After being sanctioned by the United States for omni-directional chips, Russia is going to start building advanced process lithography machines?!
Yes, it is the most core equipment in chip manufacturing (not even one). Only one company in the world, ASML, has the ability to produce the most advanced EUV level, a lithography machine that can sell for hundreds of millions of yuan and whose core technology is monopolized by the United States.
Moreover, this time Russia's plan looks a bit like that-someone, money, goals.
The project is undertaken by Russia's Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET), which is known as the Silicon Valley center of the Soviet Union and specializes in microelectronics.
Money, the initial investment of 670 million rubles.
The goal is to challenge the current state-of-the-art EUV level.
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But even so, netizens don't believe the news because of the difficulty of building lithography machines and Russia's resource reserves:
Are you sure it's not a joke?!
Coincidentally, the news came a day after Mikron, Russia's largest chipmaker, was sanctioned by the United States. Earlier, a handful of other Russian chip factories had been sanctioned across the board.
So what exactly is the level of Russian chips now? Can we really have the strength to develop an advanced process lithography machine?
Maskless X-ray lithography?
Let's take a look at the difficulty of the plan itself.
According to Russian media reports, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade commissioned MIET to develop "a maskless X-ray lithography machine", which is a little different from the daily EUV lithography machine we mentioned.
First of all, the difference lies in the choice of light source.
One is extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5nm, while the wavelength of X-ray is between 0.01nm and 10nm.
According to the existing common ideas, the lithography machine is a mask through which a specific wavelength of light is used to magnify, and then through the reduction of the lens, the integrated circuit diagram is accurately "projected" onto the silicon wafer.
In order to accurately "project", the lithography machine needs to achieve extremely high exposure resolution and extremely high repetitive positioning accuracy.
One of the most effective ways of the former is to change the wavelength of the light source.
According to the optical Rayleigh criterion (Rayleigh Criterion), the size that an optical system can distinguish is proportional to the wavelength of light.
Therefore, in theory and from the historical development of lithography (the wavelength is getting shorter and shorter), X-ray lithography is obviously better and more advanced than EUV lithography.
However, because of its strong penetration, it is impossible to zoom in and out with an ordinary lens, so it is impossible to realize projection lithography at this stage.
The current application is more in direct writing lithography, which is also the choice of this Russian plan-no mask.
In fact, this method has been around for a long time, which is to carve out the required circuit bit by bit with an intense laser beam.
This efficiency is really a little low, if you want to carve a nano-scale integrated circuit, I do not know to wait until the age of the monkey. As for projection lithography represented by EUV, they think that it is expensive and complex, and it is only competitive in mass production, so it is only suitable for a small number of global enterprises such as Intel, Samsung, TSMC and so on.
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In this way, maskless lithography itself is not difficult, the difficulty lies in the X-ray process and the improvement of efficiency. But at present, there is no institution in the world that can solve this problem. That's why they put forward the plan. According to the plan, they will complete the verification of the main technical solutions-manufacturing based on the dynamic mask model and two control experiments. The technology and model of the dynamic mask and the technical specification and feasibility study of the prototype lithography machine were developed as early as November this year, and the process should reach 28nm or above.
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In addition, officials did not disclose more details of the plan. "
"the whole world is helping the Dutch ASML."
After reading the plan itself, one can more or less understand why more people are still full of questions: is it reliable to build lithography machines in Russia? After all, Russia has a lot of high technology, there is always a lot of thunder and little rain.
However, some people said that the Russian cool techs is not bright, the difficulty lies in the lack of money, the lack of industrial base, the theory is really not necessarily backward.
The research on this lithography machine research and development project can be traced back to the 1980s at the earliest. They were already working on the manufacture of light sources at that time. In 0A1984, the Zelenograd Science Center was appointed by the government to begin the development of synchrotron radiation accelerators. This research institute has a long history. It was later incorporated into the famous Kurchatov Institute, from which the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb, the first hydrogen bomb, the first atomic reactor in Europe, and the world's first atomic power station all came out. However, the good times did not last long, and the research on the accelerator was temporarily suspended after four years of development, and it was not put into trial operation again until 2002.
Now, based on the accumulation of these technologies, Russia intends to set up a special technology center around the accelerator, which is expected to be officially put into use in 2023. As for maskless lithography, they didn't actually choose this path at first, even on a par with ASML for a time. As early as 2010, when ASML shipped the first pre-production EUV lithography machine, IPM (RAS), a Russian institute of physics, was also developing EUV systems and components, as well as the construction of device prototypes. Among them, the developers also put forward the original solution of the radiation source design, and some of it was applied to the ASML lithography machine.
