Chapter 1021: Technical hero

It is absolutely unambiguous to talk about blocking. Young Master Tan Er is an out-and-out activist.
After the lively signing ceremony with the major ministries and commissions, he casually and famously came to get close to him. The so-called "PC Four King Kong" in China had a brief social gathering and hurriedly boarded the flight. US flights.
Of course, before boarding the plane, a telegram was sent out urgently, and Ms. Rowling got busy immediately.
In Tan Zhenhua's mind, the matter in his hand is comparable to the relationship with the "Four King Kong" lesbians. By the way, it is much more important for them to join the "Midoor" industry alliance. Just let Yu Youcheng handle that matter later.
Anyway, the "Wintel" alliance that the "Four King Kong" originally relied on for their fortunes disappeared before this time and space was even formed, and he was not afraid that they would go against the sky.
Some students must be asking, what is the sacred Lin Benjian, who made the second young master so anxious to get on the pole and try to get him in his pocket?
That is of course because this person is related to the future of the entire semiconductor industry.
Lin Benjian, male, of Chinese descent, was born in Annan in 1942 and is now 44 years old. He was studying in high school on Bay Island. In 1970, he obtained a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in the United States, and then joined IBM.
If Zhang Zhongmou is the leader who changed the overall competitive landscape of the semiconductor industry, then Lin Benjian is a technological hero in the semiconductor industry.
If you want to clearly understand his importance, you have to start with the lithography machine, the most important equipment in the semiconductor manufacturing process, and the highest technical threshold.
Time goes back to 1959. At that time, the great Fairchild Company had been established for more than a year. After several twists and turns, the company’s engineer Mr. Herney finally invented the "planar processing technology" for manufacturing diffusion transistors. The process can make transistor manufacturing as efficient as printing a book.
"Plane processing technology" has become a standard process for manufacturing integrated circuits since its birth and has been used today. The most critical process in this process is to correctly project the transparent film with the circuit diagram onto the silicon chip. .
The key equipment for the correct execution of this process is the lithography machine.
In the beginning, all lithography machines used the so-called "dry", which uses air as the medium of lithography technology. This technology has been used until the 1990s. Of course, with the continuous advancement of technology, lens resolution The rate is higher and higher, the wavelength of the light source used is shorter and shorter, the size of the wafer that can be processed is also getting larger and larger, and the work process is becoming more and more automated-just like Moore’s Law follows, the corresponding process technology for manufacturing chips It is getting thinner and thinner, from the micrometer level to the nanometer level.
But suddenly one day, I ran into an unbreakable barrier and got stuck on the 65-nanometer process.
Because, for a long period of time, human beings cannot break through the technical bottleneck of lithography light sources, and can only use light sources with a wavelength of 193nm, but can't do anything about the series of problems encountered in upgrading to a 157nm wavelength light source.
Although countless scientists were mobilized all over the world and many companies and consortia invested huge amounts of money for this, but due to the limitations of the development of basic materials and industrial processing capabilities at that time, the problem could not be solved quickly. The semiconductor industry at that time even called 157nm. "It's a wall", so that all those who are interested in trying to break through are hit and beaten. This card lasted more than ten years until the 21st century.
In fact, in the industry, someone has proposed a solution for this. In 1986, at this time, Lin Benjian, who was still engaged in imaging technology research at IBM, proposed a genius idea: He believed that the best solution for shortening the wavelength is by "dry lithography". "Technology" turned to "immersion type".
However, just like it has been repeated many times in history, the idea of ​​a genius who is too leading is doomed to fail to be recognized. At that time, the entire semiconductor industry had not hit the wall in front of the wavelength of the light source and suffered a lot. His "immersion" technical solution Nobody cares.
Until 2001, Lin Benjian left IBM and joined TSMC. He has perfected the theory of "immersion lithography machine" and published three heavyweight academic papers in succession. In the paper he pointed out: Since 157nm is difficult to break through, why not Back to the mature technology of 193nm, change the medium between the lens and the silicon wafer from air to water. Since the refractive index of water is about 1.4, the wavelength can be shortened to 193/1.4=132nm, which is much higher than the 157nm that is ineffective. .
