Chapter 179 [Seven Semiconductor Materials]

Study room on the second floor.

Fang Hong established two major categories of semiconductor materials and semiconductor equipment in the document, and then further subdivided them to correspond to the industries to be invested and make a good allocation of capital expenditures.

Semiconductor materials mainly include two categories: "wafer manufacturing materials" and "packaging materials".

Among them, wafer manufacturing materials are divided into: silicon wafers, masks, photoresists, polishing materials, special gases, targets, etc.

Look at the application of each major material in detail.

Silicon wafers are mainly used in the silicon crystal process; high-purity special gases or reagents are used in the cleaning process; targets are used in the deposition process; photoresists are used in the coating process; masks are used in the exposure process; High-purity reagents will be used in the development and etching process; precursors and targets will be used in the film growth process; polishing fluid and polishing pads will be used in the polishing process.

Packaging materials include: packaging substrates, lead frames, bonding wires, plastic packaging materials, ceramic substrates, die attach materials and other packaging materials.

Among them, packaging substrates and lead frames are used in the patch link; bonding wires are used in the wire bonding link; silicon micropowder and plastic packaging materials are used in the molding link; silicon wafers, gas masks, etc. are used in the electroplating link. .

It can be said that every link and every material must correspond to a company. Of course, large companies may also master the R\u0026D and production of multiple links and various materials.

After Fang Hong created the document, he began to edit and refine it one by one. After completing these, he will hand it over to Huayu, and let him execute according to the content of the file plan.

Among the many semiconductor materials, there are seven main categories that are the most critical materials, namely: silicon wafers, special gases, photomasks, wet electronic reagents, polishing materials, photoresists, and sputtering targets.

Specifically.

Wafer:

In fact, silicon materials are widely available. The silicon dioxide in ordinary sand can be purified into 98% pure silicon, and high-purity silicon needs to be further purified to become 9 n or 11 n, which is 99.999999999% , 9 9 or 11 9 after the decimal point is an ultra-pure material with a level of purity of this level.

This ultra-pure polysilicon needs to be melted in a 1400-degree quartz crucible, and doped with boron or phosphorus to change its electrical conductivity, and then grown into a specific single crystal through single crystal growth, and then sliced ​​and so on. A series of grinding and polishing, epitaxy, bonding and other processes, then the semiconductor silicon wafer materials are almost ready.

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Specialty Gases:

Electronic special gas is an indispensable basic material for industries such as integrated circuit flat panel display devices, solar cells, and optical fiber cables. According to the different process links involved in electronic special gas, it can be subdivided into six categories: chemical vapor deposition, ion Implantation, photoresist printing, diffusion, etching, doping.

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Photomask:

It is mainly composed of a light-transmitting substrate, including resin or glass and an opaque light-shielding film. In the manufacturing process of the photomask, its direct material cost accounts for 67%, and the substrate accounts for 90% of this direct material. , the entire substrate accounts for about 60% of its total cost, and some other auxiliary materials account for a smaller proportion.

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Wet Electron Reagents:

That is, high-purity reagents. According to different uses, wet electronic chemicals can be divided into ultra-clean and high-purity reagents, and functional chemicals represented by photoresist supporting reagents.

Wet electronic chemicals are mainly used in cleaning, photolithography, and etching in various processes. In the photolithography process, they are mainly used in the pre-treatment of silicon wafers, such as cloud glue, development, and stripping. In wafer processing, they are mainly It is used in high-purity polishing and cleaning, in which sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, developer, etc. are used.

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Polishing material:

This is a general term for the planarization process of the wafer surface by chemical etching or mechanical grinding. One of its technical difficulties is that it needs to be made below 0.35 microns.

For example, mechanical polishing is used in both front-end processing and back-end manufacturing of semiconductors, such as shallow trench isolation, interlayer dielectric polishing, and metal inner dielectric polishing.

The composition of the polishing system includes: polishing equipment, polishing liquid, polishing pad, etc. Among them, the polishing pad is made of a loose porous material, generally such as polyurethane, which has certain elasticity and can absorb a certain amount of polishing liquid, and the polishing liquid is composed of abrasive PH value regulator, oxidizing agent, dispersant, A mixture of surfactants.

