Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: knowledge Automation (ID:zhishipai), author: Lin Xueping

Who is the strongest semiconductor equipment in the world? Only the word monopoly is responsible.

Everyone is crazy about chips. But the chip is where giants fight. The semiconductor market is about $600 billion, of which $100 billion is semiconductor equipment, with giants everywhere. At present, the investment of a fab is more than 10 billion US dollars, and few enterprises can afford it. Now the construction of chip factories around the world are waiting for state subsidies, and even Intel has gone to Germany to invest.

Of this, 30% is spent on clean plants with huge power consumption, while 70% of the investment is on equipment. A fab often has 3000 sets of equipment, involving ten categories of equipment and more than 170subdivided equipment. The previous equipment investment accounts for about 80% of the total equipment investment.

In fact, the fiercest competitive market for semiconductor equipment is in front of equipment. It is full of ruthless oligarchs. There are many kinds of semiconductor devices, but four front devices account for more than 70%.

According to the data of the Japan Semiconductor Manufacturing equipment Association, the dry etching equipment in the previous equipment is 20.2 billion US dollars, which is the first single type of equipment with a shipment volume of more than 20 billion US dollars. This was followed by testing equipment, with a shipment volume of US $17.8 billion, making it the second largest shipment. Of this, visual inspection equipment alone is worth $13.5 billion. Sensors and instrumentation technology have a bright future here. The lithography equipment that Chinese people pay most attention to, ranked third with US $16.7 billion. Chemical vapor deposition CVD equipment ranked fourth with $11.2 billion.

If you look at the market share of pre-treatment equipment, it will be very strange. The front-end process equipment presents a monopoly situation, which is basically the form of a dominant garlic, a bimodal camel competing for supremacy and a clover in the Romance of the three Kingdoms. Apart from this, there is almost no grass.

First of all, let's take a look at a dominant one-headed garlic. Lithography equipment ASML accounted for 92%, coating machine mainly from Tokyo Electronics TEL accounted for 89%, and sputtering equipment in the United States accounted for the largest number of materials, accounting for 85%. In the field of visual inspection and defect inspection, it is dominated by Corey KLA of the United States, at 57 per cent and 73.4 per cent, respectively.

And look at the double humps where the two bears compete. Heat treatment equipment is Japan TEL (59%) and Hitachi International Electric (35%), the two basically carve up 93%; grinding and polishing CMP equipment is monopolized by American materials AMAT (70.4%) and Japan Ehara Ebara (24%). In this regard, the domestic China Haiqing Branch has begun to make a breakthrough.

Batch cleaning equipment is mainly Japan Deans SCREEN (51%) and Tokyo Electronics TEL (29%); mask testing equipment is Colle KLA (54.5%) and Japanese company lasertech (36%); and the key size scanning electron microscope CD-SEM is mainly from Hitachi Hi-Tech (65.5%) and AMAT (34.5%), the two are completely carved up.

Finally, looking at the clover in the Romance of the three Kingdoms, three enterprises control the market. In the field of dry etching, it was basically eaten up by American Pan Lin (49%), Tokyo Electronics TEL (22%) and Yingcai AMAT (16%). In the field of dry etching equipment, it was won by Yingsai AMAT (38%), Pan Forest Lam (33%) and ASMI (14%). The same is true in the field of chemical vapor deposition equipment CVD: Japanese Deans SCREEN (37%), Tokyo Electronics TEL (28%), Lam (17%).

According to the count, there is basically nothing wrong with other enterprises. Global Top10 equipment manufacturers account for 75% of the world. The semiconductor equipment industry is really an industry that eats alone.

If according to the country, the Netherlands bianke, the most famous ASML has 92% monopoly in lithography equipment.

However, the United States is the most powerful manufacturer of semiconductor equipment. To the United States should be AMAT, Pan-Forest Lam, Klei KLA-based three companies, basically round package. They control dry etching equipment (65 per cent), CVD equipment (66 per cent), sputtering equipment (88 per cent), CMP equipment (70 per cent), visual inspection equipment (70 per cent), defect detection equipment (90 per cent) and mask detection equipment (60 per cent). The three companies build the dominance of semiconductor equipment in the United States. Klei is the leader in measuring equipment, and the market share of many products is often more than four times that of competitors. The domestic leader in semiconductor equipment testing has an annual income of 500 million yuan, while Klei has an income of US $9.2 billion and a net profit of US $1.2 billion in 2022.

If you consider that the world's three major EDA software companies are in the United States, while chip design companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, Apple and so on are also in the United States. Obviously, the United States is the most powerful chip kingdom in the world, whether it's a design company, a software company or an equipment company. The only mistake is chip manufacturing. In fact, TSMC almost monopolizes the most advanced manufacturing process in the world, and it is also the only one. It is normal that the United States does not have it. In terms of non-advanced processes, Intel also makes them in the United States. At the same time, giants of analog chips such as Texas Instruments TI have factories in the United States.

