We finished talking about chip design in the last two issues, and today we should talk about chip manufacturing, packaging and testing. The manufacturing process of chip mainly includes 7 independent key steps, namely heat treatment (oxidation/diffusion/annealing), photolithography, etching , ion implantation, film deposition, metallization, chemical mechanical polishing, and finally measurement Qualified chips will enter the packaging and testing process. When
talks about chip manufacturing, he actually refers to those things in chip foundries. In the past chip industry, Samsung and Intel "love each other and kill each other". As we said in the last issue, the two giants of the IDM model are Samsung and Intel. After the rise of TSMC, the bipolar pattern was completely broken. Today, the global chip foundry is dominated by Taiwan, China, and TSMC is an absolute monopoly, with a global market share of more than 50% and a good product rate of more than 90%.
As of the first quarter of 2022, the chip foundries ranked 2nd to 9th in the world are Samsung, UMC, GlobalFoundries, SMIC, Huahong Group, PSMC, World Advanced, Hefei Crystal Integrated Integration, Gaota Semiconductor, among which SMIC, Hua Hong Group, and Hefei Jinghe Integrated Semiconductor are mainland Chinese companies, with month-on-month growth rates of 16.6%, 20.8%, and 26.0%, respectively. In terms of technology, SMIC's 14nm technology is the most advanced in mainland China, while Samsung and TSMC's 5nm technology has already been mass-produced, with a gap of about 3 generations. At present, SMIC is unable to make a breakthrough in 7nm, and it is a basic fact that it is 5 years behind in terms of technology.
After the chip is manufactured, it enters the packaging and testing process, which is the downstream industry of the chip. In the semiconductor industry chain, due to the high technical and capital barriers in the design and production links, the first-mover advantage is obvious, and mainland China is at a disadvantage, while the added value of packaging and testing is relatively low, labor-intensive, and entry barriers are low, so Packaging and testing is the link with the highest localization, and it is also a link with strong competitiveness. Among the world's top ten packaging and testing factories by revenue, Changdian Technology ranks third, Tongfu Microelectronics ranks fifth, and Huatian Technology ranks sixth. The
chip industry is a complex industry with relatively high industrial and technical barriers, but the entire chip industry is not an industry with a high return on investment. It requires a relatively long investment cycle to generate a return on investment, so our company used to not Less emphasis on chip design and production. But the Huawei HiSilicon incident sounded the alarm for us.
Huawei HiSilicon will develop a 5nm Kirin chip in 2020. This is a morale booster. If it is not blocked by the United States, it will only be a matter of time before HiSilicon continues to iterate to a 3nm design. But now, chip design is three generations behind and controlled by others. It may take our generation to work hard to achieve a breakthrough. Therefore, no matter when and where, we need to put the R&D core technology at the core!