localization of integrated circuit equipment in Beijing made significant progress. Recently, the reporter learned from Beijing Economic and Technical Development Zone that the 12-inch formal product wafer processing by China Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (Beijing) Plant using domestically-made equipment has exceeded 10 million. This indicates that the domestically produced integrated circuits have been fully verified in market-oriented large-scale production, Domestic equipment technology and market competitiveness to a new level.

One-thousandth hair with a precision "building"

Put on a light pink dust coat, put on the mask gloves, feet put on the shoe cover, and then into the air shower after 2 minutes of clean air blowing, the reporter entered the SMIC Phase II production line clean room.

"This splitter requires a robot arm to deliver the wafer precisely and smoothly without any scratches and dust particles." "This medium speed ion implanter is an important process for silicon to become a transistor "" This medium etching machine is responsible for eating 'unwanted parts of the wafers' according to the design... "In the clean room technician's explanation, a Taiwan-made equipment entered the reporter's line of sight.

After years of research and development, as well as repeated verification and debugging, they are now standing together with foreign counterparts representing the most advanced manufacturing level of integrated circuits and are responsible for a key process in chip manufacturing.

SMIC for many years in the work of children are clearly remembered, more than a decade ago SMIC put into operation in Beijing, as large as the production line equipment, as small as nuts, screws, are imported.

Domestic equipment into the chip production line, why so difficult? "For example, there are more than 40 floors of high-rise buildings on the wafer, except that each floor needs to be depicted with a one-thousandth of an inch of hairline," said Zhang Xin, deputy general manager of SMIC. A few millimeters wide chip, the naked eye can not see is behind the great precision and complexity - each chip has many layers, and each layer above the transistors and circuits if arranged in a Straight, hundreds of meters long. Here, a sheet of silicon through photolithography, masking, light, ion implantation, heat treatment and other hundreds of processes, can become a chip. Whenever there is a mistake in any process, it will lose the slightest mistake and it will be a thousand miles away.

It is precisely because of the high precision and complexity of the manufacturing process, the chip production needs mechanical, electronic, software, control, materials and other disciplines with. Integrated circuit production line etching machine, oxidation machine, film, lithography, ion implantation and other equipment, has been dominated by a small number of companies in Europe and the United States. Today, just a few years from now till now, some domestic materials and large-scale equipment are gradually entering the most advanced integrated circuit production line in the country.

Joint research to shorten the international gap

Made in China and made in China, it is a problem that China needs to overcome in the high-end manufacturing field over the years.

"An ordinary household in a city has about 100 chips." Liang Sheng, director of the Administrative Committee of Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone and director of the National Science and Technology Major 02 Special Management Office, described such a metaphor many years ago to describe integrated circuits in people's lives In the ubiquity of the importance of. Today, the number of 100 increases unabated. Smartphones, air purifiers, mobile WiFi, HDTVs, smart cameras, sound-controlled lights ... Without a chip, all these smart devices that make your life easier are impossible.

Small people's intellectual life, as large as the national information security capabilities, are closely related to the core chips and chip manufacturing equipment. "A quarterly output value of a large foreign equipment manufacturer is much higher than the annual output value of SMIC." Zhang Xin also used a figure to explain the important position of equipment manufacturing in the entire IC industry chain.