Yi Anguo felt a bit awkward upon hearing Zhu Guanghui’s praise. It wasn’t that he himself was so impressive, but that a person nad Jack Ma had co up with this impressive idea.
As it stands now, he got ahead of everyone else with this idea, launching it first to seize the market and capture user resources.
While he proposed the thod, the specifics of how to implent it are up to them to worry about. Yi Anguo wouldn’t be involved in the specific tasks, plus, he didn’t quite understand them.
So, professional matters need to be handled by professionals.
Besides being a professional carpenter, Yi Anguo isn’t a professional in anything else. However, he knows a bit about everything. At least in broad terms, he wouldn’t go wrong, so he’s suitable for directing and can just issue orders for his team to execute his ideas.
What he can do is earn enough money to provide enough developnt funds for various companies, and for those needing technology research, he ensures ample R&D funding.
Take Hua Xing Microelectronics Equipnt Company for example; last year’s sales revenue was less than 1 billion US Dollars, yet it invested over 8 billion in R&D expenses.
Hua Xing Microelectronics Equipnt Company is like a bottomless pit; never mind over 8 billion, even over 80 billion wouldn’t be enough.
After all, if high-end lithography machine equipnt was that easy to develop, it wouldn’t be a chokepoint.
Before being reborn, Yi Anguo had seen a corporate directory with key companies in China’s upstream and downstream lithography machine industry chain.
In fact, the country has long attached great importance to research and developnt in semiconductor technology.
The Netherlands refuses to sell us the latest EUV lithography machines, which have over 100,000 parts, but without crucial components that we provide, we have no way to retaliate against them.
Lithography machines are harder than atomic bombs to manufacture, a culmination of the world’s top technologies and a comprehensive field of studies.
Only ASML can produce the world’s latest EUV lithography machines.
The Dutch company ASML is undoubtedly the leader in the lithography machine field, with its latest EUV lithography machine capable of producing 7nm CPUs. It’s the only company in the world doing this, holding 100% market share.
As mainstream processors worldwide begin moving into the 7nm era, producing 7nm chips requires ASML’s EUV lithography machines.
Since it’s a complete monopoly, ASML sets the price, and it’s not cheap at 100 million US Dollars per machine.
However, even with that money, you’d have to see ASML’s mood. If they’re not pleased, they won’t sell it to you! Is our country short on money? In 2018, we offered 120 million US Dollars, and two years later, we didn’t even see a hair, whereas the island has acquired more than a dozen.
If money could solve this problem, Yi Anguo wouldn’t bother with complicated self-research.
Before his rebirth, Arica not only banned ASML from exporting advanced lithography machines to China but also prohibited foundries in the island from producing advanced chips for Chinese companies.
Now that Hua Xing has risen strongly, it’ll surely threaten Arican interests, so if Yi Anguo doesn’t prepare early, he will face Arica’s suppression.
Yi Anguo has long ordered the most advanced lithography machines from ASML, but what’s advanced now isn’t the most advanced in a decade.
Moreover, ASML’s top EUV lithography machines are also first supplied to other major partner companies, including Taiwan Semiconductor, but definitely not Hua Xing Technology.
So, even if Yi Anguo has money, he can only buy their DUV lithography machines. Lithography machines are among the core equipnt for chip manufacturing.
In the industrial field, the toughest part is not designing chips but manufacturing them.
There is no shortage of global research on chip design, with nurous architectures available such as ARM and x86. Even developing a new chip architecture isn’t too hard; for instance, the initial team for the open-source RISC architecture only had a few dozen people.
But chip manufacturing is different. Integrating tens of billions of transistors onto a chip that’s only a few milliters large requires integrating nearly all of the world’s high-end equipnt and technicians.
It’s well known that German machine tool design is quite complex, and there remains a significant gap dostically. Yet, lithography machine manufacturing may be a hundred tis harder than the most intricate machine tools.
The similarity between machines and lithography tools is that they both demand extre precision. Machine tool processing generally requires milliter precision, whereas even the most outdated lithography machines demand nanoter-level precision.
Keep in mind that 1 milliter equals 1 million nanoters, so lithography machine precision is almost a million tis greater than ordinary machine tools! How hard is it to handle lithography machines?
An Arican engineer noted that adjusting a single part could take decades.
The Netherlands’ ASML’s most advanced lithography machines integrate nurous technologies from Germany, Japan, and the US.
The light source equipnt for lithography machines mainly cos from US company Cyr, and the lenses are supplied by Germany’s Zeiss.
According to industry insiders, almost all lithography machine parts are custom-made, with 90% using the world’s most cutting-edge processing technologies. So interfaces even require engineers to use high-precision machines to polish, with size adjustnts possibly exceeding millions of tis.
Such demanding technical requirents result in extrely low production output for lithography machines, with a significant technology update roughly once every ten years.
An EUV lithography machine needs almost 100,000 components, which can’t possibly be produced by a single company.
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