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Photoresist:

This is composed of solvents, resins, photoinitiators, monomers and other additives. In application, photoresists can be understood as the same properties as tapes used for spraying paint on some objects, except that photoresists are micron-sized or even nanoscale process.

Photoresist is one of the most important processes in the process of large-scale integrated circuit manufacturing within the process technology, and because of the small scale, there are more than ten repetitions of photolithography, etching, A series of processes such as baking and gluing, through which the circuit is printed on the silicon wafer, makes the application of photoresist very important.

With the continuous improvement of semiconductor manufacturing process and the evolution from micron level to nano level, the wavelength of photoresist has also been extended from ultraviolet broad spectrum to G line (436nm), I line (365nm), KrF (248nm), ArF (193nm) and EUV (13.5nm) process.

The composition of the corresponding photoresist will also change, because the shorter the exposure wavelength, the higher the technical level of the photoresist, and the more advanced the integrated circuit process it is adapted to. The engraving composition is also different.

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Sputtering target:

In the process of sputtering, the high-speed ion beam bombards the target material, that is, the target material, and the process of stripping and depositing metal ions on the silicon wafer is the raw material for depositing electronic thin films.

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Fang Hong edited the content of the materials and took a look at these semiconductor materials. All of these have to be invested in!

At this moment, the National Fund has not yet been established, and it will be in 2014.

But it is obviously impossible for Fang Hong to waste four years. The most typical feature of the semiconductor industry is the rapid update and upgrade, because under Moore’s Law, the performance of the next generation of products will be improved by one copy and the cost will be reduced by half every 18 months. .

So why can't the country always catch up?

It’s because you managed to catch up, and it turned out that it was a technology eliminated by others. This is not the worst thing. What’s worse is that you can’t even reach the technology eliminated by others. There is no support and subsidy from the state, and enterprises can do it themselves. The money thrown in can't be recovered at all, and 100% of the money will be lost, so naturally no one will do it.

Just like Pixiu, if you spend money, you can only get in and get out.

Fang Hong decided to engage in semiconductors, because he had to be mentally prepared for long-term financial support for this super gold-swallowing beast. It doesn't matter if he doesn't make money for five or even ten years.

But once the entire industrial chain is completed, all the costs invested in the previous ones will be recovered with interest. You only need to look at the domestic demand for chip imports in ten years' time to know.

It costs more to buy chips than to import oil for an entire year.

Fang Hong rested for a while, and immediately created a subcategory in the document——EDA software.

EDA is the abbreviation of electronic design automation. It is mainly used in the field of chip design and manufacturing. It uses the computer as a tool and uses the language expression of hardware description to optimize the database calculation mathematics, graph theory, graphics and topology logic. A general term for computer software that integrates theories scientifically and effectively and assists in the entire process of VLSI chip design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing.

EDA is mainly used in the field of design and manufacturing. As the chip manufacturing process becomes more and more complex, the application of EDA software becomes more and more important. It can greatly improve the design efficiency of chips.

In fact, the market size of EDA software itself is not large. The current global market size is about three to four billion U.S. dollars, which is not a fraction of the size of the semiconductor industry.

However, the importance of EDA software in the field of semiconductors is so important that it cannot be played without it. The reason is that if you want to design a chip, if you do not use EDA software, the result will be a significant increase in cost.

For example, if you want to design a consumer-grade processing chip at the moment, use the most advanced EDA software to design, the cost is about 40 million U.S. dollars, but if you don’t use EDA software, the cost will be as high as 7.7 billion U.S. dollars.

$40 million versus $7.7 billion!

That is to say, with the addition of EDA software, one of its technical iterations is enough to increase the efficiency of the entire design by nearly 200 times.

It can be seen that without EDA software, the cost of any new chips, especially consumer-grade chips, is simply unaffordable.

This is the importance and indispensability of EDA software. Its market size is small, but it cannot be played without it. It can be seen that EDA software plays an essential role in the entire chip manufacturing.

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