Western sanctions escalate again, quantum chips bend the road!
TSMC has made a new move after announcing the construction of a factory in the U.S. According to Taiwan media's Economic Times, TSMC's Arizona plant is expected to mass produce 4nm in 2024, and Qualcomm's global senior vice president and chief operating officer Chen Ruowen said that Qualcomm will be the first customer of TSMC's U.S. plant 4nm.
TSMC as the chip foundry industry leader holds more than 58% of the global market share, specializing in foundry chips for Apple, Qualcomm and other companies, and the difficulty of producing chips is more difficult than designing chips, TSMC actually holds the core technology link, which is why TSMC has become the world's largest semiconductor foundry company.
In fact, the TSMC to the United States to build a factory led by the U.S. side to achieve the development of China's chip industry and reduce the cost of the U.S. chip companies on the purpose, on the one hand, the U.S. side to amend the chip bill, the commitment to give TSMC related financial subsidies; on the other hand, TSMC plans to mass production in 2025 2nm process, but also need to use ASML's NA EUV lithography, Intel, Samsung and other companies are currently on the NA EUV lithography machine eye, a slight change TSMC in the upper hand may be completely lost.
Therefore, even if TSMC now finds that the U.S. side to Intel's subsidies of up to $ 10.68 billion in industrial subsidies, while TSMC has only received $ 53 billion, while going to the United States to build a factory in the cost is much higher than the original estimate of 50% and the unit price does not rise, TSMC can only continue to show a "pro-US" attitude, follow the The U.S. side together with the fight against the Chinese chip industry.
In this case, the U.S. side directly asked TSMC to prohibit cooperation with Huawei. Huawei is able to design advanced Kirin chips, but it has to rely on TSMC's advanced foundry technology. Under the U.S. sanctions, TSMC completely chose to "cut ties" with Huawei, TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin then responded to the United States: the U.S. government's sanctions against Huawei remain unchanged, TSMC will not supply Huawei!
The good thing is that China has responded to the U.S. strategy to crack down on China's chip industry, especially after the lithography was "necked", Chinese research institutions, universities and technology companies began to focus on how to improve chip manufacturing technology in response to U.S. sanctions, in terms of research investment, the Chinese mainland chip manufacturing company SMIC also announced that the capital expenditure from 32 billion yuan up to 45.6 billion yuan, continue to expand the mature process capacity; Huawei Ren Zhengfei announced last year's R & D spending of $ 23.8 billion, has completed tens of thousands of devices alternative development a few years later as our profits increase, in the frontier exploration will continue to increase investment. And in terms of the supply of chips, in the first seven months of last year, China reduced imports of more than 43 billion chips, a decline of more than 12% year-on-year, meaning that more and more chips have been placed in domestic production.
At present, quantum chips are more complex than silicon-based chips, more powerful performance and break the limits of Moore's law, such as the previous nine chapter quantum computer took only 200 seconds to complete the Gaussian boson sampling, U.S. scientists also called the quantum chip "quantum hegemony", so China in addition to silicon-based chips continue to work on the other In addition to accelerating the development and production of quantum chips, in order to achieve a bend in the quantum chip, recently, China has made a major breakthrough in the research and development of quantum chip industry, opening a breakthrough for China to get rid of the "neck" situation.
(1) China's first quantum chip production line was born
The physical 24-bit quantum chip and packaging of Hongyuan Superconductor
Hongyuan Quantum is China's first quantum computing company, with the first domestic engineering superconducting quantum computer, committed to the research and development of quantum computing chips in two production lines of superconducting and silicon-based semiconductor processes, and has built the first quantum chip production line, released the first quantum chip design industrial software "Q-EDA" Hongyuan Kun In order to realize the domestic independent control and industrial production of China's quantum chips, we have developed several sets of quantum chip industrial master machines such as quantum chip non-destructive probe table and quantum chip laser annealer.
2) Huawei announced important patents for quantum chips
According to the data, in 2021, Huawei spent more than 140 billion on research and development, accounting for twenty percent of Huawei's annual revenue, and in 2022, Huawei invested more than 130 billion. And Huawei's persistence has also brought good news, in 2022, Huawei developed two patents for chip stacking technology and a patent for superconducting quantum chips, this patent is important for advancing the progress of quantum chip development.
Huawei's new patent is called "superconducting quantum chip".
3) Domestic "quantum chip refrigerator" successfully developed
The superconducting materials in the quantum chip are highly sensitive to the environment and easily react chemically with oxygen and water molecules in the air, just like food exposed to air "oxidation and decay", the quantum chip if not properly stored, will also be "not fresh" and unusable. If not properly stored, quantum chips will also be unusable because they are not "fresh".
In March, 2023, the team of the origin quantum used high vacuum storage technology to independently develop this quantum chip high vacuum storage box, which can provide a high vacuum preservation environment for quantum chips, like a quantum chip "refrigerator", researchers use it to adjust the room pressure of the storage space, so as to give quantum chips "keep fresh". To avoid its loss of utility. This means that the commercialization of domestic quantum technology goes one step further, and as the commercialization of quantum technology approaches, the Chinese chip will form a completely independent research and development system in high-performance computing.
Now, China's first quantum chip production line has entered the commissioning phase, it is reported that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has taken the lead in breaking through the 3 nanometer optical quantum chip technology, batch application is only a matter of time.
In theory, quantum chips can bypass the traditional silicon-based chip manufacturing necessary photolithography, quantum chips will be quantum lines integrated in the substrate, through quantum collision technology in order to carry out the processing and transmission of information, manufacturing aspects almost no photolithography. Test results show that the performance of the quantum chip is at least a thousand times more than the electronic chip, its application is also broader. At that time, as China's quantum chip process continues to mature, if the yield rate is satisfactory, China can directly skip the iteration of the traditional silicon-based chip process, bend the car, directly across to the quantum chip field.
But it should be noted that the quantum chip is still in the laboratory stage, and it takes a short period of time from the landing of commercial use. China still needs to make continuous efforts in the quantum and semiconductor industry, rooted in basic research, break the technical difficulties, foster more semiconductor enterprises, and train and retain more talents in related fields, in order to occupy the high point in the field of quantum chips and realize the breakthrough development in the national science and technology field.
[1]https://baijiahao.baidu.com/
[2]https://www.163.com/dy/article/I05HCLRM055225XN.html
[3]https://www.zhihu.com/question/590546737
