antiterror13
Brigadier
You sound so obsessed with the "stepper" technology. I am telling you there are a lot of other technologies as important if not more important than "stepper".
Perhaps it is the only thing you know well ? and you are biased ?
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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You sound so obsessed with the "stepper" technology. I am telling you there are a lot of other technologies as important if not more important than "stepper".
Perhaps it is the only thing you know well ? and you are biased ?
escobar
Brigadier
Zhu Zhenlin spent 15,000 yuan ($2,378) and developed his own solar-powered car, which can run for 70 kilometers. The 19-year-old is a student at Xiangshan Technical School in East China’s Ningbo city. The automatic transmission solar car is 3.2 meters long, 1.4 meters wide and 1.4 meters high, well equipped with accelerator, brake, steering wheel, steering lights and rearview mirrors. The car is covered by 22 solar panels on the roof, hood and trunk to collect the solar power, which is stored in six 12-volt storage batteries in the trunk.
Equation
Lieutenant General
Zhu Zhenlin spent 15,000 yuan ($2,378) and developed his own solar-powered car, which can run for 70 kilometers. The 19-year-old is a student at Xiangshan Technical School in East China’s Ningbo city. The automatic transmission solar car is 3.2 meters long, 1.4 meters wide and 1.4 meters high, well equipped with accelerator, brake, steering wheel, steering lights and rearview mirrors. The car is covered by 22 solar panels on the roof, hood and trunk to collect the solar power, which is stored in six 12-volt storage batteries in the trunk.
A great use to go camping, of course without a certified registration and license plate it has to be towed by truck.
bladerunner
Banned Idiot
They should enter it in the "World Solar Challenge"
The australia event is described below
In friendly competition with others attempting the same goals, the teams depart Darwin aiming to be the first to arrive in Adelaide, some 3000km to the south.
It's all about energy management! Based on the original notion that a 1000W car would complete the journey in 50 hours, solar cars are allowed a nominal 5kW hours of stored energy, which is 10% of that theoretical figure. All other energy must come from the sun or be recovered from the kinetic energy of the vehicle.
These are arguably the most efficient electric vehicles.
The Adventure
Having made the journey from Darwin and successfully navigating quarantine, customs, scrutineering, safety inspections and undertaken event briefings, participants are ready to start their epic journey.
The event is conducted in a single stage from Darwin to Adelaide.Once the teams have left Darwin they must travel as far as they can until 5pm in the afternoon where they make camp in the desert where-ever they happen to be.
All teams must be fully self-sufficient!
During the journey there are 7 mandatory check points where observers are changed and team managers may update themselves with the latest information on the weather and their own position in the field. Here teams may perform the most basic of maintenance only - checking and maintenance of tyre pressure and cleaning of debris from the vehicle.
There are also undisclosed check points which may be imposed by the event officials to ensure regulatory compliance.
(To find out more ... visit the site.
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CottageLV
Banned Idiot
I'm obsessed with this because it is currently (had been for past few years) the only major bottleneck in completely indignizing the complete supply chain of semiconductors.
For a major power like China, you don;t have to have the best in every field, but you have to have everything in case of an embargo.
antiterror13
Brigadier
And do you think the UK , France have more capability than China in "Steppers" ?
90nm capability is more than enough, in my opinion
How about rocket technology, CNC, high end software, databases, control system, single crystal technology, space technology, High performance turbo fan engine, DNA sequencing technology, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc
I don't agree at all that "Stepper" is the most important technology, it is important, but not the most . It is the only thing you know, and obviously your knowledge is very limited
escobar
Brigadier
First-quarter sales of passenger vehicles in China changed little from what they had been in the first three months of last year.
To many industry observers, that indicated the industry had returned to enjoying the sort of stable development that can be sustained over the long term.
The country saw sales of 3.53 million cars, sports-utility vehicles, multi-purpose vehicles and minivans from January to March, a number that was up by 0.3 percent from a year earlier, the China Passenger Car Association said on Tuesday.
