What is the reason behind the global “core shortage”?

The global "core shortage" is a war without smoke. How can we win?

So the question is, what is causing this global chip shortage crisis?

Some say it was caused by Huawei's previous efforts to compete for production capacity, some say it was caused by the severe weather in Texas that caused the Samsung factory to suspend production, and some say it was caused by the surge in demand due to the epidemic. It can be said that there are different opinions.

Is it really so difficult to make a small chip? We can build aircraft and aircraft carriers, but can’t we build chips the size of fingernails?

Difficult! It's hard! Very difficult!

The chip industry is an extremely complex industry. It is a process of turning sand (silicon ore) into high-end chips. There are more than 2,000 processes in the process, and it is completed with the cooperation of dozens of countries around the world. Yes, if one country can handle the entire industrial chain and complete it independently, it is still an impossible task so far, including the United States.

In terms of IC design, our country is now in the first echelon, and the impact of this core shortage will not be big.

Let’s talk about wafer manufacturing. After the silicon oxide is melted, it is initially processed to extract the silicon. After the silicon is refined to 99.999% purity, it can be used in photovoltaics and batteries. But this is far from reaching the semiconductor-level single-crystal silicon purity of the chip (99.999999999%), and single-crystal silicon with this purity is only the raw material for producing chip-level silicon wafers.

But now there is a problem. Energy conservation and emission reduction have affected the production capacity of purification companies to a certain extent. In order to ensure production capacity, they can only upgrade themselves. At this time, if the United States does not get involved, how can it reflect its "double-standard nature"? OK, the United States has stopped supplying industrial design software. Therefore, many things previously had to be redesigned based on domestic software, which consumed a lot of manpower, material resources, and time costs, which also affected the production capacity of raw material silicon. If the upstream flow is small, the downstream will naturally be affected.

It is worth mentioning here that China Micro Semiconductor’s technology is recognized by global chip manufacturers and is the first in the world to develop The status of 5-nanometer etching machine companies should not be underestimated. The problem is that although we develop it ourselves, the parts do not have our completely independent intellectual property rights, so the blockade by the United States will have as much impact on AMEC as it does on SMIC.

Just like the lens is from Zeiss and the photoresist is from Japan. If we do everything ourselves, the cost will be too high. If we don’t talk about the cost, everything will be a rogue.

Therefore, the chip shortage can only be said to be a residual poison, which is superimposed on some of the more concrete reasons we mentioned at the beginning, resulting in a large-scale epidemic. Area of ??core missing phenomenon.