Semiconductors Are Changing The Human World In All Aspects

"Semiconductors are an important force changing the global economy," Professor Wei Shaojun started from the perspective of GDP, an important indicator of economic development. He quoted the global GDP data published on the website of the United Nations Statistics Division and said, "From 1987 to 2021, the absolute value of global GDP There is an obvious 'jump', and the global annual average GDP data has undergone relatively large changes. Before 2003, the growth of global GDP was relatively flat. After 2003, the growth of global GDP accelerated.

In addition, Professor Wei Shaojun also cited sales data of the global semiconductor industry: In the 16 years from 1987 to 2002, the cumulative revenue of the global semiconductor industry was US$1,643.1 billion, averaging US$102.7 billion per year. In the 19 years from 2003 to 2021, the cumulative revenue of the global semiconductor industry reached US$6,069.6 billion, averaging US$319.5 billion per year, which was 3.1 times that of the previous 16 years.

Comparing global GDP development data and global information industry development data, it can be inferred that "the information industry plays an important role in global economic growth." Semiconductors are the core and foundation supporting the information industry, which in turn supports the growth of global GDP. Therefore, semiconductors play an important role in global economic development.

"Moore's Law" has been driving the industry to move forward according to the law of exponential growth. Now humans can integrate tens of billions of transistors on a single silicon chip. In such a highly complex system, there is certainly no simple way to deal with it. Since its birth, semiconductors have been an innovation-driven industry. If we only look at the semiconductor manufacturing process, it mainly faces three challenges:

• One is precision graphics, which is photolithography technology. According to the formula in the above figure, Resolution= k1 * λ/NA, resolution = coefficient x (wavelength of the light source/numerical aperture of the projection lens). Since the wavelength of the light source is difficult to change, the emergence of EUV and immersion lithography machines has increased the numerical aperture (NA) of the aperture. The process of improving resolution may seem simple, but it is full of unexpected innovations.

• The second is the innovation of new materials and new processes. Currently, there are about 64 materials in the semiconductor field, including copper, germanium, nickel, high-K and other materials. Each material requires thousands of process experiments. In the semiconductor manufacturing process, how to form a set of truly meaningful product processes? Without the innovation of these new materials and new processes, there would be no rapid improvement in the performance of semiconductor devices.

• The third is to improve yield rate. A breakthrough in a single process may not guarantee a significant improvement in the performance of the entire integrated circuit product. A large number of statistical errors accumulate in the process flow. Even if the yield of each step is as high as 99.9%, after thousands of steps are accumulated, the final yield is only 37%. Therefore, the sign of industrial technology level is not a breakthrough in a single technology, but a breakthrough in a complete set of product processes.

Computing power is driving the development of semiconductors, and semiconductors support the advancement of computer technology. Throughout the entire process, from scientific computing in the early days to personal computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, and today's entry into intelligent computing, the computer and semiconductor markets have been with us all the way. In the future, we will enter a new era - the era of ubiquitous computing. At that time, it was not people using computers, but computers using computers. This will become a major feature of the era of ubiquitous computing. In this development model, many things will change.

The computing power of high-performance computers has entered the E-class era. E-class supercomputers refer to supercomputers that can perform tens of billions of mathematical operations per second. They are the commanding heights of international high-end information technology innovation and competition and are recognized around the world as " A crown in the supercomputer world." The future will soon enter the Z-level era (1Z=1021, ten trillion levels). Because data is growing too fast, if the computer's processing speed cannot keep up at any time, the computer will not be able to meet the requirements of development.