The industry's monthly sales for March came to 1.27 million units, 2.6 percent more than in the previous year. Following a 16.5 percent year-on-year decline in January and a 22 percent year-on-year increase in February - both effects of the early advent of the Spring Festival holiday this year - the figure in March marked a recovery for the industry. Yet it still disappointed observers' expectations.
"The three-day holidays and the fuel price hike in the month pulled down the growth rate," said Rao Da, secretary-general of the association. "The record high fuel prices put a lot of pressure on Chinese buyers, who react quickly to price changes, and delayed their car purchase plans."
He said the increase in fuel prices will continue to influence vehicles sales in April, especially those of small and middle-size passenger vehicles and of Chinese automobile brands.
"However, April will see swarms of new models being introduced and the approaching Beijing auto show will attract consumers back to the showrooms and help vehicle sales increase slightly in the month," Rao said.
He predicted earlier this year that China's automobile market will increase by 7 percent to include 19.8 million units in 2012, 15.55 million of which will be passenger vehicles.
In 2011, the government suspended giving out subsidies meant to stimulate vehicle purchases. As a result, vehicle sales in the country slowed from their fast pace of previous years.
"Starting this year, China's automobile industry, without policy support, has been returning to its normal state," said Xu Changming, director with the State Information Center's information resource unit.
"The country's macro economy will be the major factor in the industry's sustainable development."
Shi Jianhua, deputy secretary of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said China's economic policies promise to give the automobile industry a bright future. The potential for vehicle purchases in China's third- and fourth-tier cities is also expected to spur demand.
Shi said a slowing economy and the increasing cost of raw materials and of fuel prices will place more obstacles before the market. Yuan appreciation, as well as trade friction and barriers, are also expected to impede vehicle exports.
Compared with China, the United States, which lost its position as the largest market for vehicles to China three years ago, saw its market for vehicle sales recover in March. That month witnessed 1.4 million vehicles sold in the US, a 13 percent increase year-on-year, exhibiting the market's best performance since August 2007.
The US auto conglomerate General Motors and its joint ventures in China sold 257,944 vehicles in China in March and 745,152 vehicles in the first quarter of 2012. Those figures set records for both the month and the quarter.
Also in March, the company's domestic sales were up 10.7 percent from the same month in 2011. That was the second-biggest increase recorded in any month in GM's history in China.
For the first three months of the year, the company's domestic sales increased 8.7 percent, a bigger percentage rise than the company has recorded for any other quarter since it began doing business in China.
The company also saw its sales increase by 12 percent in its home market in March, when it delivered 231,000 vehicles.
The Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp's first-quarter sales in China increased by 1.8 percent year-on-year, while Honda Motor Co's sales declined by 10.6 percent in the first three months.
The US automaker Ford Motor Co reported a sales decline of 10.59 percent in March and 13.64 percent in the first quarter in the Chinese market. However, its business in the US jumped 5 percent over last year to 223,000 units in March, the highest monthly sales in five years.
CottageLV
Banned Idiot
WTF? You can conclude that stepper is the only thing I know just because I talk about it a lot? Hence my knowledge is very limited? How did this let you lead it to personal attacks?
This specific discussion was revolved around semiconductors and photo-lithographic machine is the single most key factor in the whole industry. Doesn't matter how important rockets and DNA sequencing may be, they have nothing to do with manufacturing semiconductors.
Unlike those other technologies, most of which have a very specific and narrow field, such as single crystalline engine blades and DNA sequencing. On the contrary, semiconductor manufacturing is very broad and now elevated to strategic level importance for all developed nations. It is now a trillion dollar industry. Apart from ships and car, almost all export earnings for Japan and South Korea come from semiconductors and their related technologies. It is the same for Uncle Sam.
China is now becoming a global power and want a share in every industry. But more importantly, China want to rid its reliance on all Western technologies and stop losing money because those cannot be produced domestically. Just because China cannot produce high tech CPUs used in ordinary PCs, hundreds of billions of dollars outflowed to US. The same applies to commercial jets, large marine engines, drive trains used in highspeed trains and many others.