However, the project ended in the layout phase. Salashchenko Nikolay, lead researcher of RAS, winner of the Soviet National Award and head of the Department of Multilayer X-ray Optics, revealed why: a country cannot do this work alone. And the whole world is helping the Netherlands (ASML is in the Netherlands).
As a result, they began to look for other paths, and the iterative process on maskless lithography was one of them. The reason for MIET to take over is that MIET has previously made research progress on maskless EUV lithography in cooperation with some organizations. In 2002, the research center of MIET, which is mainly engaged in the research of nanoelectronic devices, was established. The research field covers X-ray devices, MEMS and nano-electromechanical systems-all of which are closely related to the development of lithography machines.
And some researches have been carried out, such as "Development of soft X-ray source based on microfocus X-ray tube array, suitable for 10nm maskless lithography machine", which is one of them. The study was led by Professor Nikolay Chkhalo of the RAS Institute of Microstructure Physics. He is currently the laboratory director of the institute and has published more than 200 papers, mainly in the fields of X-ray optics, optical interferometry and so on. To sum up, from the perspective of the theoretical basis, the Russian lithography machine can not be said to be completely unreliable. However, it is worth mentioning that in recent Russian media reports, it is also stated bluntly that the lithography machine plan is 15 years late. If the program had been launched 15 years ago, Russia might not now face such a big threat from microelectronics technology.
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The largest chipmaker can only make bus card chips
It is worth noting that on the eve of the widespread spread of the news, the US Treasury announced the freezing of the assets of 21 Russian entity enterprises and 13 people in the United States. One of the chip factories came into everyone's view. Mikron, Russia's largest chipmaker, microelectronics manufacturer and exporter. And this means that Russian chip factories have been sanctioned almost across the board. Therefore, the announcement of this lithography plan is, on the one hand, to inject a boost into Russia. On the other hand, from the existing level of Russian chips, it is more urgent.
Take Mikron as an example, it can be seen in general. As can be seen from the catalogue given on the official website, the company can implement the highest 65nm process, specializing in RFID such as bank cards and bus cards, as well as power management chips.
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It has also made a number of firsts: the first manufacturer of 180/90/65nm technology, the first manufacturer of chip modules for identity documents, and the first exporter, accounting for 54 per cent of Russian microelectronics exports.
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The company's history can be traced back to the former Soviet Union, the Institute of Molecular Electronics (NIME), which lasted for 60 years in the last century. At that time, microelectronic technology was in full swing. Aware of the necessity of building a microelectronics industry, the Soviet National Technical Commission began to organize research institutes and factories on a large scale. NIME is one of them. In less than two years (1966), the output of microcircuits produced in the experimental workshop reached 100000. Then, in the following year, in accordance with a government order, the Mikron plant was born out of the institute and devoted itself to the production of integrated circuits. At that time, many technologies were pioneered in China, such as gallium arsenide microcircuit plane technology, emitter coupled logic IC crystal, large-scale use of numerical and analog integrated circuits. In 1970, Mikron has made more than 3.5 million microcircuit supplies for various industries, and has since been used in defense, supercomputers and other fields.
In the semiconductor industry, the microelectronics technology of the Soviet Union ranks third in the world, second only to the United States and Japan. It can be said that the Mikron at this time is advancing rapidly in the wind of the times. However, the momentum soon came to an abrupt end with the collapse of the Soviet Union-almost all Soviet computer manufacturers ceased operations and only a few survived through foreign component / technology transfers. Mikron is one of them.
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In 2006, Mikron began to introduce overseas technology-Italian-French semiconductor technology transfer, so that it has the ability to produce 180nm chips. And began to produce 180nmEEPROM integrated circuits in 2007. Immediately, Mikron began to produce chip modules for contact smart cards, soon mastered the full process of production of RFID transportation cards, and began to supply Moscow subway stations. In the same year, it also began producing SIM cards for the telecommunications industry. Perhaps having tasted the benefits, Mikron once again launched technology transfer cooperation with STMicroelectronics. According to the report of Semiconductor International at that time, the company intends to update the process every year and plans to launch 130nm and 90nm processes in 2008 and 2009 respectively. However, according to the official website, Mikron only realized the production of integrated circuits designed for 90nm process on 200mm wafers in 2009.
It was only in 2012 that the production of 90nm microelectronics was officially launched. Since then, Russia has become the eighth country in the world to possess the technology. Compared with the West, it has lagged far behind. At this time, the Russian government began to realize the importance of the microelectronics industry. First, it formulated a number of industrial development strategies, such as the 2013-2025 Electronic Industry Development Plan and the National Defense Industry complex Development Plan, and actively adopted a series of measures, such as using domestic electronic products as far as possible and developing CPU civil and military lines.
