Chinese semiconductor industry

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Weaasel

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This Research Paper looks to have been published in 2022. It looks like they are making a huge national push in the development of LPP EUVL.

The good news is that the Wuhan Uni and Huazhong Uni Team seems to have already developed a MOPA C02 Laser of at least 27kw Laser Power.
This is similar to the Gigaphoton MOPA C02 Laser which also produces 27kw of Laser Power. The Gigaphoton EUV Light Source uses a 27Kw Laser to produce Source Power of 250W.
The current Model ASML EUVL NXT3400 uses a 30kw MOPA C02 Laser and also produces Source Power of 250W.

As we can see, everything is gradually falling into place in the development of the EUVL in China.

What really slowed down the development of the EUVL for ASML in the initial stages was the search for a powerful C02 Laser and also the development of the pre-pulse technique for the illumination of the tin droplet.

It looks like a prototype of the Chinese EUVL is not too far away. The Light Source R&D would be close to completion.
Please rank these EUV lithography machine components in terms of difficulty of developing:

- Laser light source
- Mirrors
- Photoresist
- Tin pellets producer
 

latenlazy

Brigadier
Please rank these EUV lithography machine components in terms of difficulty of developing:

- Laser light source
- Mirrors
- Photoresist
- Tin pellets producer
Eh…this list is missing the forest for the trees if you want to talk about difficulty. The *drive* laser interacts with the tin droplet dispenser to generate the actual EUV light. The biggest challenge is in the interaction between those two components and corresponding control system to get optimal production of photons. This is compounded by the fact that the tin droplets also generate debris which can accumulate on your light collectors which then kill the efficacy of your light source, so the debris *cleaning* system within your light source becomes another point of challenge. The entire light source is easily the biggest challenge, and within the component mechanics of the light source it’s not the individual components but the ways they interact with each other that’s most technically challenging.
 

WTAN

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Quote:
"It can explain the fact that the CE of 10 ps PP is greater than that under the 10 ns PP condition in all CO2 pulse energy ranges, as shown in
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a. This optimized high-CE PP technology enabled 20 kW CO2 laser to realize a 250 W EUV source in several minutes. In 2019, the driver laser system was upgraded by improving the optical design of the pre-amplifier and 3 main amplifiers. As a result, a 27 kW CO2 laser power was achieved by the upgraded configuration. In the latest data, a higher EUV power greater than 360 W with a CE greater than 5% in short term was demonstrated, and 270 W stable operation in long term was achieved."

Figure 8
View attachment 98122

If China was able to produce 270W stably, as in commercially viable, with the "latest data", I would be very curious knowing how long ago is this latest data considering they developed a 27kW MOPA laser in 2019.
This is the research done by Gigaphoton which developed a 27kw MOPA Laser in 2019. The Chinese MOPA C02 Laser would certainly be able to achieve a similar performance.
 

european_guy

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Ten years ago:

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Now (by the same Harvard Business magazine):

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"In March 2014 this magazine published “
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,” by Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, and F. Warren McFarlan, an article that captured the conventional wisdom. The authors’ arguments were sound and well supported at the time. But just two years later eight of the 10 companies that had reached a $1 billion valuation in the shortest time ever were Chinese—and six of those eight were founded the year that article was published."

"But in the past five years, as an “innovation cold war” has taken shape between world powers, China has achieved a kind of parity with the United States"

"In the short term, China has a clear advantage in terms of output ..... and as a result it is poised to take the lead in the innovation arms race"

And finally, in an amazing crescendo of boldness, he wrote down even the unthinkable: US should now copy China!!!!!

"Up your imitation game. If you’re used to believing in your own exceptionalism, leaning into imitation as a strategy can feel like a declaration of defeat. But innovation has always been about both invention and imitation. We don’t think less of Apple because Steve Jobs got the idea for the mouse from Xerox. Genius steals, and it always has. To compete with China, imitation must be a weapon in the arsenal of global companies—one they’re willing to use."


It is astonishing that the two articles, published by the same Harvard Business magazine and written by different authors but belonging to the same US top elite demographic are just 7 years apart: 2014 and 2021.
 

Jianguo

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This is the research done by Gigaphoton which developed a 27kw MOPA Laser in 2019. The Chinese MOPA C02 Laser would certainly be able to achieve a similar performance.
My bad, I got confused because in the same paper it mentioned East China Normal University developing a 27kW drive laser. So, both Japan (Gigaphoton) and China have 27kW drive lasers.