If you really think a 90nm fab is more than enough, you can catastrophically wrong. It is not only for producing military hardware, but more importantly, allowing Chinese companies to compete commercially for customers. If you are buying a laptop, for the same price, would you buy one with up to date spec or would you rather buy one with spec from 10 years ago? Just because it's a Chinese brand sold in China, doesn't mean that people will automatically buy it. Just look at indigneous brand Chinese cars and other consumer brands. If they want to compete with Intel or AMD, perhaps Qualcomm and Nvidia in the mobile sector, the chips have to be at least up to par or even surpassing in design and performance, in order just to be priced similarly to those foreign counterparts.
A photo-lithographic machine is a lot more than just a DVD burner it seems to be, it is the mother of all modern machines. All modern technology is directly and indirectly created and supported by the chips these machines print. The performance of those chips determine the competence of a nation, because all aspects of a nation trace back to this chip.
So china need photolithography machines and etch tools in the semiconductor manufacturing process.
Are those the only 2 pieces of equipment china need or are there other equipment needed to complete the process?
Just describe the process briefly and the equipment needed in each step.
Thanks
CottageLV
Banned Idiot
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF(*&(*^*&%&^$@#$%@@#$KKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I spent a whole hour writing it, then I accidentally pressed the "previous page" key on my mouse, hence losing everything I have written for the past hour. So this version is more condensed. FML
There are several major steps in manufacturing semiconductors. Believe it or not, solar panel is actually manufactured the same way.
1. Wafer - A solid disc made out of silicon, reaching 99.9999999% purity. It is produced by "Czochralski process", essentially a feeder/starter of pure silicon shaped like a upside down funnel dipped into motel silicon. It then slowly pulls upwards, allowing pure silicon to "grow" attached to the feeder. The finished product looks like a anti-ship missile, similar shape and size.
2. Preparation - this forms a layer of silicon oxides, which later will be forming the transistors and its pipes.
3. Photoresist - Adhesives are added and dried. Then photoresist are added then baked again. Two types are added, negatives and positives. Positives react to ultraviolet lights and negatives react in chemical agents.
4. photolithography - this essentially is "burning" the pattern of billions of transistors onto wafer's photo-resist layer. It is done repeatedly to create the structures. These structures are at nano-meter scale, each specifically exposed by the stepper, making it the most challenging part of the whole production line.
5. Development - The stepping process makes the PR layer vulnerable to acids. Development removes the PR regions that have been exposed to UV light, thus forming the pattern of the transistors.
6. Etching - Since the pattern of transistors was created in the last step, which is free of PR layer. Etching is applying chemical (wet or dry) to corrode the pattern into the unprotected silicon oxide layer.
7. The last step is just to remove the PR layer.
This whole process is repeated over 50 times to create all the nano scale structures.
Essentially we can think of it as a three layer sandwich. The top layer is a protective layer and a pattern is "burnt" onto it, changing its chemical property. Then the acids corrodes the away this layer, allowing another chemical agent to corrode into exposed patterns of the second layer, since the pattern is unprotected. Then the top layer is washed away, leaving only the bottom two layers. The middle layer of silicon now has a very complexed structure, consisting of billions of transistors.
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To fully answer the question, if China could produce the machines in each step of the process.
1. Silicon ingots and wafers - China has some of the biggest producers in the world.
2. PR solution - China used to be heavily reliant on imports. BUt Kempur opened up production at around 2009, expecting 100 ton per year yield.
3. Stepper/photolithography - SMEE is able to produce it, reaching 90nm level. Milestone accomplishment, one of only 4 countries able to produce it at commercial scale. (Japan, USA[almost defunct], Holland)
4. Etching - AMEC makes machines able to handle 22nm level. But this is not that hard, it's only corroding away the silicon.
The unfortunate thing is that all three key factors, stepper, PR solution, and Etching machine, all are made by crown corporations. Although they have near-unlimited funding and huge talent pool to pick from, we all know how uncompetitive crown corporations are compared to privateers. Those companies are inflexible and slow to adjust to the market.
But the good things is, now they have it. Something is better than nothing.