Chapter 194

The cost of building a factory in the United States is too high, and Qualcomm has considered building a factory in Asia.

However, the United States should at least have its own fab. First, it can be used as a technology research and development base. Second, the factories are all set up in Asia. In case of a good or bad situation, the factories will be closed down. Can't the company produce its own chips?

Therefore, it is safest to set up a factory in the base camp of the United States and then set up a branch in Asia!

The established Fab wants to reach 8-inch specifications, and the technical requirements are very strict. It's going to cost a lot of money if Qualcomm wants to get there in one step! Improve the specification level of the wafer factory, mainly depends on the production materials, advanced production equipment and production technology!

The material is OK. It's not too expensive.

The production equipment is so expensive that people want to vomit blood!!!

Don't talk about other equipment, just talk about the lithography machine to be used!

Lithography equipment is the most critical equipment for semiconductor chip production, and it is one of the most expensive equipment!

High end lithography machine is known as the most sophisticated instrument in the world. If you hear that a high-end lithography machine costs tens of millions of dollars, don't be surprised. It's very normal, especially it's so expensive!!! High end photoresist can be called the flower of modern optical industry, and its manufacturing is so difficult that only a few companies in the world can manufacture it. The main international brands are ASML (lens from Germany), Nikon and canon.

What is a lithography machine and why is it so complicated?

In fact, simply speaking, the lithography machine is an amplified SLR, which prints the designed integrated circuit graphics on the mask onto the light sensitive material through the exposure of light to form graphics. However, the core is the lens, and this lens is not an ordinary lens, 2 meters high, 1 meter in diameter, or even larger! The industry's advanced technology is based on nano. How small is nano? It's hard to tell with naked eye! But the lithography machine has to carve lines on the chip... It's really hard enough!!!

The United States is not as good as Japan in this aspect of lithography, but the best lithography company is ASML company in Holland! ASML's photoresist accounts for 60% of the market share in the middle end market and more than 80% of the market share in the high-end market. It's totally playing two Japanese photoresist companies!

Intel, TSMC and Samsung will invest in ASML in the future

So the question is, fat is in front of us. What should we do?

In fact, there's nothing to hesitate about

For example, Intel, TSMC and Samsung Group will have dozens of photoresists in any one of their factories in the future. If all the factories add up, they don't know how many photoresists they need... Roughly, each one is 50 million US dollars, and the profit is more than half. Even if they only sell 100 photoresists a year, they can't make a net profit of 2.5 billion US dollars!

Now is 1991, semiconductor is not so developed in the future, the market value of natural production equipment company will not be very high!

If you want to buy early, you have to pay a lot later!

TSMC spent 870 million US dollars and only got 5% of the shares. Now it can buy the whole ASML company for 870 million US dollars!!!

What's more, once the company develops, it has obvious development prospects. So, if you don't have money, others are willing to accept it!

Applied materials is the world's largest supplier of semiconductor equipment, with strong capital, but it has nothing to do with lithography. Two thousand years later, it wanted to buy ASML, but it was rejected!

Therefore, the acquisition should be early rather than late!

Qualcomm has no money to buy ASML. Henry can only let Silicon Valley Electronics Group buy it. In addition, Silicon Valley electronics group has another advantage to acquire, because Silicon Valley electronics group has obtained part of the patented technology of Carl Zeiss and can develop its own lens!

Although Japan's lithography machine can't compare with ASML company, the lens, the core part of their lithography machine, is self-made. The lens of ASML is from Carl Zeiss, Germany!!!

Although the lens technology of Silicon Valley electronics group is not as good as that of Carl Zeiss, it can catch up. I believe that increasing R & D efforts will be fruitful!

The benefits of acquiring ASML are enormous.

First, after the acquisition of ASML, the cost of chip production will be greatly reduced. If the scale of Qualcomm's Wafer Factory exceeds that of TSMC in the future, it will save at least 10 billion euros in 20 years! It's just money saved. I'm afraid more money will be made

Second, the core competitiveness of a wafer factory is production equipment. In the 1980s, when I bought the equipment, I had to do all kinds of debugging, which was combined with the production process of the factory itself. I couldn't start work immediately! However, in the 1990s, due to the intensive cultivation of technology and a whole set of solutions by equipment production companies, basically, you can start work directly after you buy equipment! Therefore, the fab is not strong, it depends on the production equipment. With the acquisition of ASML, the competitiveness of the company will be in the leading position in the industry! The chips produced will be better and cheaper!

Naturally, if you want to produce a chip, only the lithography machine can't do it. Lithography is only the most important equipment in the process of chip production. There are many other equipment, such as etching equipment, measuring equipment, ion implantation equipment, cvdpvd deposition equipment, silicon wafer cleaning equipment, RTP rapid annealing equipment and so on.

It's too difficult to build the strongest equipment production company!

However, this is a long-term goal!

If all the most powerful equipment production companies are merged, then every kind of production equipment is the best, and the established wafer factory is not going to explode?!!

Think about it, the saliva almost came out!

However, step by step, we need to win the most important lithography production company, and then expand and merge other equipment production companies!

Henry didn't expect that the release of CDMA chips by Qualcomm will bring about so many problems, such as mobile phone manufacturers, wafer factories, equipment production companies and silicon raw material supply companies. To build a perfect industrial ecological chain, these companies have to acquire!

Mobile phone manufacturers, targeting Nokia.

Equipment production company, targeting ASML company.

What about crystal silicon material supply company? As for the supply company of crystalline silicon raw materials, Henry is more inclined to the American MEMC electronic materials company. MEMC electronic materials company is the market leader of silicon wafer, providing polysilicon raw materials, semiconductor chips and solar chips, with the production of fluidized bed and granular polysilicon technology! And it has a subsidiary, SunEdison. SunEdison is also a leader in solar engineering and solar services, a global solar giant company!!!

In the future, the development of photovoltaic cells and the manufacture of solar cars seem to be no worse than Tesla cars