As the amplification of CO2 laser system approaches the technical limit, the output power is difficult to be further increased. As such, a novel laser system scheme of multi-fiber coherent synthesis has been proposed and is currently under investigation by our team at East China Normal University, as shown in
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. Based on the currently realized 130 W single-fiber output power
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, a 27 kW laser power can be achieved by using 207 synthetic Yb-doped fibers. By optimizing the fiber laser amplifier, the number of fibers can be further reduced.

Fig 9
Recently, a new strategy for EUV source has been presented by our team at East China Normal University, which is a combination of a multi-fiber laser coherent synthesis system and a nano-Sn generator. The method of multi-fiber coherent synthesis offers a significant advantage of providing a high peak power, high average power, and high conversion efficiency simultaneously. The technical principle has been verified in previous studies
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. However, there are two remaining problems to be solved: the coherent addition techniques of multi-fibers, and Sn debris cleaning. It will be the focus of our future studies.
China is researching a different laser+tin droplet configuration. It mentions that they are working on a fiber laser system with 207 fibers at 130W each. I'm not clear on how this will work, but on the surface, it seems it will accelerate zapping smaller tin droplets with fiber lasers resulting in a more smooth continuous delivery of photons. This seems to be a more efficient method and should result in greater net photon delivery than a CO2 MOPA laser driven system. I'm speculating on this so more informed opinions would shed more light on this.
 

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WTAN

Junior Member
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Please rank these EUV lithography machine components in terms of difficulty of developing:

- Laser light source
- Mirrors
- Photoresist
- Tin pellets producer
The Light Source would be the biggest challenge. The ASML LPP EUVL took almost a decade to develop as they struggled to develop a Light Source with sufficient Source Power for commercial mass production of ICs.

Once the Light Source is successfully developed, things will move quite fast, with the integration of the Light Source with the other components like Optics and Work Bench into a prototype LPP EUVL.

The Patent for a LPP EUVL which was filed in Shanghai a few months ago, which uses a 30KW MOPA C02 Laser, gives us an indication that the Light Source is close to completion and there are plans to develop a LPP EUVL Prototype for testing.
 

Weaasel

Senior Member
Registered Member
Now (by the same Harvard Business magazine):

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

"In March 2014 this magazine published “
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
,” by Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, and F. Warren McFarlan, an article that captured the conventional wisdom. The authors’ arguments were sound and well supported at the time. But just two years later eight of the 10 companies that had reached a $1 billion valuation in the shortest time ever were Chinese—and six of those eight were founded the year that article was published."

"But in the past five years, as an “innovation cold war” has taken shape between world powers, China has achieved a kind of parity with the United States"

"In the short term, China has a clear advantage in terms of output ..... and as a result it is poised to take the lead in the innovation arms race"

And finally, in an amazing crescendo of boldness, he wrote down even the unthinkable: US should now copy China!!!!!

"Up your imitation game. If you’re used to believing in your own exceptionalism, leaning into imitation as a strategy can feel like a declaration of defeat. But innovation has always been about both invention and imitation. We don’t think less of Apple because Steve Jobs got the idea for the mouse from Xerox. Genius steals, and it always has. To compete with China, imitation must be a weapon in the arsenal of global companies—one they’re willing to use."


It is astonishing that the two articles, published by the same Harvard Business magazine and written by different authors but belonging to the same US top elite demographic are just 7 years apart: 2014 and 2021.
It is heretical in the West and in the United States in particular even admit that imitation is a necessary and good thing, let alone preach it. The Harvard Business Review are apostates that will be excommunicated for even permitting such an article to be written...


If one does not one to be copied don't exist.

China should try to replicate in prototype and even thereafter mass produce the most sophisticated EUV lithography machine that ASML has, including every single component, if it can.
 

panda_989

Just Hatched
Registered Member
If they can achieve commercially viable yields on this 7nm GPU design in the next 18-24 months, no matter how good/bad the design actually is, it will turn out to be yet another watershed event. Generally speaking, if they can make a decent GPU, even in the low/medium range of Nvidia/AMD mainstream lines, they definitely can build a GPGPU off that GPU design. Forget about the graphics card market. GPGPU for supercomputing and AI applications is the real deal. A made-in-China GPGPU at 7nm, even around 2024/2025 with commercially viable yields, would essentially break up all bleeding edge sanctions. From that point on, it would be US in general and Nvidia/AMD in particular really worry about their future in high-performance computing.
hello olala
 
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