It is no secret that China's chip industry is backward. Chinese mainland has done a good job in the field of chip design, packaging and testing, but its share in other sub-industries is relatively low, and the situation of being controlled by people is very serious.

Domestic chips are subject to people.

In the upstream of chip industry chain, such as EDA tools, semiconductor ip, semiconductor equipment and materials, China is in a bottleneck.

In the midstream manufacturing industry, China's chip production capacity is also seriously mismatched with its market position; China is the largest chip market in the world, but in 2020, the output value created by Chinese mainland enterprises will only account for 5.9% of the total chip market in China.

Chip is the "grain" of the industry, and the realization of chip self-control is to ensure the national industrial security. But now China's chip industry depends on imports, which is obviously worrying.

So, is it possible for domestic chips to break through? The answer is yes.

There is hope for domestic chips in the future.

At present, the situation that domestic chips are controlled by people has attracted more and more attention. More and more funds, talents, welfare and policies are pouring into China's chip industry. This has pushed domestic chips into the fast lane.

At the same time, China's chip market ranked first in the world in 16, and the huge consumer market gave China enterprises enough room for development. The trend of domestic substitution has given more opportunities to local enterprises in China.

More importantly, China is in the process of industrial transformation from the Moorish era to the post-Moorish era, which gives China's chip industry great opportunities.

Let me briefly talk about Moore's Law: Moore's Law was first put forward by Intel founder Gordon Moore in 1965. Its core content is that every 18-24 months, the number of components that an integrated circuit can accommodate will double, and the performance will also double at the same price.

Moore's Law is regarded as the golden rule of the chip industry, but it fails at 20nm: the price of/kloc-0.0 million transistors is 2.7 cents at 28nm, but it rises to 2.9 cents at 20nm. This violates the most basic condition of Moore's law, and the price remains unchanged.

As a result, the post-Moore era has brought about the disconnection between the old laws and the current situation of the chip industry. The chip industry needs to seek new technologies to push the chip forward, and China is expected to seize the opportunity to catch up.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity.

At the 202 1 World Semiconductor Conference on June 9th, Wu Hanming, an academician of China Academy of Engineering, expounded the three core challenges of chip manufacturing in the post-Moore era, which is both a challenge and an opportunity for China.

First, the basic challenge: accurate graphics.

When the wavelength is larger than the physical size, the resolution will be extremely blurred. At present, the main technology used in chip manufacturing is to expose patterns with a wavelength of 193nm, and its future development will be challenged by the European war.

Second, the core challenge: new materials and new processes.

The original materials have gradually failed to meet the needs of chip development. In order to continue to promote the improvement of chip performance, new materials are needed. For example, mainstream silicon-based chips are difficult to refine further, which hinders the improvement of chip performance. Therefore, the industry is looking for new materials.

Third, the ultimate challenge: improve the yield.

It is very difficult to increase production. If the yield is not up to standard, it will produce a lot of waste in the chip manufacturing process, and it is difficult to reduce the production cost. From this perspective, there are many challenges in the post-Moore era.

However, in the post-Moore era, the difficulty and cost of chip development rose rapidly, which slowed down the pace of the industry. The slow Moore's Law is a rare opportunity for pursuers like China.

At the same time, in the post-Moore era, advanced technology is difficult to advance, and mature technology is expected to have a huge development space in generate.

Therefore, SMIC takes advanced manufacturing technology as its development direction, and is also actively developing advanced packaging to cope with the post-Moore era. At the same time, the proportion of mature processes in TSMC is also increasing.

Write it at the end

Today, although China's chip industry is still very backward, if we can seize the opportunity of the post-Moore era, domestic chips can go further from self-control and catch up in the chip field.