Mikron also changed its route accordingly and began to develop its own 180-90nm domestic technology and unique products, and to create new technologies, including 65nm-45nm level. In 2014, US economic sanctions, including a crackdown on sensitive technology industries, made the fragile Russian chip manufacturing even worse. Even in 2015, Mikron barely completed the development of the 65nm process. But there has been no news of iterative process since then. Now from the scale point of view, Mikron business radiates the world, as Russia's largest chip manufacturer is indeed true. However, the products that can be made have long been stereotyped-transport and access control RFID, Internet of things data protection microcontrollers, smart water meters, and so on.
Russian chip factories have been sanctioned almost across the board
As mentioned earlier, Russian chipmakers have already been sanctioned by the United States. Not only Mikron, the largest chipmaker, but also Angstrem-T, another manufacturer, has even gone bankrupt once. And the designer Baikal Electronics, MCST and so on have been plagued by sanctions, getting in and out of the "entity list". We also take this opportunity to take a look at the current level and situation of the Russian semiconductor industry built by these companies.
Baikal Electronics
First of all, let's take a look at Baikal Electronics, which claims to be the most technologically advanced chip designer in Russia. Its parent company, T-Platforms, is prominently on the latest round of sanctions list. The manufacturing process that Baikal Electronics can achieve is 28nm, which was originally based on MIPS architecture. In the past two years, it has turned to ARM to support the operation of the Russian-made operating system Astra Linux. Its recently released processor is Baikal-S, which has 48 cores, reference frequency 2.0GHz, maximum acceleration 2.5GHz, thermal design power consumption of 120W, and integrates and encapsulates a self-developed RISC-V architecture coprocessor.
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In addition to the sanctions imposed on the parent company, Baikal Electronics also faces the problem that the chips cannot be shipped. For a long time, Baikal Electronics chips have been manufactured by TSMC. Before the United States released the latest round of sanctions list, TSMC had already said that it would no longer produce chips for Russian companies, bearing the brunt of Baikal Electronics.
Angstrem-T
Angstrem-T, a chip maker that also has a long history with Mikron, was sanctioned and hit hard in 2017. At that time, the highest process Angstrem-T could come up with was 250nm. By contrast, Samsung has been mass-producing 7nm chips this year. Angstrem-T was plunged into a debt crisis due to sanctions and was acquired by VEB.RF, the Russian state development bank, in 2018. In 2019, it was officially declared bankrupt and reorganized. But just last year, there were signs that the company was coming back from the dead. According to reports, they have hired more than a dozen experts at high salaries to help Angstrem-T restart the production line. It also plans to purchase equipment from AMD to produce 130-90nm chips.
MCST
Finally, the chip designer MCST (Moscow SPARC Technology Center, Moscow Center for SPARC Technologies) is introduced, which was established in 1992, formerly known as Lebedev Institute of Precision Machinery and computer Engineering. Its Elbrus processor consists of two product lines, one for civilian use, based on Elbrus-2000 architecture (Russian version X86), and the other for military use, based on SPARC, also manufactured by TSMC. At present, the highest process that the product can achieve is 16nm.
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However, this series of chips did not perform well in the actual test. At the end of last year, the technical department of Sber, Russia's largest bank, gave the following evaluation after testing Elbrus-8C: insufficient memory, slow memory speed, small number of cores, low frequency, and completely does not meet the demand.
70, 000 IT personnel have left Russia
Finally, let's go back to the present. As of March 31, the latest sanctions list released by the United States involves 21 entity enterprises and 13 individuals. On the same day, the White House also said that 120 Russian and Belarusian entities would be added to the list in the next few days, and the scope would be extended to the aerospace, shipping and electronics industries. From the current point of view, the impact of the first wave of sanctions has gone far beyond the chip industry. The Russian version of Google Yandex is one of the representatives. Its businesses include search engines, cloud services, ride-hailing and so on. It is reported that due to import and export restrictions, Yandex will face a shortage of server hardware in the next 1-18 months, and autopilot business will also suffer a severe blow.
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To that end, they are seeking restructuring to reduce the risk of sanctions. It is also in talks with VK, the largest social network operator in Russia, to sell its news division, Zen social platform, or divest its self-driving business. A deeper impact is also reflected in talents. It is reported that 70, 000 IT technicians have left Russia since the end of February.The Russian Communications Association also acknowledged this fact and said that the number of IT personnel leaving the country could reach 100000 in April. However, Russian officials have also been responding. In addition to the heavy investment in photolithography mentioned above, Russia is turning to Chinese microchip manufacturers for supply, mainly to meet the bank card demand related to its local MIR payment system, Reuters reported recently.