Moreover, this solution called "immersion lithography" has other obvious advantages. First, because it uses existing mature technology to transform, the capital investment is small, which can save semiconductor equipment manufacturers R&D investment and reduce chips The manufacturer's import cost; second, if the medium is changed from water to other high refractive index liquids, the wavelength can be further reduced to below 132nm, which means that it is very convenient to increase the resolution of the lithography machine.
He began to lobby lithography machine manufacturers in the U.S., Hans, and Japan to try to persuade big companies to adopt the "immersion lithography" solution, but they were still rejected.
Because these big manufacturers have invested a huge amount of money for the 157nm light source, if you give up now and develop the "immersion solution" from scratch, it means that the huge amount of investment in the early stage has been wiped out, and I will feel distressed when I think about it. Fa explained to the board of directors-well, these companies later regretted it.
Finally, Lin Benjian found Peter. Wernicke, the CEO of ASML, the most inconspicuous lithography machine manufacturer that barely survived the cracks of many large factories at the time, two fallen geniuses finally wiped out sparks.
When Peter Wernick got this plan, he immediately made up his mind to break the pot...The determination to fight, put all his wealth on, and jointly develop this lithography machine with TSMC.
Three years later, in 2004, the world's first immersion lithography machine was successfully developed.
As soon as the "immersion lithography machine" came out, it basically sentenced the various "dry" lithography technology solutions being developed in the semiconductor industry to the death penalty, because following this technology path, semiconductor chip manufacturers can take a not too expensive The cost of the chip will gradually increase from 65 nanometers to less than 10 nanometers!
For any semiconductor chip manufacturing company, the manufacturing process is the most important key factor and the lifeline of the company!
Why is the process important?
The answer is simple-because of the money!
Before explaining this problem clearly, we first need to establish a basic concept-for chip manufacturers, the manufacturing cost of a chip has nothing to do with the complexity of the chip, but only with the area of ​​the chip, in other words, the same area A chip, no matter how many transistors it contains and how complicated the circuit is, its manufacturing cost is almost the same.
This is like, for a copying company that undertakes photocopying business, it does not care how many characters are on the piece of paper you copy, it only collects money based on the number of pages.
After clarifying this concept, it is easy to understand the following example: a 12-inch 304.8mm diameter wafer, assuming that 100 chips can be made with 16nm process, then 210 chips can be made with 10nm process, so the price It's only half the price. In the market, you can hold on to the friction of competitors on the ground, and you can do more research and development while making money. The gap is widened.
Therefore, Asmer’s
immersion lithography machine
has become a hot product immediately, and it has to be queued to buy it. From 2004, it only took a short period of 5 years. By 2009, its market share It has soared from almost negligible to 70%, and Nikon, the industry leader that once occupied 50% of the market share, suddenly dropped its market share from the peak to single digits.
After having tasted the sweetness, Asmer tried its best on the "Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machine EUV" and succeeded again. Since then, it has reached the top of the global lithography machine throne, especially on the "Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machine EUV". Achieved an astonishing 100% market share, absolute monopoly!
The absolute monopoly business is naturally very cool. The price of this "Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machine EUV" is as high as 120 million U.S. dollars, and it needs to be ordered in full and queued for at least one year!
At that time, there was a helpless ridicule in the international semiconductor industry: "As soon as ASML sneezes, semiconductor companies all over the world catch a cold."
Of course, ASML's success at the top is not all because of technological leadership, there are many factors that play a role in it-but that is another story, we have a chance to talk about it in the future-well, maybe there is no chance, because The following dialogue is taking place in Armonk, New York, in this time and space:
"Hello, Dr. Lin Benji, I am Eric Tan, the founder of the "Matrix" laboratory. I am very glad that you agreed to meet with me. I am very interested in the theory of "immersion lithography" you put forward. Personally, I think this will be a great invention that will change the semiconductor process industry. How about we discuss it in depth?"