In fact, American politicians have taken advantage of the labor division flaw of "the most advanced manufacturing process is not in the United States" as an emotional lever to successfully pry up the chip craze all over the United States.

This sentiment soon spread to Japan and Germany. Both are looking for the landing of a chip fab. As a global power in machinery manufacturing, it is surprising that Germany has no presence in the semiconductor equipment industry. Although Deutsche Express provides the world's strongest carbon dioxide laser, Zeiss provides the best lens, and Bosch has the world's strongest automotive chip design, none of these can hide the pallor of German semiconductor equipment.

Unlike Japan, which once dominated the field of memory chips, semiconductor devices are also developing at the same time. According to the Japan Semiconductor Manufacturing equipment Association, sales of semiconductor equipment made in Japan will fall 23 per cent in 2023 from the previous year, or about 150 billion yuan, accounting for about 20 per cent of the global market.

However, unlike the strategy of Europe and the United States, Japan has adopted a niche market strategy and has a large share of the small market. In the market with higher scale, the scale of the market is not very large. Japan has the first market share in coater / developer (92%), heat treatment equipment (95%), monolithic cleaning equipment (65%), batch cleaning equipment (80%), electron microscope CD-SEM (66%) and so on. For example, laertech is a small Japanese company, but it is the only company that can test the mask of Asmai extreme purple lithography machine. The exclusive secret is to eat an exclusive meal. Many Japanese enterprises just eat garlic.

Surprisingly, although Asmak in the Netherlands accounts for 92% of lithography machine sales, it is only 60% in shipments. This is due to the outstanding performance of two other mature lithography equipment manufacturers in Japan: Nikon and Canon. Although it was impossible to achieve the breakthrough of EUV extreme purple lithography, Canon found a burst point in DUV deep purple lithography. It has been drilled deeply on the i-line and KrF lithography machines of dry lithography machines, so it is still won by partial undergraduates.

Relatively speaking, Asmai may be absent-minded and unable to work on this type of lithography, while Nikon does not seem to be in the state.

From the distribution of lithography machines, we can also see the differences between Japan and Europe and the United States. Large pieces of meat have been eaten by Europe and the United States. There are four categories of markets worth more than $10 billion, three of which are the only martial arts in the United States. The largest market is US $20.2 billion dry etching equipment, which is eaten by US pan-forest and should wood, accounting for 65%; of US $13.5 billion visual inspection equipment, US Colle KLA and should wood AMAT account for 70%; at US $11.2 billion chemical deposition CVD equipment, it is still 67% for US materials and pan-forest; only for US $16.7 billion lithography equipment, Dutch Asma accounts for 92%.

By contrast, China has almost just taken a step forward in semiconductor pre-processing equipment. In 2022, the US accounted for 49 per cent of the global market, Japan 24 per cent and the Netherlands 21 per cent. On the stage of semiconductor equipment, only three countries play games at the poker table, while other countries have little sense of existence.

Despite its strong semiconductor manufacturing capacity and the support of consumer electronics, South Korean semiconductor devices still have only 2.4% of the market. This depends largely on the support of Samsung. Samsung subsidiary Sumisi SEMES has a little space on cleaning equipment. South Korea is also a cripple in the semiconductor industry.

At present, the global share of China's semiconductor front equipment is only 0.4%, or even less than one percentage point. In 2022, Chinese mainland became the world's largest semiconductor equipment market for the third consecutive year, with nearly 30 billion US dollars. However, the import of semiconductor equipment is heavily dependent: from the amount of equipment purchased by Chinese wafer factories in 2021, the domestic self-sufficiency rate is only 11%, among which the self-sufficiency rate of domestic leading equipment is even more bleak.

The starting line starts from the decimal point, which is the current situation faced by China's semiconductor front equipment. Moreover, the technology gap is only one aspect, and the semiconductor industry has given birth to a symbiotic relationship between suppliers and user manufacturers. These devices have already formed a close interest group with the users, and they lock in both directions. In Yingcai's US R & D base, there is a production line specially set up for TSMC. And TSMC will also open up valuable machine parameters to enterprises such as Yingcai and Klei. The growth of complex equipment must be fed back by the knowledge of the big wet nurse. Simply from the equipment manufacturers to tackle technical problems, that kind of future is bleak.

In the situation of super monopoly of semiconductor equipment, the pursuers are almost in a desperate position. If there is no good large-scale engineering organization, no new cooperation model, and simply relying on the enterprises to fight alone, it will be very difficult to change the unique situation of "two or three men to pass the gate, do not open for thousands of hours" in semiconductor equipment. This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money.

A brief introduction to the author

Lin Xueping: general Manager of Beijing Lianxun Power Consulting Co., Ltd., visiting researcher of China quality Research Institute of Shanghai Jiaotong University

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.